On government and taxation.

The thing is, I don't think the majority of Scots really want independence.

Not that I don't think that they should or will have it, I just don't think they want it.

And trying to sell people something that they don't want is a loser.

However, I think an overwhelming majority of Scots want change.

If there is one thing that we can all agree on it's that politics is broken and that some faction or another will be first against the wall when the revolution comes.

The people of Scotland won't buy independence but they will buy Constitutional Change.

It will have to be packaged just right.  It will have to be their Change not somebody else's.  The Yes campaign needs to say to people 'Vote Yes and what form independence takes will be entirely up to you.  We will hold an extensive, fair and open national debate on the available options and leave the decision up to you.'

The Yes campaign also needs to rigorously avoid engaging the No campaign and its endless series of 'gotcha' trap-questions.  Whatever unpleasant scenario they conjure up the rebuttal has to be 'We will leave that up to the people of Scotland.  It's their country and their future, we will show them the respect of letting them decide how these issues should be tackled.'

What it boils down to is that the people of Scotland want to be in a position to decide how they are governed and not merely by whom.  Offer them that and they'll have your arm off.


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Taxation.

The current method of taxation is stupid and wrong-headed.  There, I've said it, the Emperor has no clothes.

A graduated taxation scheme that gets ever more onerous the more that one earns places the greatest motivation to avoid it on those best able to do so.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

It is actually a disincentive to wealth creation.  Why work a bit harder in this tax year when more than half of the profits will go to the government?  Instead people push the work into the next tax year and take it easy for a bit.

People aren't stupid, particularly as a mass psychological entity.  They instinctively recognise the law of diminishing returns and optimize their performance to get the best profit from the least effort.

To me it looks like the whole plan was cooked up by someone that thought they were a genius.  When they were done they leaned back in their chair, stroked their white cat and cackled 'The more they earn the more they have to pay us.  We'll be rich I tell you. Rich, rich!'

And then they had to go downstairs for their Tea 'cos their Mum was calling...

On its surface it is genius.  If you look at the graph of taxation against income you clearly see that the amount of money that the government can claim from a single individual is unlimited.  Of course that is just an illusion.

The amount that the government earns from a single individual is limited by that individuals willingness to keep  grafting when most of the money goes to the State and by their ability to afford accountants that ensure as little income as possible is actually liable to tax.

So if the amount of tax the State can extract from an individual is effectively capped why not work within those limits?

Perhaps if you can remove all the incentives to fiddle the system you can stop wasting quite so much money trying to prevent tax avoidance.

So here's my solution, it's a little rough, needs tweaking to ensure that nobody is significantly worse off but it gets the point across.

Reverse the slope of the graph.  So long as the area under the graph is the same for your current economy it doesn't matter how the taxes are raised.  Start with a high rate of tax, say 40%, and gradually reduce it the more money people earn all the way down to, say, 1%.  Do exactly the same thing with corporations.

The trick is to create a tax regime where there are no points where earning more would mean you would keep less.  I am convinced that the secret to this will be a universal social pension.  Pay a minimum income to everybody in return for a small social contribution.  If you do useful work in your community, work that it would be otherwise uneconomical for anyone to pay to have done, the State will pay you just enough to survive on.

This pension will be available to everyone, you won't have to prove that you qualify and go to fifty job interviews a week, just show up and help run the crèche in the community hall, or pick up litter, or help repair headstones, or whatever.  If you are too old or infirm to contribute then we pay you automatically and helping look after you becomes a reasonable thing for the young and able bodied to do to qualify for their pension.

But after that every penny that you earn is taxable.

Ideally I would like to create an alternative tax regime where nobody pays any more than they do now but with the slope of the graph reversed.

I'm not sure that isn't fundamentally  impossible but I'm willing to throw it out there and see if a solution can't be found.

Briefly my addled mind debates whether or not it would be possible for both schemes to run concurrently with the choice of which to take part in be voluntary.  Surely that's crazy.

I'm sure I can apprehend the edges of a spectacularly elegant solution but the details elude me.  For now.

I need comprehensive economic data, Customs and Revenues data for the whole of last year for everyone in the UK, and the smarts to be able to plug that data into various models and uncover the answer I'm looking for.