Is it raining?

Tax is a kick in the teeth, most people think this. You work your fingers to the bone, sat on your fat arse in an office, then pay day comes around and some of your hard-earned is creamed off to spend on killing God-bothering-nut jobs in Afghanistan. Of course most of the tax actually gets spent keeping the street lights on or having an ambulance on stand-by for when I decide Ice Hockey is actually the sport for me. So based on this you suck it in, write off your losses and get on with your life.

Canadian Can-Can

Unless you can afford a PR company. In which case you get them to round up a few tame academics - who will do anything for a sniff of cash and almost anything for an undergraduate with a nice smile and a lack of morals - and get them to tell the world that the 50p tax rate is making the country unbearable to live in and repelling free floating wads of cash from landing here. Making the rich pay this high rate of taxation on their well deserved pay-packets is driving them out of the country and raising a barrier to stinking rich foreigners coming over and building business empires here.

To be honest who cares if they leave and who cares if they don't come, neither will really happen. The real driving force of the economy in this country is the small & medium sized businesses and it's rare their owners and employees would come close to earning the £150,000 pa required to be taxed so heavily. The people who take home this sort of size pay packet tend to be working in the Service / Finance sector and so don't add much to the real economy - but keep the coke dealers in The City busy (I'm looking at you Chancellor...)

Hookers & Coke - not an upper class
department store

 The few people actually paying the estimated £2.7bn this tax raises feel hard done by and so, after getting very angry and beating their Au Pairs with an ivory golf club, came up with the brilliant idea to tell us peasants that if they continue to have to suffer this inhuman taxation regime it'll actually be worse for us in the long run. The economy will continue to fall because of it and the only jobs available will be part-time trainee floor moppers at Kansas Fried Chicken.

This is known as pissing down your back and telling you it's raining.

As a youth I used to work behind the bar in a working men's club - the working part is ironic I think - during the tombola (Not bingo, tombola) I used to contemplate how many pints of lager I'd earned so far that night. It worked out about a pint an hour so I used to count down the minutes till another Carling Black Label had been earned. This impressed on me the importance of how much per hour you're paid and therefore I wondered how much these hard done by folk take home per hour after the tax man's had his cut, for all the fuss they've kicked up it must be a significant drop, a real belly blow to the take home, when they hit the magic number. So I did a smashing graph showing how much people take home per hour after tax & NI compared to their gross annual income. What I was expecting was a huge kink in the curve at £150,000 justifying their cry baby antics. What I got was a straight line and proof that they're just greedy bastards.

Tweet