I came across a shocking statistic today: environmental taxes are decreasing in the UK!
The total revenue has risen slower than inflation between 1999 and 2008; from around £32.6bn in 1999 to £38.5bn in 2008. If it had grown with inflation over that period it would have stood at £41.4bn in 2008.
As a percentage of GDP [...]
Posts Tagged ‘economics’
29 Jan
Eco taxes going down in the UK!
7 Jan
Can the community regenerate Peckham?
Can a local community pay for its own regeneration instead of relying on developers with tall blocks of flats and massive government grants? I got thinking about this again after reading a jargon-fuelled paper on urban rights and renewal sent my way by local hero Eileen Conn. The author writes about communities owning, or controlling, [...]
17 Dec
TaxPayers Alliance accidentally show we need more eco-taxes
If you read beyond the squeals of indignation from the latest TaxPayers Alliance “research” you find an interesting conclusion. The taxes we pay on measures aimed principally at reducing carbon dioxide emissions are much lower than the cost of those emissions to the economy. So we should be putting more tax on carbon dioxide, and [...]
16 Nov
How close are we to zero carbon communities?
My paper about BedZED in was published in the Environment and Urbanization journal last month, there’s a free PDF for download. Aside from the many nitty gritty technical lessons learned from the UK’s first and still-largest Zero Carbon development, I took away two basic lessons for green policy.
The first is that good urban design really [...]
4 Oct
Who is really ripping us off?
A discussion with two friends on the back of my post about the cuts agenda brought up some interesting figures about benefit and tax fraud.
There’s nothing the Tories and right-wing media pundits like more than a good old attack on benefit fraud. Lazy good-for-nothings scamming our taxes! Get ‘em! But how big a problem is [...]
