#Osbornefail
On reading George Osborne’s oh-so-convincing CiF piece setting out exactly how tough he’s going to get with tax dodgers (they’re “like benefit cheats” apparently – can you imagine the depths of their perfidy?), one sentence in particular jumped out at me:
Tax evaders also make use of tax loopholes, and the truth is that over the last decade they have multiplied.
Really? I could have sworn that all those boring snarky rightwingers who like to have a go at UKUncut repeatedly told us that tax evasion (as opposed to avoidance) was illegal, while making use of legal loopholes is kind of within the law by definition. Ah well. Lucky Osborne isn’t supposed to know about economics for his job or anything, or that would have been really embarassing.
Reader Comments
Maybe he meant that tax evaders tend also to be tax avoiders? That would be a reasonable thing to say, though one would have expected him to be a bit clearer if that’s the explanation for this strange wording…
Yeah I considered that possibility, but as you say it would be a really weird way of phrasing it. Could be a subbing error though I suppose…