Sales Tax or Business Rate Rise?

Talking about business rates again and costs to small businesses, these businesses have to pay their rates whether they make any profit or not on sales of their goods. So do large businesses of course. However, I am becoming more and more convinced that it may be an idea to introduce a sales tax. Yes it is another tax we would have to pay but if it could be introduced sensibly, (and rates disappear),  and it isn’t set too high maybe it could just work. If businesses were able to take rates out of their accounts and replace it with a sales tax so that it was cost neutral then we wouldn’t be spending any more in small businesses. Of course we would also be spending money in larger businesses but perhaps that could be more or less cost neutral. It could certainly be designed to be like that, it may even bring costs down for small businesses as well as being cost neutral for large businesses.

Where it would cost businesses more is for companies like Amazon who ship their sales to be booked in Luxembourg so they don’t have to pay tax here on the sales. One way to get some money from them is to make them pay sales tax on what they sell here despite moving the sale to the EU and possibly shipping it from there as well, but as the sale was made in the UK so they should pay tax in the UK. You could also do this to Google as well who seem to ship their sales off to Ireland even though the sales happen here, its just that the “deal” happens in Ireland. It may apply to Apple as well but I don’t know enough about their sales to comment about them but they do seem to have a lot of cash spread round the world. I suppose we could always add a bit to VAT to sort this out instead of a new tax but I don’t suppose the EU will let us.

Well, what are they going to do about it – kick us out of the EU? Yeah right. I don’t see that being too much of a problem and it may stop them whinging on about having to pay 60 billion to leave.

I cannot remember if that’s pounds or euros. It doesn’t matter, it’s a bit more than I will ever see.