The great and the good (read barmy and bonkers) have hit the press and Twitter’s trending topics with a campaign for a tax. Yes you read that right, a campaign for a new tax, as in in support of a new tax!

The tax is of course that old favourite of the Left, the global tax on financial transactions first proposed by James Tobin and known to economists as the Tobin Tax. The trouble is that every campaign in support of a Tobin Tax runs aground on the same problem, namely that all you have to do in order to see why such a tax is (a) bad and (b) unworkable is to look it up!

This new campaign has successfully circumvented such problematic issues as economic scrutiny by rebranding itself the “Robin Hood Tax” – cleverly replacing the “T” with an “R” and adding the urban slang term for a ghetto neighbourhood (and the name of a WW2 battleship) – thereby escaping trial by Google and allowing its supporters to revel in the Lincoln green shaded medieval romanticism of an English folklore. It’s spearheaded by Bob Geldoff, Richard Curtis, Bill Nighy (i.e. the usual suspects).

What we need is a tax which is (a) workable, (b) doesn’t harm the productive economy, and (c) doesn’t fall unfairly upon lower to middle income earners. The Tobin “Robin Hood” Tax fails all three tests – needing global agreement, reducing international movement of capital, and reducing bank profits (bank shareholders being primarily pension funds and the Government). However I have a better idea…The Celebrity Tax!

Like bankers, celebrities earn huge sums of money. Unlike bankers and banks they don’t have no pension funds as shareholders and won’t move abroad – the lack of press and glitzy parties would starve them back – and so we wouldn’t need a global agreement. A few might take refuge in Dubai but the Inland Revenue could snatch them when they sneak back for London Fashion Week or the Harrods sale, impounding Bono’s jet at Heathrow and cornering Peaches Geldoff by the perfume counter of Harvey Nichs. And since celebrities produce nothing of value, unlike banks perform no economic function, and are in unlimited supply, the “dead weight loss” would be negligible to zero. Celebrities are therefore the perfect tax victim.

So I propose the Celeb Tax, calculated by column inches! And since people such as Geldoff, Curtis, Bono and the other “do gooder” celebrities love advocating higher taxes, higher spending and more restriction – whilst earning millions and (in many cases) being registered in tax havens – they won’t mind paying a higher “sanctimonious do gooder rate” on their column inches.

Tags: celebrity, Robin Hood Tax, Tobin Tax
Posted in Blog