The government is being urged to get VAT removed from school clothing - and quite right. It is the government that back schools having a uniform promoting the benefits of equality, i.e. no fancy Dans coming in with all the latest street wear, while the spotty kid with an interest in robots and computers gets bullied for wearing his older brother's hand me downs (it's not cool to be clever these days, in fact it's positively frowned upon; another feather in the cap of the famous line "Education, education, education").
The problem with this is kids come in all different sizes so even though VAT is waived for the under 14s, the fact that we have a nation of fat kids means that adults can fit in to much the same clothes as the kids - therefore it is done by size not age. I don't know whether to laugh or cry when I read that some shops were selling boys' blazers with a 52in chest and trousers with a 42in waist. Who breeds these monsters?! Of course, if the VAT was waived just for school uniforms by age, then it would be easy to enforce as you would assume (hope) that only a school kid who had to wear the uniform would buy it... All this does beg the question, should clothes be viable to VAT in the first place - I wouldn't call them a luxury, they are most definitely a necessity. The government is once again cashing in on things that we have no choice but to pay up for. As way of a point to prove it is a necessity, the last thing I want to see is a 14 year school boy with a 52in chest and 42 inch waist walking around in his birthday suit - a powerful argument to scrap VAT on clothes altogether, I'm sure you'll agree.
Comments
"It is the government that
"It is the government that back schools having a uniform"
They also seem to back adults wearing clothes, as anyone walking past a police officer while naked would testify. So I think, yes, we can safely extend that logic to all clothes!
"promoting the benefits of equality, i.e. no fancy Dans coming in with all the latest street wear"
Uh-oh, I smell danger. How long before the government reverses the logic and wants us *all* to wear uniforms in the name of equality?
VAT exemption is a market distortion
This is very similar to the approach to dealing with "fuel poverty" by trying to hold down the price of domestic energy. The trouble is, when you try to deal with poverty by making certain products, whether energy or clothes, artificially cheap, you distort the market, as you have accurately described, and provide a benefit not just to the poor minority you wanted to support, but also to the richer majority. VAT reduction or exemption is effectively a subsidy - it means that those who spend less of their money on exempt goods and more on goods that are fully liable to VAT are bearing a disproportionate share of the burden of VAT. Subsidised pricing is not a sensible approach to welfare - that is what the welfare system (preferably a basic income) is for.