Tag Archives: tax

The civilised thing to do

10 Mar

An excellent piece by Zoe Williams in the Guardian about the Green party conference and why delegates remain upbeat, despite recent difficulties.

This bit in particular caught my eye:

being outside acceptability has allowed the party to slough off the accepted wisdoms that both shackle and amalgamate the other parties. Tax is the obvious example: today the deputy leader, Amelia Womack, promised to axe all tuition fees, and to pay for it from general taxation: yup, that old chestnut. Not a graduate tax, or a fee-based system that was really a tax, but an actual, progressive tax, asking the people with the most to pay for something that would improve the entire country – not because they benefited from it themselves (though, in likelihood, they did), but because it’s the civilised thing to do.

Tax is the price we pay to live in a civilised society. It really is that simple.

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I Can’t Believe It!

6 Dec
Alex Brummer, writing in the Daily Mail of all places, comes out against tax avoidance:

Tax avoidance (organised by expensive teams of accountants) is perfectly legal. Yet it comes at the expense of millions of hard-working people who are not in a position to exploit such loopholes and have to bear the brunt of subsequent cuts in public services and increases in their own taxes.

Those workers on Pay-As-You-Earn tax arrangements have no means of lowering their Inland Revenue bills because tax is removed from their pay packets every month, along with their National Insurance Contributions (NIC) – which have now lost their original purpose as payments towards state pensions and social security, and are simply another form of income tax. Remember, too, that the vast majority of these ordinary taxpayers have had pay-freezes – and that the Government has not increased their tax-free allowances in line with inflation.

Read the full story here

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