From Phil Maguire.
THE people of Jersey make me laugh. You argue passionately over the pros and cons of whether we should have had zero-ten. But it is all irrelevant.

There is only one argument against getting rid of it – if we go back to 20 per cent and the Isle of Man does not, the companies which have offices in both Jersey and the Isle of Man (i.e. all of them) would be motivated in taking the lion’s share of their business away from us and giving it to them, as indeed has been happening within banks for most of the 21st century to take advantage of the Isle of Man’s lower employment costs. Get used to it, people, zero-ten is not going to go away. So we need some way of fixing it.

During both of my electoral campaigns, I have been against tax increases like GST because they damage the economy. The proof is GST and ‘20 means 20’ have made no impact on the £100 million gap and the only way that an increased tax rate can produce no gain in taxes is if the economy has shrunk – by about £½ billion, in this case.

If you want proof of this contraction, just look at the number of businesses which have closed or are closing down. We now have a permanent unemployment rate in excess of 1,000 lost souls, and while the rest of the world seems to be recovering from recession, the earliest we can expect any signs of growth is next year.

Extra tax increases will only continue to destroy more of the economy and, therefore, make it harder for our economy to recover and grow, and the longer it takes us to recover, the less competitive we are in the world economy.
In my campaigns, I had just one alternative to tax increases and cost cutting which also would have cost the Island nothing to implement.

During the second campaign and since, I have been introduced to another six ways which would raise revenues without raising taxes and all of them cost nothing or next to nothing to implement. And the irony is that I have not tried that hard to find them.

I would be happy to tell you more about them – but I would not want to waste your time.