The Nature Of Taxation

I'm about to get a promotion at work, and with it comes a pay raise. According to my calculations, my pay raise is going to bump me up a tax bracket. I love being punished by the government for my hard work.
 
Tax. Blargh.

Oh well, I suppose it goes to good things
Like the Iraq War, overstuffed prisons, handouts to private corporations, Trident, Private Finance Initiative, and foreign aid with disasterous strings attached?

Available beds in England,1996-1997: 198, 848.
Available beds in England, 1999-2000: 186, 290.


Imagine how those wealthy people you loathe so feel. Most of their hard-earned goes back to the government and they get absolutely nothing in return as they don't generally drain on state resources.
Wealthy people use tax havens; in any case I'm not sure you can actually justify the claim that this government does "absolutely nothing" for rich people.

EDIT: Let me qualify that. According to the Tax Justice Network, tax avoidance in the UK deprives the treasury of between ?25bn and ?85bn a year. The high figure represents 74% of all income tax the Exchequer gets; it is more than the entire 2004 NHS budget. An official Revenue and Customs estimate for 2008 is 41bn a year. This enormous figure, and the fact that the chief methods fo tax avoidance are forming shell companies and living abroad, makes it easy to guess that those who are most able to practise tax evasion are those who have the money to spend on foreign residence, forming legal entities, and employing tax advisors. After all, allowing for some vaguity, over 10% of the population would have to pay no taxes at all in order to make up the R&C figure.

Gordon Brown keeps making bold claims about closing existing loopholes, but refuses to institute a general anti-avoidance rule that would stop new loopholes from opening up; when speaking in Brighton that year he mentioned tax policy once, in scoffing gat European harmonisation that would make it more difficult for the rich to shift their money overseas. Think of Lord Levy, the multimillionaire Labour fundraiser, who, in the financial year 1998-99, paid 5000 pounds in tax. Five thousand! Less than that punishing 33% of the 'average' income (GDP per capita). And yet is the government attempting to rescue these discrepencies? In 2004 it was also announced that 40,500 staff would be laid off from Inland Revenue and Customs - and why? Maybe it has something to do with the discovery Guardian journalist Nick Davies had made two years earlier - that the government's efforts to catch tax avoiders had already "collapsed in a heap of mismanagement and staff cuts". All the specialised offices are struggling with too few experienced staff, after massive cuts in the 1990s.

George Monbiot sent a list of questions to the Inland Revenue. Was it true, as the Lib Dems had claimed, that the poorest fifth of the population pay a higher precentage of their income in tax than the richest fifth? Was it true that there had been a shift if income tax receipts from the rich to the poor and middling over the past 10 years? The Inland Revenue published no such analysis and furthermore had produced no estimate of the money lost through tax avoidance. The Inland Revenue claims that it has made no attempt to work out whether or not its policies are working, whether the results are fair.

In short, despite the enormous amounts of money that are being lost in avoidance, the government is doing very little to stop it. And why should they? Those who have the resources are generally those who are rich, and the government likes those who are rich. Corporation tax has been cut from 33% to 28%, and capital gains tax from 40% to 18% (not to mention the Entrepreneurs' Relief scheme = first million of capital gains tax only 10%). Meanwhile, they tried to raise income tax by the poorest earners from 10% to 20%, and have lifted inheritance tax (punishing, if anybody, ordinary people) from ?300,000 to ?700,000. And compare the government's abortive efforts (detailed above) to combat tax evasion, with its aggressive efforts to prosecute benefits cheats - "no ifs, no buts!"

It seems clear that the current tax regime is intent on punishing not only the lowest earners but the middle earners and 'middle england' as well - those who are actually "rich" are having few problems. The government's policy is no surprise. Patience Wheatcroft, the business editor of the Times, once attacked the Treasury for imagining tax avoidance as "tantamount to extreme wickedness" - and hey ho, her employer is Rupert Murdoch! When The Daily Telegraph was owned by Lord Black, it said people have "a legal and moral right to work out how to pay as little tax as possible". It would say that. Its new owners, the Barclay brothers, are technically resident in Mexico.

The IR can't stop this and neither can we, because while the details of people's wages are splashed across newspapers (the salaries of directors, the negotiations of trade unions), the details of people's taxes are utterly confidential. We can know how much the rich are earning, but we cannot know how much they are giving - unless, as with Lord Levy's five thousand pounds, the details are obtained illegally.

This government does nothing for the wealthy!

EDIT: Quit spamming Solaris dudds :>
 
Personally, if I ever earn enough to put me in the 50%, I'm moving it to a quiet little tax haven :D

I really object to my taxes being spent unwisely..
 
Personally, if I ever earn enough to put me in the 50%, I'm moving it to a quiet little tax haven :D

I really object to my taxes being spent unwisely..

I know some dude who has this house with the most fantastic view, its got 8 bedrooms total and costs like a million, but he bought it in a lump sum and sold another equally costly house at the same time or some crap.
The basic sum of all this is that because he got rid of an equal piece of property, he gets it tax free, and he made a lump payment, so he doesn't owe anything.
Bascially, he's only got to pay for the plumbing, electric etc.
I envy that dude.
 
Most people drive 1.2-1.6 litre shitboxes here, it's too expensive to drive anything decent.

That's not quite true, there are plenty of people driving big assed 4x4s all over the place (esp supermarket car parks..).

Personally, if I ever earn enough to put me in the 50%, I'm moving it to a quiet little tax haven :D

Not before you pay back all that hard earned Tax I paid, that you pissed away on beer, alcopops and ill advised fashion statements ;)

I really object to my taxes being spent unwisely..

Bend over, lube up and get used to it like everyone else. :dozey:

One thing I'd say is, don't expect the world as it is based on prevalence (Job, House, Car, comfortable life), to necessarily reflect the world that will be in 10 to 20 years time.
 
Not before you pay back all that hard earned Tax I paid, that you pissed away on beer, alcopops and ill advised fashion statements ;)

Never!

I plan to become fabulously wealthy, and ensure that you personally never see one penny ;)
 
Nope.

Originally Posted by Encyclopedia
the theory and practice of organizing society into ?corporations? subordinate to the state. According to corporatist theory, workers and employers would be organized into industrial and professional corporations serving as organs of political representation and controlling to a large extent the persons and activities within their jurisdiction. However, as the ?corporate state? was put into effect in fascist Italy between World Wars I and II, it reflected the will of the country?s dictator, Benito Mussolini, rather than the adjusted interests of economic groups.

Sounds a lot like socialism
'the theory and practice of organizing society into soviets subordinate to the state. According to socialist theory, workers and employers would be organized into industrial and professional soviets serving as organs of political representation and controlling to a large extent the persons and activities within their jurisdiction.'

Most definitions of Corporatism and Fascism define the process as a merger or union between state and corporation rather than a state take over. So the merger can come from either direction. Political definitions aren't concrete Liberal for example in the USA today doesn't mean what it meant 200 years ago, so even if whoever coined the term corporatism meant that quasi-socialism, it's an antiquated idea.

Modern corporatist states include Mexico, which requires its citizens to join large, state-run "corporations" or syndicates. It is literally illegal in corporatist states to lobby the government without being part of a state-run corporation. In corporate states, the goal of the "corporations" is not profit, but political representation. Corporate influence on democratic states with free markets is known as corporate pluralism, or corporate hyperpluralism, which is what we have in the US. In these states, corporations are privately owned and run to create a profit, but they can also lobby the government for their interests. In a hyperpluralist state, there are so many competing corporate interests that nothing can ever get done.

I don't know much about Mexico's economics but state controlled employment sounds like socialism to me.
 
Ha! Our superior 15% tax beats you all! :p
 
The government should stay the hell out of economics.

Economics is the managing of resources, which are finite.

Government is the managing of people's desires, which are infinite.
 
The government should stay the hell out of economics.

Economics is the managing of resources, which are finite.

Government is the managing of people's desires, which are infinite.

But I thought you couldn't seperate the two, or at least that's what it says on my economics textbook.
 
Other than a fiat currency which isn't really necessary the government is unnecessary in the economy. The Government cannot exist without some interference in the market.

No economic system is perfect, every system that has been tried has had problems.
 
Back
Top