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Dog house: Budget '08 special
As the Taxation tax hound I thought it my duty to watch the Budget today.
I missed the first few minutes, TV remotes were not designed for paws. Doing his bit to fight global warming my 'owner' no longer leaves the set on standby, which makes life a bit difficult. I've missed a lot of Crufts recently as well.
All I can say is that this is just the sort of Budget I would have expected from a Treasury team that — as far as I am aware (and I am still waiting to hear back from Yvette Cooper's personal assistant) — do not own a dog between them.
Mr Darling is increasing the fight against global warming and included in his plans is the threat of a tax on 'single use' carrier bags.
I can only assume that this is a plot by Mr Darling to win the hearts and minds of Daily Mail readers, the paper currently running a 'Banish the bag' campaign to save the lives of turtles throughout the world.
What this seems to ignore is that, apparently, more deaths of turtles are caused by discarded fishing lines than plastic bags.
But enough of that, what I really worry about is what this means for the plastic dog poo bag.
Poo? Bah!
Now I can understand that you don't want to step in my, ahem, doings, so my man picks these up with a plastic bag. I'll arrange for him to post the exact information on the Taxation blog for those who are really interested.
But what is he going to do if these dog poo bags are taxed?
And I suppose they will have to be at some point, because I can imagine that the supermarkets' tax advisers are at this very moment already thinking up single use plastic carrier bag tax avoidance schemes.
'Let's not give away carrier bags, let's give free dog poo bags!' they will be suggesting.
And I really don't think that those poo bags want to be anything other than 'single use'.
And I can't see many dog owners wanting to use paper bags. Certainly not on rainy days, and definitely not in other circumstances which readers with more delicate stomachs would probably not want me to go into the details of in this column.
The more I think of it, the more I think that there are lessons to be learned by the Treasury team from the humble dog poo bag.
The ones that my man uses have the words 'Bag it. Bin it!' written on the side.
I would have thought that this could have been a useful lesson for some of the capital gains tax proposals that I see are now being put through without change.
Perhaps it might also be a good idea if the Treasury team had someone following them around to pick up their little 'mistakes' in a plastic bag and put them in the bin.
What a carrier on!
- Budget 2008
- Blog
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