Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

Well done you!

I don’t know about the situation in Dublin - but I assume you were able to claim some sort of benefit? Job Seekers’ Allowance, etc?

I assume you also got your health looked after by the state when you got bitten by a poisonous slug?

I take it that the police were at least reasonably effective in stopping your meagre possessions being stolen?

Naturally, your country wasn’t over run with insurgents or invading foreign armies.

You also, I guess, had a basic education. Learned to read and write. Perhaps went to university? Took a few of those upskilling classes that are freely available.

No… you’re quite right. You don’t owe the state anything. (Ok, the state that you’re in now isn’t the one you grew up in.)

Finally - have you ever thought that there are people who worked just as hard - if not harder - than you, but didn’t make it? Maybe they didn’t have your connections, charm, luck. I’m not saying that people should be rewarded for trying - just that they should have a safety net to enable them to keep trying.

I’m a higher rate payer (40%) - do I wish that my taxes were better spent? You bet I do. But that’s why I write to my MP and vote as often as I can.

Could I take a hit of an extra 10% (because that’s what we’re talking about)? It would be hard, no doubt about that, but not as hard as it would be to feed a family on minimum wage.

(Sorry for the inarticulate rant. I dislike this present shower of numpties in power, but I am very grateful to live in a relatively stable country which has given me so much. I’d rather that corporate tax avoidance was tackled first rather than high earners etc.)

I think the higher rate tax was probably about 40% then which was still a fair chunk higher than standard income tax..

I wonder if the higher rate payers back then complained about subsidising those little upstarts who wanted to work in computers rather than graft for a living?

@Terence Very well put. You’re right in everything you say. I’m actually having a rant at those who don’t work just as hard, or even harder. I’m not having a rant at people who care about the environment (tree huggers) etc. But let’s be honest, most tree huggers don’t work very hard when it comes to anything other than dedicating time and effort to saving trees. OK, I know we need ’some’ people like that in the world…

If our taxes were better spent we wouldn’t have to worry about 50% taxes. Personally, I don’t pay 50% because I run a small portfolio of companies which provide dividends etc. So I’m actually ranting on behalf of others.

One eejit said it should be as high as 75% - I took a look at his bio and Web site and yes, he dedicates his time to… just about every campaign known to mankind.

‘If Bob didn’t earn enough to pay a lot of tax, he obviously doesn’t deserve to have someone else pay more tax on his behalf’… so the midwives who work 12 - 20 hour shifts and literally deal with life and death and bring their children to work - in the hospital creche - because they can’t afford alternative childcare don’t deserve to have someone else pay more tax on their behalf then? We could go on…

@Noelle - OK, there are exceptions to the rule, perhaps a lot of them, but I can’t cover them in my blog posts. Perhaps I should have listed a few examples to balance my tone a little.

“If Bob didn’t earn enough to pay a lot of tax, he obviously doesn’t deserve to have someone else pay more tax on his behalf”

Really? So nurses, teachers, street cleaners, social workers, care workers wiping people’s arses on minimum wage, should have to pay the same level of tax as people earning hundreds of thousands of pound a year?

Would that be a fair rule? The what if there’s not enough cash?

And just because you and lots of entrepreneurs achieve so much off their own back and increasingly contribute to an overall distribution of wealth, can you honestly say you or they work harder or longer than these people?

Surely you can’t because it’s impossible to measure. It’s impossible to account for all the hard workers, dedicated people, lazy arses, and spongers (rich and poor) you find in all walks of life.

However, unfortunately laws and rules have to make those blanket judgements, don’t they? It’ll never please everyone and you can sympathise with those who feel hard done by but surely distribution of wealth is the only way to fund a sustainable responsible society?

@Matt - see my last comment.

No matter how you look at it taxes are coercive theft. The government steals money from the “haves” so the “have nots” can have something. Personally, I’m not opposed to state or provincial taxes, but federal taxes are ridiculous. I like donating my own money to private organizations that I know work well.

@paul fair enough, you replied while I was writing my comment and I agree with your second point.

Totally agree with everything you say, Paul. I have one friend who has been unemployed for ten years, he has an international business degree but, for various reasons, has little experience in that line. Instead he worked for a computer games company, but in admin. The only thing he’s qualified to do now is data inputting, but that won’t pay enough for him to come off the dole. I’ve tried employing him doing various things that he *can* do, but he’s just happy to sit at home or in the pub. I’m not against helping those that are trying to make their lives better, and I’m not supportive of the crap wages nurses, teachers and the like have to deal with, but the social security system needs some sort of system to weed out the lazy people who can’t be bothered to try. I like the idea of this training funding that was announced in the budget, but anecdotally, I’ve heard that it exists only as a vote winner. In reality, nothing actually happens.

via a comment on the guido fawkes blog

HOW THE TAX SYSTEM WORKS

Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to £100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:

The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay £1.
The sixth would pay £3.
The seventh would pay £7.
The eighth would pay £12.
The ninth would pay £18.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay £59.

So, that’s what they decided to do.

The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve. ‘Since you are all such good customers,’ he said, ‘I’m going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by £20.’ Drinks for the ten now cost just £80.

The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes so the first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free. But what about the other six men - the paying customers? How could they divide the £20 windfall so that everyone would get his ‘fair share?’

They realized that £20 divided by six is £3.33. But if they subtracted that from everyone’s share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer. So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man’s bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay.

And so:

The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings).
The sixth now paid £2 instead of £3 (33%savings).
The seventh now pay £5 instead of £7 (28%savings).
The eighth now paid £9 instead of £12 (25% savings).
The ninth now paid £14 instead of £18 (22% savings).
The tenth now paid £49 instead of £59 (16% savings).

Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to drink for free. But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings.

‘I only got a pound out of the £20,’ declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man, ‘but he got £10!’

‘Yes, that’s right,’ exclaimed the fifth man. ‘I only saved a pound, too. It’s unfair that he got ten times more than I did’

‘That’s true!!’ shouted the seventh man. ‘Why should he get £10 back when I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks’

‘Wait a minute,’ yelled the first four men in unison. ‘We didn’t get anything at all. The system exploits the poor’

The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.

The next night the tenth man didn’t show up for drinks, so the nine sat down and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They didn’t have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.

The only fair system of taxation is a threshold below which one pays no tax, and then one rate of tax for everybody. The more you earn the more you pay, but at the same rate as everybody else.

There’s easy ways around paying 50%. Just have a limited company of your own, pay yourself minimum wage and the rest as dividends. All the big earners know this already. This tax only encourages more people to do creative accounting to avoid paying tax. The richest people are the people paying the least tax. It’s the middle classes who are the mugs. Maybe Ron Paul’s idea to get rid of income tax isn’t such a bad idea.