Tax transparency. Apparently if we all really, really, know how much the bastards take off us, then also know what they piss it away upon, then we’ll be happier paying more tax.
Hmm.
Tax transparency. Apparently if we all really, really, know how much the bastards take off us, then also know what they piss it away upon, then we’ll be happier paying more tax.
Hmm.
Bring it on!
Put a sign on the fuel pumps showing how much Esso gets and how much the thieving bastards in government take…
I’d have thought Tax Transparency would lead to an immediate tax strike and everyone straight into the black market.
What would be quite interesting is people given a choice to prioritise what their taxes are used for. The results would be impossible and contradictory but rather revealing, especially when broken down into the usual demographics.
BiC
The internet to the rescue!
If petrol was £1.40 a litre you would be paying 52.95p a litre fuel duty and 28p VAT.
Total tax 80.95p.
The retailer typically makes 2-3p a litre profit. Let’s say 2.5p. That’s liable to corporation tax of course.
Giving a breakdown somewhere along the lines of:
After tax profit for a retailer of selling one litre of petrol – 1.875p
The amount of tax the government gets from that same litre of petrol 81.575p
Andrew C @ 9.20, don’t forget how much they
takesteal from the oil companies. I wonder where the government are going to get all the money they need when everyone has an EV?Oh boy. He’s really not going to like what the great unwashed want to defund!
Being serious for a while, I used to believe in something along those lines, that is everyone should know what percentage of the tax they pay goes on this or that. The problem with it is that if you pay verging on fuck all income tax, what you get is bloody good value. Like the NHS. Great value for a few quid a month. Less than a prescription charge. Not such great value when it’s thousands. And those people have votes.
There you have it. With income tax paid on a Pareto curve there will always be a built-in minority of net contributors in the population. Throw in universal suffrage and you have a built-in permanent majority for spending other people’s money. It’s no surprise that welfarism coincided with universal suffrage. There is no way out of this bar limiting suffrage, autocracy, or totalitarianism.
Personally I’m in favour of limiting suffrage. You get to decide if you’re actually paying for it. If you don’t like this, be more productive so that you’re actually paying for it. Athens had the right idea.
Of course the downside of this under current conditions is that those who are actually paying for it are likely to vote for unlimited immigration, the short-sighted idiots.
@ Norman “Athens had the right idea”.
They had some clever ideas. The 20 wealthiest Athenians were expected to pay for the upkeep of a Trireme.
If you were among the 20 and thought someone else should be instead of you, you could challenge them. If they disagreed, you had the option to swap estates. Everything you owned was now theirs, everything they owned was now yours.
And Pericles had a great put down (and one that applies to all those who whine about others having had ‘advantages’ in life). Being born an Athenian opened up political positions not available to those not born Athenian.
Whiny non-Athenian socialist (probably) to Pericles: “You could not have achieved what you have achieved had you not been born an Athenian.”
Pericles: “That may be so, but could you have achieved what I have achieved if you had been?”.
I sometimes get this “you don’t pay any tax” line when people find out that I bet on horses for a living. As though I get my VAT refunded, have fuel duty deducted at the pump, never get billed for council tax, stamp duty, insurance tax and goodness knows what else.
If you don’t pay income tax, all it does is leave you with more money to pay tax elsewhere.
Then get rid of all progressive income and wealth taxes, and only tax transactions. In practice this means a flat income tax with no exceptions, because income is a transaction, isn’t it, and you tax transactions?
What would that do to the overall tax take and the proportion of net contributors to net beneficiaries?
I recently demonstrated tax transparency to a friend who works in a pub and moans about losing so much money on tax from minimum wage.
There was a guy we know who’s on full benefits for being a lazy scrounger. He was having a slap up meal with pints.
There’s where your tax today has gone – you’ve paid for his slap up meal, and on top of that, you get to serve it to him.
Transaction taxes are the very worst of all taxes. Whatever level they are set at, they glue up all commerce and render vast swathes of it unprofitable.
Tax net profits by all means, but never tax the transactions which lead to those profits. Otherwise you will have no profits to tax.
I agree, but given that a state does have certain things to do and needs money for them, how should this tax be raised in a way that doesn’t lead to welfarism and a built-in majority for spending others’ money?
In a modern industrial economy there are only really two kinds of people who can be extraordinarily wealthy: those who are generating an extraordinary amount of value and therefore consumer surplus; and rentiers. We don’t much like rentiers. How do you tax them, and not the consumer surplus generators?
Well,Norman, my original point was that it doesn’t really matter what you tax or how you tax it (as long as you don’t tax the very transactions which create the taxable money in the first place). Whether through income tax or VAT or fuel duty or whatever, we all end up paying a load of tax.
I was just trying to point out that because profits from gambling winnings are not subject to income tax in the UK, it doesn’t mean that I’m not still a net taxpayer with the right to an opinion on how those taxes are spent. More broadly just pointing out that to a lot of people “paying your taxes” means paying income tax and that’s it. They just don’t appreciate the massive tax burden beyond that.
To put it another way: rather than arguing about how we tax, we should be arguing about how much we should tax. Make the idea of state expenditure and tax itself something limited and extraordinary rather than the default duty of government.
By arguing about how we tax rather than whether we tax, we’re just letting Murphy win the argument.
@ Norman
A few days ago the builder said, referring to some additional work done on top of his original quote, “£x plus VAT (=£x+20%) or £x if you pay cash” and I replied “I pay VAT” [my wife who usually complains if I waste money said nothing].
VAT is currently the least bad of UK taxes [Rates used to be but they suffer from three major defects, the worst being exemption for Labour’s pet supporters on a variety of benefits, the second being that bear no relationship to ability to pay as they are per dwelling/building, and the third being that they use out-of-date valuation] .
Transaction taxes increase the coast of the transaction by significantly more than the tax raised which is A BAD THING.
@ Norman
The way to tax rentiers is to set a minimum tax rate of 50% on all OAPs
Sure, but the crippling expansion of the state correlates with socialism, universal suffrage, and welfarism. Surprisingly it also correlates with personal mobility, and women entering the workforce. We want to encourage value creation and transactions because they make everyone richer but discourage welfarism and rentiers.
How does one do that? Perhaps it cannot be done, but if nothing is done welfarism and public sector bloat (another form of rentier) expands to the point at which the productive economy cannot and will not support it, and the whole edifice collapses. Then, in an interlinked and co-dependent society such as ours, it’s Mad Max time, and the recently-arrived Diversity will win because they’re in practice.
It may be that I do self assessment, but the government sends me a breakdown of where my income tax is spunked each year.
@Excavator Man
The NHS budget averages out to £6000 per year per household. Those that aren’t paying their share in tax are often the first to claim that austerity and cuts , referred to by others as not having exponentially increasing budgets, are responsible for its piss poor performance.
Didn’t the Athenians also have a rule that if you proposed a law that was accepted you got a lifetime pension, whereas if you proposed a law that was rejected you got executed?
That would certainly concentrate the mind!
Also, the irony of this blog’s libertarian commentariat discussing how to maximise tax revenue is not lost! Not convinced we want to discourage rentiers by taxing it out of existence. If I ever get wealthy enough to withdraw my labour those setting the various conditions of my labour (especially the swingeing taxation of it) are most at fault.
There appears to be some confusion as to what a rentier is. It’s somebody profiting from economic rents, i.e. getting an above-market-value return (risk adjusted) on an investment. Historically this has been most commonly through having some form of monopoly, but more recently some government favour.
It is not renting out property for market value. It is not receiving dividends on shares. It is not receiving coupons on bonds or interest on cash deposits.
Knowing how much the morons-in-charge waste, every time I push down on the accelerator and thus use more fuel, I think it could be instead tightening a garotte around the necks of the bastards.
The evil Uniparty, which it seems we cannot remove except by civil war, is a blight on humanity, degrading human experience and reducing us all to slavery.