I’d love to see this chart too if you can share

Also a reminder that ‘joined up government’ sometimes means things like the Home Office giving dubious travel data to HMRC, so you just get ‘joined up dysfunction’

You should team up with Matt Levine: everything is either a bank or securities fraud (and why not both?)

One of the central points in Plato’s Republic, isn’t it?

In this paper my coauthor and I find you can’t rationalise mandatory contributions and tax concessions as an optimal policy *unless* the concessions solve a political problem (in our paper, they’re necessary to get new workers to opt into the system)

tinyurl.com/mr8y9ph9

Why? As OP notes you can’t give the whole of society a tax break. Concessions on retirement contributions just mean higher taxes on something else -> optimal choice depends on the marginal social impact of each of these two taxes

That’s a remarkable level of hubris if so. The UK’s sluggish productivity growth was the main economic issue before being eclipsed (in the news) by Brexit and Covid

Which is stunning, given how their campaign promises all hinged on those unplanned policies getting growth going again

The ISA landscape is so confused.

Exhibit 2: one of the main types of ISA is called ‘Stocks and Shares ISA’. Two words for the same security.

yeah on second glance I was wrong - the surpluses of the other countries add up to more than the UK and US deficits, so your OP was the right interpretation; apologies

The US’s deficit is the bit that’s unexplained by the bars in the graph

Can confirm from my own experience - we always put my name first, but the doctor & school always call my wife first.

From the abstract: "Our findings underscore a process through which agents outside the household contribute to within-household gender inequalities." Indeed.