UK Tax and Taxation - Tax Kills!

16 October 2006

Over taxation causes poverty, suffering and death, and I'm not being melodramatic...

Over 31,000 older people died from the cold last winter (in the UK) (National Pensioners Convention)

That's a lot of people. I wonder how many people died from drugs?...

The National Programme on Substance Abuse Deaths (np-SAD) reports the number of drug-related deaths in 2004 as 1,372 (Medical News Today)

...is that all?

Seems to me that council tax is killing at least ten times more people than illegal drugs!

You have to have some tax...

Tax is like food. You have to have some to live, but if you have too much - it's bad for you. And tax can be addictive - just look at Gordy...

Anarchists might say you don't need any government, but due to people's love of passing on responsibility, we'll always have a hierarchical society, so that's bollocks.

Obviously we need government to organise the country's infrastructure, and that costs money.

As a rule though, tax should apply to activities which are undesirable, rather than desirable ones - like employment. I think it's crazy for the government to lower taxes on gambling, yet raise them on employment - it's like saying 'gambling is good, but employing people is bad'.

...but not this much!

From: New Labour 'sham': 157 stealth tax rises (Daily Mail)

The result is that taxes have risen by £5,000 a year per family since 1997... the Chancellor will take £17.9billion more in tax this year than he would if he had made no changes to the tax regime

The IFS predicts the Chancellor will have to raise taxes by at least £11billion a year to pay for his future spending plans and says the tax burden is set to reach a 25-year high by 2010.

Council tax has gone up by 70 per cent since Labour came to power:

Here's a list of 80 tax-raises that GB has made since 1997: 80 Reasons To Hate El-Gordo

Fair taxation?

Few people would mind paying a fair amount of tax, but as in any transaction, we expect value for money. Our government is so unbelievable incompetant they waste tens of billions every year (£50 Billion / Year?), and what they do manage to squeeze out in terms of policy or services is shocking.

The only thing this government is any good at is spinning the truth. They like to spend lots of our money on 'special advisors' and press-officers to make themselves look good.

£300m a year - how the cost of spin trebled under Labour:

The price of Government spin has trebled since Labour came to power, costing taxpayers more than £300million a year.
Recently released figures show that Whitehall employs an army of more than 3,200 press officers to promote ministers and their quangos. (Mail)

Little has changed since biblical times (except the rate of tax - which back then was a mere 10%). This is from Matthew 23:23-24: and it just goes to show - government always stinks...

Extortion and excess... Lets take extortion to start with:

'Taxtortion': Money or Menaces

Extortion is characterised by being forced to give someone money, or have violence done to you. Having your freedom taken away, being locked in prison - is violence. No one should ever be put in prison for non-payment of taxes. Being required to work it off as community service is acceptable - as long as the person is physically and financially able.

Prison for tax protest pensioner:
A (73 year old) retired social worker from Devon has become the first woman pensioner to be jailed in England for refusing to pay part of an increase in her council tax. (BBC)

Our government, sees fit to imprison pensioners. They really are 'Tough on Crime...' aren't they. Wankers.

How many of those 31,000 people who died of cold last year would have survived if they hadn't had to pay a huge council tax bill?

Is this not exactly why Sylvia Hardy and the others like her who have refused to pay their 'fair share' of tax have chosen to make a stand? Because they know that this unfair tax is part responsible for the grinding povery and early deaths of thousands of people every year.

Meanwhile, back in Bullshit Land, Gordon Brown is busy trying to make himself look good by generously pledging to give away our money to help Africa. Not a bad cause, for sure, but there's this saying about 'your own back yard'...

Government Excess: Livin' it up...

We all know our politicians don't like to 'slum it'. They contend that to get the best people into government from the private sector, you have to pay them a similar wage, give them perks etc. But people are in business to make money. People are in government, theoretically, because they want to make the country a better place. Not for the money.

Besides, where's the evidence that their high salary, (luxurious offices, staff & living allowances...) has improved the quality of the candidates, or their work?

Politicians should be paid the median national wage.

This is a much fairer way of judging a politician's worth - (as opposed to them deciding themselves)

This way - they actually have a real incentive to increase the wealth of the general population.

90% of the civil service are useless.

Everyone knows that the government wastes money - mainly on themselves. A lot of it's due to the civil-service and their culture of inefficiency and unaccountability.

A recent report from the Institute for Public Policy Research said, the civil service was 'Amateurish' and had "anachronistic and severely inadequate" constitutional conventions governing relations between the Civil Service, ministers, Parliament and the public. They have become a recipe for ambiguity, confusion, weak leadership and buck-passing. (Mail)

...from the horses mouth!

The Scottish Parliament

The Scottish Parliament is a good example of government`s lavish overspending...

Sure it'll be a great building, but how can they justify spending that much on themselves, yet refuse decent armoured vehicles for the troops they sent to Iraq? Hmmm?

... its cost has risen from a nominal £10m at the time it was first seriously mooted in 1997, to £40m when its design was approved, to £100m when its scale was tripled, to £300m more recently, and to £345m today (Guardian)

For an in depth read on how government love to piss your money up against the wall, read this book:

The Bumper Book of Government Waste: The scandal of the squandered billions from Lord Irvine's wallpaper to EU saunas

Taxes are a lot higher than you think

Because there are so many different taxes which get applied at different stages of the commercial cycle, it's nigh-on impossible to gauge how much tax we actually pay...

Taxation as a percentage of GDP is today (2003) 56.1% in Denmark, 54.5% in France, 49.0% in the Euro area, 42.6% in the United Kingdom, 35.7% in the United States, 35.2% in The Republic of Ireland, and among all OECD members an average of 40.7%. (OECD national accounts)

I've always wondered how much tax do we actually pay, so I'm trying to build a table of figures for an 'average' person. If I've missed some things, please let me know:

The Hidden Tax column is my estimate of what proportion of the remaining amount is also tax - but hidden by a layer or more of transactions. These are taxes incurred by the supplier of the service, or their suppliers and include: Business rates, Employment tax (Employers NI), Fuel tax, Corporation tax, Government fines etc. and I've just estimated to be 15%, though it's probably higher.

* Stamp Duty for an average house (£125,000 to £250,000) is 1%. Say the average house costs £200k - that's £2000 per move. If you move once every 10 years, that's £200/year.

** Alcohol Duty varies a lot depending on what you drink. For spirits it's about 50%, wine and beer about 20%...

*** Airport tax £10 for EU, £20 elsewhere...

A flat-tax rate is a fairer system

Taxation - like everything government does - is done inefficiently and beaureucratically.

The only objection anyone could have to a flat-rate tax system - is that it's less jobs for the boys...

If found a couple of awesome articles on this subject:

• Flat Tax - A Simplified View
• Chris King - Flat Tax

It sounds to me like a non-taxable personal allowance of £18k / year - with a 45% tax rate on anything above is a pretty fair system. Simple too.

The benefits of flat-rate tax

• The taxpayer would be able to calculate their own tax bills - easily.
• The tax-credits system would be redundant as the poorest would not be taxed at all.
• Massively simplified administration & hence lower costs.

The disadvantages of flat-rate tax

Evil Gordon Brown and his henchmen don't want anyone to know about flat-rate tax. Presumably because it would take all the confusion out of the system: Flat Tax Scandal in UK

• Far, far fewer jobs for `the boys`
• Far less chance of being able to bullshit about tax to people.
• Loss of status and mystical power.

Comments

This is a sporadically moderated blog. I am not responsible for anything below!

Super Tax and the Seventies

It was proven by all the top earners in showbusiness etc moving out of the country as tax exiles when labour last put in the Super Tax of the Seventies that Karl Marx\'s progressive taxation does not work if people who are economically able to move do so. A simple flat tax at source is nearly unavoidable and simply putting everyone below a certain income level free of taxation encourages everyone to try to earn close to the maximum free allowance. What flat taxation with a generous personal allowance would do however is to tax the rich more fairly and less avoidably. That is a political no no as it is the rich who fund politics. Simply put if you wanted to end poverty in the UK it could be done at a fraction of the cost of the current system of benefits. No one who earns less than say £20k pays a penny in taxes. All income above that is taxed at a flat rate. Benefit is paid to anyone working full or part time who earns less than £20k to bring them up to an income level dependant on circumstances i.e. single, married, with children. If it is less than £20k then anything they manage to earn or produce to top it up to that total level of £20 is tax free. It was estimated that this would cost less than £2 billion a year. It was also estimated by the government themselves that the current level of benefit fraud was exceeded by the amounts unclaimed but due to people, i.e. the governments complicated system meant people in need lost out to benefit cheats but overall the government saved money on the deal. The waste in the system was therefore not benefit fraud but the paper shuffling costs. It was also shown that the Tax Collectors prosecutions for evasion were in the main against little people and cost more than they reclaimed. Had they have spent the money going after the big targets anyone of them resulting in a win would have paid for the investigation. Instead criminal family The A Team recently sentenced after a campaign of terror and crime lasting years, made a secret deal to pay a few hundred thousand on MILLIONS of undeclared income. Oh and by the way when you want to win an election what you do is promise everyone free money (benefits and tax cuts) open a massive paper shuffling centre in a deprived area employing thousands and then pay your mates in the computer industry billions to beggar up the system so you can blame them for the fact it doesnt work rather than admit it was all a scam anyway. I rest my case.

By Nicholas Kulkarni on 23 March 2007

To add your own comments, click here to login or register