Happy children, pharmaceuticals, tax havens and football
Other TaxPayers’ Alliance Update: 6 Feb 2009
This was the week that the TaxPayers’ Alliance complained that LabourList’s Derek Draper had shouted at them. But read our report about how the TPA targeted a local council for recruiting a part-time co-ordinator to lead a successful local youth scheme - and then decide who the bulllies are:
taxpayersalliance.org/news/tpa-bullies-score-own-goal-against-youth-worker
It’s also at Liberal Conspiracy:
www.liberalconspiracy.org/2009/02/05/tpa-bullies-score-own-goal/
Following Draper’s accusation that the TPA supports corporate tax avoidance, Andreas reminds us how another right-wing organisation, the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, ended up scoring an own-goal by trumpeting the merits of low corporate tax:
citizenandreas.blogspot.com/2009/02/leading-lights-on-lower-corporate-taxes.html
In fact the TPA is rather fond of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, and features on its website a loopy video by the Center’s Dan Mitchell on “how tax competition, and tax havens, can make us all better off”:
www.taxpayersalliance.com/research/2008/09/another-video-f.html
Meanwhile, Don Paskini slams the TPA’s response to the Children’s Society’s “Good Childhood” inquiry: “It tells you everything that you need to know about the Taxpayer’s Alliance that they think that new youth centres, higher child benefit and better mental health services for teenagers will ‘simply increase the misery of our children further’.”
don-paskini.blogspot.com/2009/02/childrens-society-vs-taxpayers-alliance.html
And Paulie at Never Trust a Hippy challenges us to help him answer an important list of questions, including who funds the TPA. We’re doing our bit - though it’s not helped by the fact that the TPA published “abbreviated” accounts last year, meaning income and expenditure were withheld. So much for transparency:
nevertrustahippy.blogspot.com/2009/01/crowdsourcing.html
Paulie added a post-Draper follow-up here:
nevertrustahippy.blogspot.com/2009/02/more-evasion-from-so-called-tax-payers.html
And finally - here’s an oddity: the TPA is a member of the free-market Stockholm Network - and boasts that it won the Network’s “prestigious Golden Umbrella award for Innovation” in 2007. Surely that can’t be the same Stockholm Network that demanded a government bail-out of the pharmaceutical industry earlier this year? What an innovative, free-market response to the crash…
Posted by Clifford Singer at 10:40am on 6 February 2009
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