It would be a brave girl who asserted that she understood the economic situation of Egypt, except to say that it is dire; but it seems a reasonable proposition that the IMF (from which the government is hoping to borrow USD15bn or some such number) was behind this week’s five percent increase in the top rate of tax. Individual well-off Egyptians are round about 99 times cleverer than any government they have had in the past 50 years or are ever likely to have, so this has to be regarded as a piece of window-dressing. But other IMF prescriptions this week also follow the usual tax-increasing path: in Luxembourg it’s VAT and property taxes; in Lithuania it’s property taxes and vehicles; in Latvia it’s the flat tax thresholds. And here is a particularly abysmal example of first world high-taxing double-speak … Read More »