Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by pjc50 16 days ago
> You can't get any high value notes there, they just don't exist

Yes, although this is mostly by capping the highest regularly circulating note at £50 after the war and then waiting for inflation.

> And there's so much street crime,

[mostly false]

> and the police care so little about burglary,

Sadly true (including "find my iPhone" reports; there was a joke during the Mandelson scandal that this was the one time the Met had managed to locate a phone)

> The UK did this already and ML is out of control there: criminals just don't care.

Yes, which makes a sort of orthogonal point about whether or not cash is actually important for this. There's the conspicuously suspicious businesses ("American sweet shops"), but also more complicated stuff going on (Scottish Limited Partnerships were in the news). Then there's all the Crown dependencies, which are a total financial wild west still.

> Carousel fraud in the EU is a huge problem that governments hate to talk about because they don't know how to fix it

God yes. This is a significant problem in VAT as a concept; I don't understand why the EU loves VAT so much.

3 comments

>>Sadly true (including "find my iPhone" reports

I'll give you one better. I know someone who had their nearly new Range Rover stolen in Manchester - reported to the police etc. Few days later, they found it parked at a car park near a big supermarket. Rang the police, they said well, if you still have the keys...just take it? And he was like hang on, you don't want to look at it, check for drugs, take fingerprints, you know, do any actual police stuff stuff around stolen property? And they were like nope, don't have the time or the people to come out, if you have the keys just take the car back and make sure you tell your insurer you got it, that's all we can do.

I've heard that this is quite common. The criminals drive the car a short distance and leave it for a few days to check if it has a hidden tracker. If the vehicle isn't recovered they assume it is clean.
The story I heard is the car is stolen and used briefly to commit other crimes like robberies or general mischief. Then the car is discarded leaving the surveillance trail largely dead or at least difficult to follow.
Depends on the vehicle. Range Rovers are commonly stolen to be exported for countries where registering them is not a problem and where buyers are likely to pay cash. Some cars are stolen to be broken up for parts, some are used for other crimes, and some are exported and re-sold as-is. LR products are very frequently in that last group.
"I don't understand why the EU loves VAT so much."

Because it's easy money as taxation goes. Facing growing fiscal deficit and worsening credit score, the first thing the government in Romania did last summer was to rise the (general) VAT quota and cut on some VAT exceptions. It works quicker and more reliably than other means for securing the budget needs.

The VAT related fraudulent schemes are a problem in EU as many other things are, but they are investigated, often prosecuted, and written about. For anyone interested, more can be found at the European Public Prosecutor's Office's site: https://www.eppo.europa.eu/en/media/news

VAT/GST is a direct tax on productive economic activity (as opposed to some proxy like income or capital gains) and I'm sure there are good economic arguments why that's the best kind of tax.