Jo Johnson, a member of Britain’s Parliament, has penned a piece in the FT explaining why Britain’s policy of punishing bankers through higher taxation is harmful to Britain’s economy.

Johnson cites recent Treasury data in noting that Britain’s year-old 50 percent tax rate on high-income earners — people making over 150,000 pounds, or around $240,000, annually — hits more “innocent bystanders” than bankers.

Out of 275,000 affected, only 63,000 — 23 percent — work in ‘financial intermediation.’ Many of the [other] collateral victims, of course, will be precisely the entrepreneurs the UK must attract to stimulate job creation and quicken its sluggish recovery from recession.

The author further laments that investors now see Britain as a “high tax economy,” a bad thing in a world where “countries need to compete for highly skilled labour as never before.”

This perception would be good for New York. We could compete as the lower-tax alternative.

We can’t do that, though, until, at minimum, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver drops his bid to continue a temporary “millionaires’ tax” for people earning above $1 million a year (the tax currently falls on six-figure earners, too).