Peston: still an idiot

Stamp duty raises an invaluable £3bn a year for the exchequer. (src)

Oh, Robert, Robert, Robert. There are just a few things wrong with this. Firstly, £3bn is not 'invaluable'. I can tell you what its value is: £3bn. Seriously. Almost anything else you can call invaluable, but money, by definition, cannot be invaluable.

Secondly, £3bn is less than a half a percent of the UK government's tax revenue. It's not even significant.

Thirdly, your datum is insufficient to deduce that the first derivative of revenue with respect to headline rate is positive. (I am not making the counterclaim, or indeed any claim other than a lack of information.)

Fourthly, you cannot know the counterfactual: what if scrapping stamp duty on shares resulted in an investment boom which raised revenues from corporation tax and income tax beyond the £3bn you so laud here? It's a possibility, and one which you cannot discount without evidence, if you want to be serious about this analysis.