It was recently my turn to pick up the pen and contribute to City AM’s ‘The Note Book’.
I chose to write about the issue of economic inactivity and to focus on ways to encourage younger people into the workforce and ways to incentivise older workers to work for longer.
My thinking is that this will encourage the highly paid and highly skilled to work up until retirement age rather than choosing, as many do, to retire early.
And my estimation is that this would result in more, not less, tax being collected and collected sooner because these individuals are frequently higher rate taxpayers who will typically find ways to avoid inheritance tax in the extra spare time they have after they’ve taken early retirement.
Instead, these highly capable higher rate tax payers will be incentivised to continue to contribute to the growth of their organisations and the wider economy and consequently to the exchequer as well.
One for the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) to grapple with perhaps… but I’ve no idea how you’d model such an idea. Sometimes it’s just better to give things a go!
And if you do get a chance to see the play ‘A View from The Bridge’, you should go. It’s a precious thing - a brilliant play, brilliantly acted!
