A quarter of UK tax is paid by the wealthiest taxpayers.

New figures show that the wealthiest taxpayers paid a quarter of all UK income tax last year, and the proportion has increased since the coalition came to power.

Both the proportion and the amount paid by "additional rate" taxpayers has increased: where before they paid £38 billion there are now 313,000 such taxpayers paying £46.5 billion.

This knocks two Labour myths on the head

1) It demonstrates that this government's policies have not, despite Labour propaganda to the contrary, reduced the amount or proportion of tax paid by the wealthiest people.

2) Although those who break the law by failing to pay their taxes should be prosecuted, and loopholes which allow people to get away with ridiculously low payments should be closed, if a little over three hundred thousand rich people are paying between them more than forty billion a year in tax, those people on average must be paying over a hundred thousand pounds a year each.

And if on average they're paying that much, that means there must be thousands of individuals who are paying that much tax or more,

By all means go after the real tax dodgers, though it would be a good idea to make certain you know who they are before throwing out allegations under parliamentary privilege. (Yes, Ed Miliband, I am looking at you.)

But since some rich people are paying vast amounts of tax, lumping all rich people together as tax dodgers is clearly unfair to those who are paying what is due from them.

Comments

Jim said…
erm, whats your point?

look the lower rate of the specific tax, income tax is 20% which means of course people who earn more will pay more.

then for some unknown reason if you earn so much more than an ever decreasing limit then you pay 40% even more still.

but of course there in lies the curtain doesn't it. because as a lower rate (20%) income tax payer soon sees, national insurance adds on another 11% and VAT yet another 10 so it seems that the min tax take is at least 41%
Jim said…
I have even spoken to coucillors about raised car park charges. The answer i got was "we cant raise council tax by over 2% so we cant do it.

- my answer - er, Yes you can raise council tax by over 2% you always could have done, it just needs a referendum from the local bill payers as to why they are paying it, thats all, so yes it can be raised.

- they tend to answer along the lines of "thats not how a council works"

- to which i would answer - "well, there we have your first refrom, don't we"
Chris Whiteside said…
The point is that 1) confiscatory tax rates - e.g. 50% or more - do not actually raise more revenue and 2) not all rich people are tax dodgers

As for the comment you make about car park charges, you are absolutely right, and when I was a Copeland councillor we regularly got an even more ridiculous version of the same argument.

When the council found that it had more money than they had previously thought, and more reserves than were needed, and both parties plus the officers accepted that a council tax increase that year was not needed, Labour refused to freeze council tax because they would not be able to catch up with a bigger increase the following year once reserves had been run down, and so as one Labour councillor put it, "you're giving the money away forever."

An interesting way of decribing not increasing the amount of people's money you take off them, but if you regard the council as having a God-given right to take a constantly increasing amount of cash from taxpayers regardless of whether the council actually needs it, that's the kind of twisted logic you end up with.
Jim said…
The point i was making regarding income tax is that it is set as a percentage Lets just sick with the 20% for now.

So someone who earns £1000 per week pays £200

someone who earns £500 per week pays £100

so we can see that of course the people who earn more pay more. Its something so many people cant see, and then say there should be the higher bands of income tax for the higher earners, as they earn more they should pay more.

Thats the bit i dont get. By the very nature of setting income tax as a percentage, rather than a flat figure in pounds means that those who earn more pay more.
Jim said…
And yeah, I am not sure where some people get the idea that not taking money from people is giving money away to them.

Its like getting home and saying "Dick Turpin gave me a hundred quid by not robbing me on my way home tonight love"
Chris Whiteside said…
Which is precisely the way far too many members of the Labour party think.

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