Thanks for the civil tone - I appreciate it.

And thanks for sharing the two articles, which I read with interest.

If I'm honest, The Telegraph piece is really playing the man and not the ball, trying to make out that two expert researchers are total idiots, when evidently they are not. Of course you can disagree with increasing taxes on a certain group for all manner of reasons, but Arun's research is mostly focused on trying to understand what actually happens when you change some policy. What did people actually do when X happened? What money did we actually raise/lose? And using that information, what might we expect people to do if we did A, B and C?

I find it hard to accept that people would dismiss out of hand what they find by analysing actual tax returns. This is just helpful evidence isnt it? On the other hand, I find it totally reasonable to debate whether some given tax policy measure is "right" or "fair". And fully understand that people might reasonably disagree with me. But surely we have to accept what the evidence shows about what has happened, or we can't get anywhere?

The Telegraph also places a lot of weight on research with organisations with a clear vested interest in lower taxes on wealth and property. Henley & Partners are not neutral detached observers, and neither are Ashbridge Partners, so anything they publish needs to be filtered accordingly. Wealth management company defends interests of super wealthy is hardly news.

The article in The Week is much more balanced I would say, and does raise a series of legitimate questions about RR's proposed non-dom changes. FWIW, I would be surprised if RR sticks with all these initial plans on non-doms, and expect a compromise to emerge. I mean, does analysis suggest you can do whatever you like to non-doms and they'll suck it up....no, of course not. But equally, the suggestion that ANY change will cause a millionaire exodus is not true either. The world is messy and nuanced.

If I focus for a moment on the quotes from Arun included in that article, they dont indicate that he's a nutcase do they? "The only way to know about what non-doms are doing is to look at the tax data". "Late filing is particularly prevalent at the top of the income distribution," said Advani, because "the £100 late fee is not really that costly"." That sounds to me like a slightly boring researcher trying to get to the right answer? Having met him - he's not a Marxist. And he's not a nutter.

Posted By: Under soil heating, Jun 28, 16:22:20