Fun with the Income tax threshold

Someone changed the office radio from Smooth FM to LBC today, and within second the office was seething with opinions about who's fault everything was:- parents, the police, ethnic concentrations in deprived areas, politicians.

Someone made a remark about how the Tories hate poor people, I'd just read Mark Pack's blogpost about how many Labour MPs voted against lowering the 50% tax rate, which had me thinking about how the Tories have massively helped poor people with last week's budget raising the income tax allowance, taking 2 million people out of income tax.

And that got me thinking about the income tax threshold generally, I believe in raising it to above the minimum wage is a great idea, taking all of the low paid out of tax, out of the employer's HR department even having to bother with the paperwork of taxing them, letting the low paid keep more of their hard earned money.

This blog says:-

We think raising the Income Tax allowance is the purest form of helping the poor.

So I took a look on the office of national statistics website for historical income tax thresholds, and then adjusted them for inflation and figured out which color of government were in power

Should it be adjusted for inflation, or adjusted by average earnings? Or some kind of mysterious cost of living index that takes into account the cost of living, other taxes, houses and so on? I dunno, I've adjusted for inflation cos it was easy to do with online tools.

The general idea is that if the government keeps the threshold level the same from one year to the next, because of inflation, it essentially means the threshold is lowered. Raising by the rate of inflation gives the patches of horizontal lines in my graph. The declining dots are when the government has kept the threshold at the previous years level and inflation has taken a bite.

This is my raw data:-

Year	Threshold	Inflation adjusted	Government
1953	£110	£2,491.00	Con
1954	£110	£2,416.00	Con
1955	£110	£2,373.00	Con
1956	£120	£2,478.00	Con
1957	£120	£2,362.00	Con
1958	£140	£2,658.00	Con
1959	£140	£2,581.00	Con
1960	£140	£2,566.00	Con
1961	£140	£2,541.00	Con
1962	£140	£2,457.00	Con
1963	£140	£2,356.00	Con
1964	£140	£2,310.00	Lab
1965	£200	£3,194.00	Lab
1966	£220	£3,048.00	Lab
1967	£220	£2,934.00	Lab
1968	£220	£2,862.00	Lab
1969	£255	£3,485.00	Lab
1970	£325	£4,215.00	Con
1971	£325	£3,961.00	Con
1972	£460	£5,124.00	Con
1973	£595	£6,188.00	Con
1974	£625	£5,950.00	Lab
1975	£675	£5,541.00	Lab
1976	£735	£4,858.00	Lab
1977	£945	£5,358.00	Lab
1978	£985	£4,826.00	Lab
1979	£1,165	£5,265.00	Con
1980	£1,375	£5,486.00	Con
1981	£1,375	£4,647.00	Con
1982	£1,565	£4,726.00	Con
1983	£1,785	£4,962.00	Con
1984	£2,005	£5,333.00	Con
1985	£2,205	£5,578.00	Con
1986	£2,335	£5,557.00	Con
1987	£2,425	£5,577.00	Con
1988	£2,605	£5,757.00	Con
1989	£2,785	£5,876.00	Con
1990	£3,005	£5,889.00	Con
1991	£3,295	£5,898.00	Con
1992	£3,445	£5,822.00	Con
1993	£3,445	£5,615.00	Con
1994	£3,445	£5,512.00	Con
1995	£3,525	£5,499.00	Con
1996	£3,765	£5,685.00	Con
1997	£4,045	£5,946.00	Lab
1998	£4,195	£5,998.00	Lab
1999	£4,335	£5,982.00	Lab
2000	£4,385	£5,963.00	Lab
2001	£4,535	£5,986.00	Lab
2002	£4,615	£5,999.00	Lab
2003	£4,615	£5,907.00	Lab
2004	£4,745	£5,883.00	Lab
2005	£4,895	£5,874.00	Lab
2006	£5,035	£5,890.00	Lab
2007	£5,225	£5,904.00	Lab
2008	£6,035	£6,517.00	Lab
2009	£6,475	£6,734.00	Lab
2010	£6,475	£6,798.00	ConLib
2011	£7,475	£7,848.00	ConLib
2012	£8,105	£8,105.00	ConLib
2013	£9,205	£8,560.00	ConLib

From looking at the graph and the numbers, it seems like the main step changes in the threshold level (from £2,400 to £5,900 and then to £8,000 in today's money) have occurred during Conservative governments. In fact, going by the past fifty years, where Conservatives and Labout have each had approximately 25 years in power, we can get these average increases in the threshold.
 

	Conservative and Libdems	Labour
Average	£207.23	£34.00
Median	£149.50	-£12.50
Sum	£5,388.00	£816.00

As a disclaimer, I'm not a Conservative voter myself, I just really like the idea of raising the income tax threshold to stop the government taking people's hard earned cash, and that seems to happen most during Conservative administrations.

Public Sector, the state and petrol prices

I'm not sure if I'm filled with rage, or just paracetemol and lactic acid, but I received this email from a colleague who happens to work in the state sector.

Dear All,

Here is an interesting idea to think about (and act upon?)...unless you've already received the same message independently!

Please see what you think and pass it on if you agree with it.

We are hitting £129.9 a litre in some areas now and soon we will be faced with paying £1.50 per litre. So Philip Hollsworth offered this good idea:

This makes MUCH MORE SENSE than the 'don't buy petrol on a certain day campaign' that was going around last April or May! The oil companies just laughed at that because they knew we wouldn't continue to hurt ourselves by refusing to buy petrol. It was more of an inconvenience to us than it was a problem for them. BUT, whoever thought of this idea, has come up with a plan that can really work.

Please read it and join in!

Now that the oil companies and the OPEC nations have conditioned us to think that the cost of a litre is CHEAP, we need to take aggressive action to teach them that BUYERS - not sellers control the market place. With the price of petrol going up more each day, we consumers need to take action. The only way we are going to see the price of petrol come down is if we hit someone in the pocket by not purchasing their petrol! And we can do that WITHOUT hurting ourselves. Here's the idea:

For the rest of this year DON'T purchase ANY petrol from the two biggest oil companies (which now are one) i.e. ESSO and BP.

If they are not selling any petrol, they will be inclined to reduce their prices. If they reduce their prices, the other companies will have to follow suit. But to have an impact we need to reach literally millions of Esso and BP petrol buyers. It's really simple to do!!

Now, don't wimp out on me at this point... keep reading and I'll explain how simple it is to reach millions of people!!

I am sending this note to a lot of people. If all of you send it to at least ten more (30 x 10 = 300)....and those 300 send it to at least ten more (300 x 10 = 3,000) ... and so on. By the time the message reaches the sixth generation of people, we will have reached over THREE MILLION consumers! If those three million get excited and pass this on to ten friends each, then 30 million people will have been contacted! If it goes one level further, you guessed it.....

THREE HUNDRED MILLION PEOPLE!!!

Again, all YOU have to do is send this to 10 people. That's all (and not buy at ESSO/BP). How long would all that take? If each of us sends this email out to ten more people within one day of receipt, all 300 MILLION people could conceivably be contacted within the next 8 days!!! Acting together we can make a difference. If this makes sense to you, please pass this message on.

PLEASE HOLD OUT UNTIL THEY LOWER THEIR PRICES It's easy to make this happen. Just forward this email, and buy your petrol at Shell, Asda, Tesco, Sainsburys, Morrisons, Jet etc. i.e. Boycott BP and Esso

I remember when I was young my father would drive a little out of his way to fill up on petrol at a petrol station that was a couple of pence cheaper than the nearest petrol station. I'd question the logic, but he'd costed it out and knew his fuel efficiency, and paying 43.9p per litre ten miles away was better than 45.9p at the petrol station opposite.

These days things have changed, petrol costs £1.30 a litre, most of that money goes to the government, about 80p is fuel duty and VAT.

Bear in mind Esso, BP, Shell, Tesco and all the rest are private sector companies.

I used to be a private sector company, I used to make CDs and sell them. They cost about 50p to make, to print on my desktop printer, and burn on my PC, cos I made so few of them I never paid VAT or any kind of tax.

Imagine if you will, that the government decided to force me to charge a duty and VAT on those CDs so I could no longer sell them for 50p each, but instead had to sell them for £1.30 each. I probably wouldn't have bothered.

Every few years we have a general election, we vote in 665 members of parliament, some of whom make up the government, but those in the government can't do much themselves, they need the vast vast apparatus of the state, thousands of employees, public sector workers following their dictats in order to collect taxes and spend the money. These people are all complicit in raising the price of petrol at the pumps.

And that is what exasperates me right now, that not only does the state artificially push the price of petrol up, but they also complain about the high price and suggest ways to put the companies out of business, to force them to lower their prices.

Ethically, public sector employees who object to high petrol prices should quit their jobs.

Here's another way I look at it. When I spend £1.30 at the petrol pump, I don't get £1.30's worth of petrol, I get 1 litre of petrol plus 80p's worth of government spending on schools, hospitals, European Union bullshit, MPs expenses, antismoking enforcement, Police officers working undercover, benefit payments and so on.

Actually I'd rather just have the petrol I pay for.

Student protests and education funding

Yes, its shocking that the bastards bastards Police were so brutal, none of the protesting students could have expected the police to be so frightful.

Yes, its shocking that such a large and overwhelmingly peaceful protest could be overshadowed by the vandalism of a tiny minority.

Yes, its shocking that a university education that was free or cheap to previous generations will now have to paid for by the graduates once they start earning over £21,000.

Yes, Charlie 'Son of multi-millionaire David' Gilmour is an asshole for swinging on the cenotaph.

But why?

Well, its what the police have always done.

It would be nice if the protests could be carried out without any police violence. It would also be nice if protests could be carried out without any vandalism, smashing of private property and graffitiing of public property. It does happen occasionally. Nice ideal protests, like those anti-war marches, they failed in achieving their stated aims, but the protests were less violent than these graduate tax protests.

And there's something dodgy about anarchists demanding more state funding.

The number of students in the UK has pretty much doubled since I was at university a decade ago. In the sixties, 5% of the young went to university, now its 45%. Whatever was spent by the government on universities fifty years ago, to maintain the same cost per student would cost nine times as much.

As an aside, I wonder how much university education costs, not how much people have to pay, but how much it costs, before any excessive profits. Does it really cost prestigeous universities like Oxford, Cambridge and Hull so much more than the local polytechnic to educate? Or do they charge an excess amount cos they can, for the prestige. In the same way that houses in London cost so much more than in Motherwell, despite using the same number of bricks and the same labour to build.

I've been meaning to write this blogpost for weeks, I've been doing research.

Here, how much of GDP should the government spend on education?

Rightly or wrongly I take GDP as a proxy for my income. If the government spends 5% of GDP on defence, thats the same as them taxing me 5% and spending it on defence, the same as taxing everyone likewise. If the government raises corporation tax and lowers income tax, I reckon the corporations will pass on the cost to the consumer and that 5% will still come out of my pocket. They can tax 'the rich' more, but that money will still come out of my pocket.

Anyhoo, here's a graph showing defence spending in the UK over the past few hundred years is a constant around 4% of GDP, apart from when there's a war.

Out of all the money anyone in the UK has earned, about 4% has gone on tanks and planes or muskets and horses, depending on the technological era. We can suppose that that's about how much defence costs to maintain the UK and stop other countries from trying it on.

Now government funded education, that's more of a new thing and hasn't been a constant. As a percentage of GDP it has been increasing.

See how in the 19th century, it was a small fraction of a percentage, and now its about 4.5%. Down from a peak of 6.5% in 1980.

In 1980, there were around 800,000 students in the UK, today there are around 2,500,000 students, about three times as many. If spending per student was to stay the same as it did in the good old days of student grants and 'free' education, then the UK would be paying around 20% of GDP on education.

Sure, I'm playing fast and loose with the facts here, that graph is for all education spending, not just university education. And also, its just government spending, here look:-

In 1850, government spending was only 10% of GDP, the other 90%, other people spent on things of their own choosing, or stuck in banks where it was invested in things. People paid for their own education, or their kids or charitable scholarships or their own choosing. But in the last hundred years, the state as taken more of our money, around 40% and spent it however the prevailing government has decided. Individually we can't be trusted to spend that additional 30% on what we want, government knows better.

That's the welfare state. That's what it costs.

The welfare state is a great thing. Its better that there is a welfare state than if there wasn't one, I think we can all agree on that. However, some people think the welfare state is too big, too costly, to all encompassing, some people think it should be bigger and encompass more.

Personally as a small state libertarian, I'd prefer a smaller welfare state, and more freedom for individuals to keep hold of their own money and spend it how they see fit, like the legendary policy from The West Wing, making college fees tax-deductable.

Elsewhere on the internet, wiser men than I have highlighted the fact that education isn't free, and demanding free education.

What is the point of amassing public money to subsidise the madness of young people who (a) think that complex services even in theory can be 'free', and (b) then proceed to 'demand' them.

My own theory is that there are far too many students to be paid for from the public purse. There should be some degree of rationing, how about letting the best achieving 10% of students from any school have their university fees paid for by the government, regardless of institution and course, non-transferable so the rich kid can't palm off their good fortune on a poor kid. And the next best achieving 10% get a lowest subsidy.

And say the best achieving student doesn't want to go to university, or for some reason gets knocked back from all his choices of uni, then well, hard cheese.

Paying with money

As the new flat slowly becomes populated with furniture and furnishings I find myself spending time queuing up at the tills in Ikea. The folk in front pay with cash, the pay with a huge wedge of twenties, whilst I pay for my purchases with my debit card.

For a few moments I ponder what circumstances lead to people paying for their Ikea purchases with cash, before my mind wanders onwards to whether I should by Ikea chocolate for 39p.

Today in the thrilling world of Twitter, @Pavlunka tweeted the following factoid:-

Something crystalised in my mind, tax evasion isn't just carried out by high earners, the fatcats with off-shore accounts, its also carried out by by the waiters working in restaurants for cash in hand, paying no national insurance or income tax. Me, I pay about 28% of my labours to the state in Income Tax and National Insurance, if I worked cash in hand, I'd be paying none of that.

I pondered, since there are more low earners than high earners, is it possible that lower earners commit more tax evasion than high earners? How could I find out the spread, where would such details of who carries out tax evasion?

It took a wee bit of google-juice, but I found the National Fraud Authority and in January they released the Annual Fraud Indicator report, which had the sort of pie chart I was looking for:-

The 'Tax Gap' being the difference between what the government think they should be collecting and what they actually collect. They don't publish this information often. Anyhoo, rather helpfully there was some spiel about how Tax Avoidance isn't Tax Evasion, isn't considered fraud and isn't counted in the £15billion figure that Pavlunka quoted:-

Actually, Pavlunka's factoid was a tiny bit incorrect, £15billion is the total tax fraud, the tax evasion sector is £7billion. Still tax evasion is seven times the benefit fraud figure, in an ideal world seven times as much effort should be put into combating it. I wonder if that split of resourcing stands.

So, after wandering round the room musing on the pie chart, I thought to question it. Whilst it was the most reliable and detailed information available, there was no other more reliable or detailed that I could find, just how reliable was the information, where did it come from, how could the National Fraud Authority know? Luckily there was a footnote.
So, aye, its all guesswork.

Anyhoo, in answer to my line of thought about how much tax evasion the waiters who are being paid in cash and then spend it in Ikea, well, that's not 'tax evasion', that's 'the hidden economy' and its only 7.5% of the tax gap.

Now in my ideal world there would still be tax fraud, the rule of law will never be absolute, but as long as the cash in hand folk are defrauding the system less than the tax evaders and the tax avoiders, then all is good.

Spread of rents in the UK housing market

Good evening blog readers, I'm in the process of moving house. I'd been meaning to move away from Wembley and closer to work for a while and now, well, to be honest I'm of no fixed abode until I get keys to the new place some time next week.

Anyhoo, it took a while to find somewhere to live. We had a budget, around £800 per month, no more than £900. We wanted a two bedroom place so one room could be an office/studio/den/spare bedroom, but a one bedroom place would be okay if it was nice. I had location stipulations, nearer to where I work in Enfield than Wembley, and also closer to ways into London town centre of gigs an stuff.

Other people in the househunting game have other stipulations, such as, not in the east and near on of those cool west London tube lines.

Here, take a look at RightMove, London doesn't really really cater for the two bedroom less than £800 a month west dweller.

No matter how hard you look, there's always going to be something better in that price range towards the east.

The concept of 'cheap' two bedroom doesn't exist in west London.

Its been a while since I was out looking for a two bedroom flat, in fact last time was around ten years ago, in Glasgow. We got a rather executive city centre flat for £575 a month, that was expensive for Glasgow. But for London, that's not even on the radar for the cheap end of the market.

There isn't even a cheap bit of London with the shittest two bed flats for around that. I know inflation exists, but no no.

Anyhoo, so I like graphs and stuff. I went onto RightMove and started scraping.

This is a graph of the distribution of two bedroom flat rental prices in Glasgow from RightMove. It tells us that if you're looking for a £800 two bed there, you can pretty much get any flat on the market. A shitty flat in a shitty area will cost £400 a month and a decent one will cost £800. Sure there are more luxurious city centre ones over a grand, but most of the market is within your grasp.

Its not just Glasgow that's that cheap, here's a look at the spread in Glasgow and Manchester. Its the same spread.

Sure, Manchester is a touch more expensive. The average being £628 per month compared to Glasgow's £593 per month, but there's not much in it.

Anyhoo, here are all the price spreads that I scraped off of RightMove.

Yes its hard to see what's going on there, suffice to say there's a wide spread of rental prices comparing different cities and towns in the UK. That's kind of obvious to all.

You'll have heard of the north/south divide, or how London is horrendously expensive compared to the rest of the world and it gets cheaper the further from London you go.

So to illustrate this here's a graph of average rent for a two-bed in different parts of the UK, with latitude along the y-axis and price along the x-axis.

The rent floor for the UK seems to be £490 a month. No town has an average rent much below this. Sure, some of the vilest shitholes will be cheaper, and there's always flatshare.

London is generally more expensive than anywhere else in the UK. Even the cheap bits of London are more expensive.

Here's a wee graph of the spreads of various places in that expensive latitude around London.

I've cut off the x-axis at £1500 per month cos above that it gets rather depressing. Do you really want to know that the average rent in West Hampstead is £1710 a month an Tower Hamlets is £1570? Around three times more than double the average in most of the UK.

The other day Raedwald blogged about how Middlesbrough was well cheap, you could buy a four bedroom house there for £132,000. But that still not quite scraping the barrel.

I use to joke with people that I could quit my job and move to Hull and live in a nicer flat just on my Job Seekers allowance. But it appears there are cheaper places than even Hull. Carlisle for example.

Here, this is my wee list of the average 2-bed rent in various places in the UK.

£1,711.15 - West Hampstead
£1,569.78 - Tower Hamlets
£1,530.41 - Bethnal Green
£1,394.95 - Brixton
£1,252.63 - Wembley
£1,173.56 - Brighton
£1,144.02 - Enfield
£1,093.44 - Uxbridge
£1,031.45 - Walthamstow
£955.47 - Croydon
£874.05 - Reading
£869.32 - Slough
£828.37 - Chelmsford
£783.09 - Edinburgh
£775.00 - Burnham on Crouch
£755.04 - Portsmouth
£736.06 - Bristol
£692.54 - Plymouth
£668.94 - Cardiff
£666.67 - Birmingham
£664.54 - Colchester
£648.22 - Newcastle upon Tyne
£645.89 - Norwich
£627.92 - Manchester
£617.50 - Leicester
£606.42 - Liverpool
£597.65 - Sheffield
£592.19 - Glasgow
£581.67 - Swansea
£578.26 - Moss Side
£576.36 - Nottingham
£553.09 - Coventry
£516.23 - Doncaster
£507.14 - Bolton
£504.90 - Rochdale
£504.41 - Middlesbrough
£497.64 - Bradford
£496.24 - Hull
£479.17 - Carlisle

Thrilling stuff, I'm sure you'll agree.

Does this open up some interest questions about the nature not just of Housing Benefit, but also Job Seekers Allowance in the UK, and who pays for who.

**UPDATE**
Playing around on Excel instead on OpenOffice Base, I've put together this surface graph of the spreads in each of the aforemention towns, and done it so it looks a little like the cover to Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures.

Its going to be a wee while until I can get on a 'puter that can run better graphing software.

Sleepless and frustrated

I was up late last night, and then had a restless and fitful night. I had a piece I needed to finish writing, precious little time during the day when it wouldn't come. Doubt and uncertainty with the finished article.

Always doubt and uncertainty with finished articles. I'm tearfully grateful when certainty arrives.

Someone finally read my film treatment the other day, it was such a relief when they confirmed my doubts and uncertainties, I was grinning for hours.

Its just the awkward fraction of the autistic spectrum I inhabit. I could have just not bothered writing anything, written it off as another thing I'd planned to do, but didn't. It sure would have saved time and effort and made the world a nicer place.

But my head doesn't work that way, when there is an intention or a plan to do something right away then I feel the need to do it. That's normal right? Or no? The willingness to sacrifice the plan, that frustrates me.

Something that still plays on my mind even after many years was when I was helping a friend move from Glasgow to London. We'd hired a van and I figured if we drove at x miles an how, we'd get to London in daylight, and it would be easy to unload and have the job finished. The trip would use this much petrol, and cost this much money. But now I think should we have stopped more on the way, for lunch at a Little Chef, dinner at Watford Gap and who cares if we arrived at 2am and put off unloading til the next day? The journey would have been more pleasant, more relaxed.

Maybe we'd still be friends today, if we'd stopped at the Little Chef, abandoned the plan and loosened my embrace of the plan.

Anyhoo, about the frustration. I'd read a stack of blogposts, all during the week. Freakishly fast sprinter Usain Bolt can't run in the UK for tax reasons, under the UK government's tax regime, he'd be paying more in tax than he'd earn. Its a familiar story for the super-successful. I remember read that for years the Rolling Stones couldn't play in the UK because the tax and the costs would be more than they could make from the concert, regardless of how much they charged for tickets, the costs and tax would mean they'd make a loss. Government policy dictates the Rolling Stones tour schedule.

Elsewhere in the blogs was coverage of Vince Cable and the LibDems proposals for a graduate tax. I might have misread, and right now on a train, hammering this out on my blackberry, graduates would pay an extra 9% tax on their income, to pay for the ever increasing cost of further education.

Firstly, I'm sceptical of why the costs of further education keep increasing, what are they doing differently? Are the universities incapable of keeping costs down? Why does is cost proportionately more to educate a student now than it did ten years ago. Sure there are more computers, but entry level computing costs the same now as it did even twenty years ago, £300 for an Amstrad CPC, £300 for a crap desktop PC, £300 for ahalf decent netbook/laptop.

I'm not expert, but is it cos there are more university students now. That was some damn fool idea to get 50% of folk through university. Society doesn't need that many graduates, the population isn't smart enough for that many graduates. Everyone with an IQ of 101?

Or is it that further education costs more cos primary, and secondary education isn't educating enough, so now universities are have to teach people how to read and write, do addition and subtraction, derivatives and integration before they can start the meaty stuff of rocket science, particle science, manufacturing engineering and media studies?

I digress. Some spectacularly successful people didn't go to university and some did. Alan Sugar didn't. Anyhoo, at the top of the pay scale, high earners are going to be paying their 50% income tax, plus another few % for national insurance, say 10%, I dunno. But then some of them are going to be forking out 9% on top of that. Paying almost 70% in tax if you pay by the rules and neither avoid or evade tax. Its hardly an incentive to work at all.

Lower down the pay scale, a university degree is less of a benefit. You'll have half the people in the office are university graduates and half got where they are today by the hard slog of working on the shop floor, streets typing pool and getting promoted. These folk are all going to be doing exactly the same job, the same amount of effort day to day. Yet under a graduate tax system, half of them will be taking home less money for their labours.

The Daily Mash had it right with "the harder you work, the more you're taxed".

Some newspaper story earlier in the week about a Somalian family with seven kids who've been put into a huge £1,200,000 house in Kensington. Jesus Christ could they not have been deported to Hull and gotten a bigger place at the fraction of the cost to the taxpayer.

Mark Wadsworth can wade through the arguments for and against social housing and how in this case its just transferring money from the hardworking employed through government and a brief stop in the bank accounts of the residents and then into the pockets of the rich private landlord. Redistributing wealth upwards.

I was thinking, shit if I hadn't worked so hard in school and university and a succession of office jobs, I could be unemployed with seven kids in a huge expensive house.

Not only that but I often hear of families, living in accommodation paid for by various benefits who manage to run up arrears by not even paying the rent to the landlords, instead the money is spent on other things, fags, phones, plasma TVs and holidays abroad. I choke on my cappuccino til it comes out of my nose.

As an aside, during writing this I have now arrived at my destination, a pleasant bar in Camden. Last time I was here it was called the Oh Bar, now its called the Blues Bar. The barstaff, whilst friendly and helpful, don't remind me as much of the barstaff at the 13th Note in Glasgow like they did in the Oh Bar. There was one who looked like a b-movie Cameron Diaz, she is absent now.

Every blogger's favourite former ambassador was writing about slavery the other day, how folk work hard and forced by threat of violence to pay taxes to subsidise those who don't work. Those who chose not to work. The employed are the slaves now.

It was weeks ago that I came upon the realisation that I'm slaving away for forty hours a week to pay people who are getting more for free in benefits that I earn in a five years or something. It just seems a bit unfair.

Why more laws? Why more taxes?

That Somalian family in Kensington were offered other, cheaper places but turned them down. They didn't like the cheaper places.

Its a familiar story. This sense of entitlement from those who reside on benefits, that they are somehow entitled to free housing of their chosing.

Not me. I left home at eighteen to go to university hundreds of miles away, staying in halls of residences and flatshares with friends. The flatsharing continued after graduation. And as my friends peeled away for marriage and job elsewhere, I too left. I arrived in London with nowhere to stay, an afternoon on gumtree.com checking out different places within my price range soon found me a complete shithole of a flatshare which I tolerated for a few months until I found friends with a more pleasant flatshare.

Whilst I've always wanted a place of my own, with a garden and woodchip wallpaper that I put up and painted myself and walls lined with shelves, I know I can't afford it and so that's going to have to wait.

Not so for the unemployable who live on benefits, they expect the provision of their own houses, they demand it. Stamping their feet, and threatening to spawn. No thought of paying for it themselves or building their own route to the house of their dreams.

Its a minor bugbear of mine, the 'waiting lists' for social housing. Anyone can get on the waiting list, it would be really nice to get a nice house for free. When Camden New Journal says there's a waiting list of 18,000 people, I think is that all, there's only that many people who'd like a nice house for free?

So my solution to the ills of the nation is an income tax threshold of whatever the living wage should be, and then 40% tax, scrapping VAT and national insurance.

Or even just scrap National Insurance and make it so everyone has to get their own private medical and employment insurance scheme. Like you have for car insurance, the government doesn't run that, so why should they for health and employment. The voluntary charity sector can fill the gap for people who didn't insure themselves. Somewhere there will be a charity that judges even the worse case of self-neglect as worthy.

Its all bullshit this. Like Behind Blue Eyes, I look back at the city on fire and acknowledge my proxies. I'm not a high earner, nowhere near 50% tax, judging by my pay packet I earn so little I pay 17%. And my univeristy costs were paid off a long time ago. I escaped the benefits trap months ago, other than jealousy these issuesdon't concern me.

What frustrates me in reality is the huge credit card debts I ran up in my last tranch of unemployment. That's my own fault, I should have moved out of the expensive flatshare and found a cheaper shithole one instead of claiming Housing Benefit. I should have gone straight to Office Angels instead of the Job Centre Plus.

That's all in the past, now I just need to pay off my credit card. At the current rate I should be debt free by 2016. Sooner if I stop spending money on other things.

It not the folk who live on benefits or the government's tax regime, its just me spending, its entirely within my control. I can whine for days but its all bullshit.

Yesterday I bought a load of presents and for myself a new pair of shoes. Its debateable whether I need new shoes or not, where to draw the line, can I afford it or not, are the old ones a detriment to my employability and social or not.

No point even debating it. On Friday night I could have stayed in and not spent but instead I went out for a meal and then pints and pints, costing about the same as the shoes.

Even today, right now as I sup my second cappucino in the Blues Bar, ist cost me about the same. Could have stayed in my flat and not spent anything.

Sitting here in Camden cost me £3.20 for the train to Euston, £3.20 for the train to Camden, £5 for a couple of coffees and then maybe £3.20 for the train back home , that's 0.14% of my credit card debt.

More than getting over my creditcard debt, I really want an Xbox 360 Elite. Not some shitty red ring of death Xbox 360 Arcade, but a decent Elite with 120gb hard disc, that will play both new games and second hand original Xbox games like Warriors and Project Gotham Racing 2 where you can drive round cities like Edinburgh, Stockholm and Moscow. This Xbox 360 Elite will cost me around £150.

New shoes = Friday night out = 1/6 of a Xbox 360 Elite

My credit card debts = fifty Xbox 360 Elites

I'm a smart cookie. Sometime ago the computer I had that ran Quicken Accounts died a death, but recently on my wee netbook I wrote me some home finance personal household accounts software in Perl. I rule. It does neat graphs showing income and expenditure. How much and what proportions I spend on rent, my car, going out and pointless shit. I can easily see what spending needs to be reined in. And how to rein it in is all under my control, any reason not to is bullshit. I can reduce travel costs by moving closer to where I work, I can lower my communications costs by getting rid of this phone. I could live off rice and baked beans to cut down on food, or just sleep in my car to reduce my rent.

But I don't, for I am that Somalian family, stamping my foot, demanding this lifestyle and turning down the cheaper options.
Sent using BlackBerry® from Orange

Taxpayer hours 2010

Yes, I know the government are soon to announce the emergency budget with its inherent tax rises and spending cuts. But to help you rationalise the figures, the millions and billions of pounds, I've done some sums.

• Median weekly income these days is about £497
• Tax freedom day was 30th May
• That's about 41% through the year

Therefore:-

• One taxpayer hour is £5.10
• One taxpayer week is £204
• One taxpayer year is £10,600

So when the government spends £1,000,000, it takes about 94 people working for a year.

Thrilling stuff, I'm sure you agree.

Why's petrol expensive?

The BBC have a nice graphic to cover the story of petrol reaching a new high


So, fuel duty is about half of the price. Bear in mind that Fuel Duty is entirely within the control of the British government. Whilst the wholesale cost is at the mercy of OPEC and the dollar/sterling exchange rate, the majority of the high price is because of the government.

At any moment they could cut fuel duty if only the government didn't pish so much money up the wall. They get £26,000,000,000 from fuel duty, about 6% of the £400,000,000,000 total estimated tax receipts for 2010.

Bah.

The Audacity of Change

Devil's Kitchen covers a piece by a former minister in New Zealand, but how they slashed socialism in the seventies with a series of 'bold, strong moves' ('bold and strong'?). Other bloggers have been showering the Kitchen with praise over this.

Blogoir highlights a few lines of the piece:-

...for every dollar we were spending on education, 70 cents was being swallowed up by administration.

...

...we immediately eliminated all of the Boards of Education in the country...

...

We converted 4,500 schools to this new system all on the same day...

Why can't that sort of thing happen here? Cos no one is audacious enough.

Well, the Libertarian's policy of abolishing Income Tax is an order of magnitude more audacious, but they/we're a few elections away from a landslide.

So what of the main parties in Westminster right now? Nothing.

Sure, three years ago there was George Osborne mooting the abolishment of Inheritance Tax. But that was a different world, that was before the recession.

Here, this is one of my favourite pie charts in the world:-

It shows projected tax receipts for 2008-2009. God knows how it turned out in reality, but going by that pie chart, Inheritance Tax brings in 2% as much as Income Tax, which is within the margin of error of how much Income Tax actually brings in. The UK could get rid of Inheritance Tax completely and no one would miss it in the great heap of taxes, its that insignificant.

The only people who'd miss it would be those involved with collecting it.

Elsewhere on the internet, Mark Wadsworth is using the phrase "white heat of techology" a bit more than strictly necessary.

The Tories are tinkering around the edges of National Insurance in an effort to help small business.

Mark Prisk, the shadow minister for trade and industry speak about the changes that the Conservatives will make if they win the coming general election. They will give small businesses a one-year break on national insurance contributions for their first ten employees. This should go some way to encouraging start-ups to hire employees again.

Alternatively Mark Wadsworth suggests:-

Thinking on, if they want to 'incentivise entrepreneurship', why not just scrap capital gains tax, which raises bugger all in the grander scheme of things?

Looking back at the wonderful pie chart of destiny, Capital Gains Tax gets us £5billion, that is 3% as much as Income Tax, still a margin of error level of money. The only people who'd miss it would be those whose jobs was collecting it. Capital Gains Tax is piss in the wind, its a rounding error. Its as much money as a project coming in on time on budget or late and over budget, the latter happening more often than not, so why not just get rid of Capital Gains Tax and make life more attractive.

I think my point is that abolishing taxes completely is far better than tinkering round the edges. The Libertarian's abolishment of Income Tax is a fine thing, but then the state would still be collecting dozens of other less significant taxes, employing people to and cocking it up as much as humans generally cock things up.

Abolishing taxes completely makes the state apparatus smaller, which is a good thing.

So please, please can some political party likely to gain seats, Labour, Tory, LibDem, UKIP and the regions, please, please just abolish some of the minor taxes.

Council Tax cuts

Here's an interesting thing, the Local Government Association's annual survey of council tax things reports that the average rise is 1.6%

Householders are set to see an average rise of 1.6% – the lowest increase since council tax began in 1993. With the Retail Price Index (RPI) currently running at 3.7%, the increase would represent a real-terms cut of 2.1%. For councils outside London, the average increase is 1.9%.

They fail to mention those councils who've been able to cut the tax this year. The Taxpayers Alliance neatly suggests a few:-

But there is no mention at all of Hammersmith & Fulham's amazing four years in a row of 3% tax cuts. Nor do Windsor & Maidenhead get congratulations for introducing the largest council tax cut ever - 4%. Not even Three Rivers' 0.5% cut is acknowledged.

Then again, its a bit of a coincidence that these three mentioned are all down south, (two Conservative councils and one LibDem). I wonder what the national picture of council tax rises is like in terms of party control of the council and how up north or daan south the councils are

Benefits anxiety

I walk to work, its about 2.4 miles, I do it not to save petrol but to save money and ensure I get to work on time. As a result of this walking, I get to see lots of adverts.

You know, of course that the government is the UK's biggest advertiser.

I am fraught with anxiety. I see lots of adverts against benefit fraud. They catch benefit thieves, 56,439 of them last year.

I'm not sure if I'm a benefit thief or not. Maybe I am and I just don't know it, maybe I made a mistake on a form, and as a result I'm getting benefits that I shouldn't be. If its just an innocent mistake, they won't prosecute and fine me, will they?

Like, last year I claimed Housing Benefit for a few months, and Job Seekers allowance, but they kept cancelling it for a variety of reasons, so I got further and further into debt. The Housing Benefit was a particular pain, cos I lived in the middle of West Hampstead, its pretty expensive round there and I could barely afford it even when I had a job, so there was something that made me feel uneasy about getting the state to pay for me to stay there. If I was the state I wouldn't have paid any benefits, I would have insisted I moved out to somewhere cheaper, like Hull.

But no, the State, they paid vast sums of money for me to stay. Maybe that was the mistake that will get me done. Anyhoo, I moved away to somewhere cheaper, Wembley and stopped relying on Housing Benefit.

I heard about some bloke who works 50 hours a week, but still claimed Housing Benefit cos he couldn't afford the place he stayed in, he had a big family and needed a big house. He was advised to work less so he'd be able to claim more benefits, it was the only way he could stay were he was. Is that cheating? Not working as much as you possibly can? Or is it just the way the system's geared.

I was on Job Seekers Allowance, but that kept on changing, and getting cut and I'd have to reapply for it and then discover that it was the Job Centre who made a mistake and not me. But maybe it was all a mistake and I wasn't due to claim anything. It could go either way.

Besides, if its not the claimant who makes the mistake, does the person in the benefits agency get fined and imprisoned? No? Is there any penalty for them cocking up? Any incentive for them to not mess up?

There was a Dick Puddlecote piece the other day about how his business has to keep doing stuff to keep up with changing regulations, just to stay in business. Maybe the benefits malarkey is like that, one week I'm all law abiding and lawfully claiming and then some legislation changes or some statutory instrument and a week later I'm a benefit thief without me actually doing anything.

Right now I get a single person's discount on my council tax, 25% off, which is nice of them. But I'm concerned that when I phoned up, I just told the nice person at Brent Council that I lived alone and they believed me, and didn't require any proof or anything. What if I was lying? What if its some kind of trick, some kind of test?

I swear I'm the only person who lives at my flat, no one else has slept there or stayed the night since I moved in. The bed remains unchristened.

Then again there was that thing with Islington Council taking itself to court about parking fines, maybe the council folk have gone rogue against themselves. Its not my fault, I'm just caught up in some council schizo split personality battle.

Maybe its the Working Tax Credits? First time I applied I figured out how much I was due to earn in 2009/2010 and the nice Working Tax Credit people gave me a regular amount of money every week. But then a month or so later, I recalculated how much I thought I'd earn in the same financial year and came up with a different figure, so now I get paid a different amount in Working Tax Credits, but I don't know which number was right, or what I did differently the first time.

What if it was right before and wrong now? What if I'm a benefit thief?

I don't think I am, I don't think they'll ever catch me, but that's what the people in the adverts thought. Or they would do if they were actually benefit thieves, and not just models paid to appear in adverts holding signs.

In fact if they're not really benefit thieves, and just pretending to be, how do we know that the 56,439 figure isn't also just pretending to be the number of people caught? How can we believe any of it?

More excessive money extraction

BBC has The AA saying 'increased profits from VAT on fuel' should be diverted to fixing pot holes.

I disagree.

Rather than just extracting more money from the denizens of this fair isle perhaps VAT on fuel could be reduced to help out the consumer and instead the money the government collects from the population and then doles out to anti-motoring charities could be diverted to fixing potholes first.

Fakecharities reckons:-

• Campaign for Better Transport Charitable Trust recieves £447,305 from the state
• Living Streets recieves £438,213 from the state

To this I add:-

• Road Safety Foundation who were mentioned in the BBC report, their website financial statement has them getting £127,126 from the Department of Transport in the guise of the Highways Agency.

Sure, trying to stop people being killed by cars is a noble endevour, but road deaths are at their lowest level ever, so surely now's a fine time to reduce the state funding for such organisations, so they can thrive on voluntary donations from people who's lives they've touched.

How much should people be taxed?

I remember reading it on Charlotte Gore the first time, and Mark Wadsworth covered it too (or maybe Mark Reckons, someone called Mark), and now JuliaM is quoting it:-

From Charlotte Gore:

In other words, instead of these bonuses being taxed at 40% as they already are, they’ll be taxed at 50%… assuming, of course, that someone getting a more than £10k bonus isn’t already going to end up in the Government’s new ultra-f**k-you band of income tax. Instead of getting£4k from a £10k bonus the state will now get £5k.

As I see it there's two sides of taxing:-

• We pay tax because the government spends money
• We pay tax because we owe the government for what they provide for us

On the first issue, you can do a task quickly and efficiently or you can do it slowly and wastefully. The end result is pretty much the same, but the costs can vary. If we had a choice we'd rationally pick to do it quickly and efficiently.

Do you think that the government never wastes any money at all? Not even a little bit? Do you think that they are as efficient as possible or have lots and lots of very slow burocracy?

Every time I get a letter from the council/government/inland revenue, saying my housing benefit/job seeker's allowance/working tax credit has been declined, or instated, or back dated, or cancelled again, I think to myself, this letter cost about £1 in typing, printing, posting and delivering (maybe it costs more, maybe it costs less) couldn't they not just streamline things a bit, and then cut whatever tax I pay by £1.

No, no chance of a great bureaucracy making itself more efficient, it never happens. Instead, occasionally, I choose not to bother, I choose not apply or to give up applying, in the hope that I reduce the bureaucracy, the tax burden, the number of tasks that they charge us all for, by exactly one unit.

And on the second issue, paying tax to the government, the authorities, because we owe them. That's slightly more justified. Its nice that they keep an army to protect our borders from foreign invaders, and that they empty the bins, and to some degree enforce law and order and all the many varieties of support workers. But how much of my earnings, or anyone's, what percentage, should be owed to the government? And how should this change depending on how much you earn.

Back in Charlotte Gore's quote

Instead of getting £4k from a £10k bonus the state will now get £5k.

I don't get it, cos someone has put in the extra effort, or has had remarkable luck, or just used their brains to work smarter, they owe the government more money. They have to pay a bigger share for the army, the binmen and the judiciary, without necessarily using them more.

Now, I'm not advocating a poll tax, just some clearer rationale behind why we pay tax.

And then how, in the great scheme of things, as a society we can lower taxes. What personal moral decisions can we make that will ultimately result in lower taxes.

• Should I work in one sector or another?
• Should I take the bus or car or walk?
• Should I go to the cinema or go to a gig?
• Should I spend time with friends or alone?
• Should I vote for one party or another?
• Should I be productive or unproductive?
• Should I be successful or fail?

Which choices will result in the government taking a smaller proportion of my hard-earned money.

UPDATE

Its occurred to me that there are other sides to the reason for taxing too, to make us change our behaviour, use less petrol, smoke less, drink less, spend less. Maybe that's it, the reason we are taxed is because the government want us to exist less.

I calculate therefore I am

I am no longer unemployed, my new job starts at the end of next week. I am no longer living off the state, my benefits were mysteriously cut six weeks ago.

I am in limbo.

My attractive young ladyfriend is far away. I am left to my own devices, so I calculate.

I don't know when I'll next have money coming in, weeks at least. So my existance until then is on expending as little money as possible, but still staying sane.

Sure, I could stay home, spend all day watching tv, surfing the net, blogging. Eating just the 5kg bag of rice, wisely acquired last year, the dried pasta left over by generations of departed flatmates, my potatos still have another crop in them and the onion could be ready soon.

If I minimise the energy I use, could I live on 500 calories a day?

I am at a gig, it was free to get in. MJ Hibbett's Dinosaur Planet, returning to London after a victorious run at the Edinburgh Fringe. To save on transport costs, I walked here. Five miles I guess. Five hundred calories, more than I consumed for breakfast.

So to the supermarket I must go, carefully comparing the price and calories of sandwiches.

• 362 calories for £1 with egg and cress
• 384 calories for £1 with cream cheese and ham
• 562 calories for £2 with the brunch triple pack

Cream cheese and ham wins, I shuffle to the self-service tills to pay by credit card, saving the £3.50 in coins in my pocket for buying drinks at the gig.

How come a half pint of cola with no alcohol duty costs the same as a pint of beer? And half of it is ice too. Its a culturally accepted rip off.

Sure, it makes sense so that a non-alcohol round costs the same as an alcohol one and these places are owned by breweries so making soft drinks more competitive would just put more places out of business.

I spent just over £100 on a pre-owned XBox 360, this you already know. Two months ago the same would have cost £120. God knows how GAME justify it, Cliff the store manager juggled the special offers to make it so, selling me the £129 golf package and buying back the free game.

Anyhoo, it went on the credit card, money I don't have. Spending it quick before it runs out. It makes no sense. Am I subconsciously banking on hyper-inflation to render my debts worthless? Probably.

I'm still trying to resolve it. To place a value on my leisure time.

• Cinema for 2 hours cost £8 = £4/hr
• £Gig for 3 hours cost £6 = £2/hr
• Dinner for 2 hours cost £24 = £12/hr
• XBox for 100+ hours cost £100 = £<1/hr
• Playing ukulele for 40+ hours cost £20 = £<0.50/hr
• Jogging for 1 hour cost £1 = £1/hr (one cream cheese and ham sandwich)

It doesn't create money, but it justifies it.

So once I start work and the money begins to roll in, the minimum wage not quite covering costs, having the XBox will slow the flow rate.

There are other possibilities. If I somehow can make extra money from the leisure activites, become a professional gig/cinema reviewer, do such things exist? Get paid to play ukulele?

No, I'm damned, all I can hope for is hyper-inflation.

Tax the unemployed

You know how the government charge duty on cigarettes and booze and petrol, partly to encourage people to stop consuming them, cos they're bad for your health, etc. Taxes being used to discourage people from buying stuff. There's VAT on luxury items but not on essential items, thus discouraging us from consuming luxuries.

So Income Tax, that's there to discourage people from working, right?

Its almost like we don't want people coming to the UK

Here's a story via uncle Timmy about a Chinese gentleman who was held in an immigration reception centre in the UK for two years.

Prison inspectors found the Chinese man had been in the centre for more than 20 months, but staff and managers had not even realised how long he had been there.

...

Prison inspectors found the Chinese man had been in the centre for more than 20 months, but staff and managers had not even realised how long he had been there.

And here's a wee press release from American band Cars Can Be Blue about when they got in a little bit of bother coming to the UK.

At this point, I was near breaking point. Tired, fatigued, disorientated, seperated from my bandmate, I became a bithysterical. Where was I being taken? "Oakington"and that is basically all the information I was provided. I had been told I was going to Oxford, but now I was being taken someplace else? What the fuck was going on?

I was difficult to guage how long the next van ride was, probably another hour and a half or two hours. It all seemed incredible, absolutely incredible. I was being treated like a prisoner, a dangerous terrorist or something equivalent, all because my stupid band had booked some shows in the UK without a work permit?

If they had managed to get on tour here okay I would have seen them three times by now, and a fourth time this evening at Twee As Fuck. Alas, it was not to be.

But think of all the waste of money, the cost-benefit analysis. That chinese chap, if he'd been allowed to stay from the outset, and got a craply paid job, he would have contributed thousands to the UK economy, rather than costing £80,000. And the chap from Cars Can Be Blue, think of the kids, think of the kids.

How much of this recession we're in is caused by hassle like this? We do it to ourselves.

And getting a Wii half-price from Woolworths hardly makes up for it.