cake and eat it

I've been looking at the current economic situation and wondering how Bojo will blamelessly jump free before he is replaced next year. 

I suspect there will need to be some kind of emergency budget. 

It can be along the lines of 'we are all in this together' and Rishi Sumak can play around with three main taxation areas comprising Income Tax, VAT and National Insurance. 

The first two of these items could raise around £5.5 billion (tax) and £5.2 bn (VAT) with a 1% point rise. 

NI is more headachey and raises only about half as much. 

A total of 7.5 million people are on furlough, with staff from more than 900,000 businesses off work as the Treasury paid 80pc of their salary up to £2,500 a month under the Job Retention Scheme. It is now reduced but meant that furlough cost around £14bn per month at the start - which reduces as the employer is supposed to take more of the burden. 

So here's how things could work. Rishi could add 1% across the board to taxes "we are all in it together" and make Basic rate 21%, intermediate 22%, then 41% and 46%. 

People would moan but a 1% increase is difficult to get too hot under the collar about. 

That taxation would boost the incoming tax by £5.5 billion. Then Rishi has to decide whether that is enough - it runs at something like: 

1% Income tax = £5.5bn 

2% Income tax = £11 bn 

As it goes to 2% or 3% it would get harder to defend, and Rishi will no doubt be pulling the chain for the Bank of England to flush some new printed easily (quantitative easing) money through the system. 

Rishi could add something to VAT, maybe a 1% increase to 21% (which yields around £5.2 billion). 

Together the two schemes would yield almost $11 billion, which pays for the furloughed workers but perhaps with a longer and more gentle tapering off, to encourage replacement jobs seeking? 

I'm not saying that I agree with these moves, but they are the only ones likely to fix the current situation.

And of course, it doesn't do anything to remedy the £2 Trillion of debt presided over by Controlmeister Boris. It is a weird way to demonstrate taking back control.  

If the UK was a computer, Bojo would have 'paged out' the entire operating system and caused it to crash. Oh, wait a minute...

Of course, Boris will want a tax rise now and then a tax cut before the next election. Typical cake and eat it stuff.