How much tax is ‘the right amount’? When you get your tax bill, it hurts. Every payslip seems to have two amounts on it, gross and net, separated by a small fortune. Everyone moans about tax. And yet moans even more if others aren’t paying their full whack. For doing what we’d all like to do.

I get it. I get both. I hate paying tax but I resent like hell anyone who gets away LEGALLY with avoiding it. I’ve said it before, but a reminder is due: an ISA is a tax avoidance scheme. Ok, you do it with the Bradford & Bingley down the road, but its legal and its a way of avoiding (a very little) tax. Not quite the same as paying Bermuda-based shell-companies your salary and taking personal ‘loans’ from it. Not the same as jetting (metaphorically) money half way round the world and back, charging different parts of the same company massive amounts for invisibles like ‘intellectual property rights’ to reduce their domestic profitability and hence tax burden. As is done by Apple, by Nike, Starbucks and many others. So the fucking Americans are to blame!! Bastard tax-avoiders!!!

But the Queen does it too. Oh. She’s certainly not American. She’s as British as Britain itself. Probably doesn’t even eat apple pie. But the Queen is rich. She’s allowed to be, she’s the fucking Queen. And has her money invested by various trustees. Whose job it is to maximise her return. Just like every investment vehicle. And if those investors deem that the way to provide her maj. with a few percent extra is to send some of her funds offshore, legally and within all tax and banking parameters, why wouldn’t they do that? Arguably, if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be doing their job properly, which is to maximise her investment profits. Its not like they were funding crack labs or buying shares in child-labour factories in Bangla Desh. Both of which, so I understand, can be very profitable. Hmmm…

The Queen will get a yearly statement, I dare say, and, probably like everyone else, she’ll look at the bottom line. The intricacies of hundreds of transactions may be scrutinised but I’m guessing not by her. She has ‘people’. Shit-loads of people.

Apple pays more tax than any other company in the world. Yet still avoids a bundle.

The newspapers and media love this shit. Whilst half the BBC ‘contractors’ are paid ‘offshore’, their news team takes the moral high ground. In a seriously Corbynistic way. Look at all the services these bastards are depriving us of. They’re not paying their fair share.

The problem is basically that these very clever circumventors are always cleverer than HMRC. And if everything is ‘legal’, the argument becomes about morality. Basically asking big companies to make ‘charitable contributions’ on top of the tax they already pay, to fund the NHS, age care, schools…

The whole issue is a tightrope over a sea of hypocrisy. Which is why I love it.

Happy Tuesday

The Tax Payer
xxxx