> they love the fact that they can raise taxes here now... they openly talk about it and very few people I know bat an eyelid!
which looked to me (and still does) as if you were expressing surprise that people openly talk about raising taxes and that others aren't surprised they're doing so.
> Who honestly wants to pay more tax?
Me. More precisely: all else being equal I prefer to pay less tax, but all else is not equal and I think increasing the taxes paid by people like me and using the resulting revenue to increase funding for (e.g.) the national health service or benefits for disabled people would, overall, make the country I live in a better place.
> no Government has decreased taxes in the UK
Well, according to the graph here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_taxation_in_the_Uni... tax revenue in the UK was a smaller fraction of GDP in 2005 than in 2000. It's a little under 40% (which already makes it quite implausible that 60% of your income gets taken in tax).
Finer-grained comparison is really difficult because the tax system is complicated (income tax, National Insurance, VAT, capital gains, ...); over the last few decades income tax has decreased substantially for most people but other taxes have increased.
> over 60% of my money is taxed now
This is not something you should be believing or disbelieving on the basis of something you read from an anti-tax campaigning organization. You should have all the information you need to work it out.
I don't know whether I'm paid better or worse than you are (I would guess fairly similarly) but I do not pay anywhere near 60% of my earnings in tax. Adding up all the taxes I can think of, I reckon I pay either about 30% or about 40% in tax; the lower figure is if I count capital gains (largely untaxed because most of my assets are in tax-efficient things like ISAs and pension funds) as "income" and the higher figure is if I look only at salary.
(Maybe the numbers look worse for contractors than for salaried employees? I am not counting, e.g., corporation tax paid by my employer; neither do I see any reason why I should.)
> they love the fact that they can raise taxes here now... they openly talk about it and very few people I know bat an eyelid!
which looked to me (and still does) as if you were expressing surprise that people openly talk about raising taxes and that others aren't surprised they're doing so.
> Who honestly wants to pay more tax?
Me. More precisely: all else being equal I prefer to pay less tax, but all else is not equal and I think increasing the taxes paid by people like me and using the resulting revenue to increase funding for (e.g.) the national health service or benefits for disabled people would, overall, make the country I live in a better place.
> no Government has decreased taxes in the UK
Well, according to the graph here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_taxation_in_the_Uni... tax revenue in the UK was a smaller fraction of GDP in 2005 than in 2000. It's a little under 40% (which already makes it quite implausible that 60% of your income gets taken in tax).
Finer-grained comparison is really difficult because the tax system is complicated (income tax, National Insurance, VAT, capital gains, ...); over the last few decades income tax has decreased substantially for most people but other taxes have increased.
> over 60% of my money is taxed now
This is not something you should be believing or disbelieving on the basis of something you read from an anti-tax campaigning organization. You should have all the information you need to work it out.
I don't know whether I'm paid better or worse than you are (I would guess fairly similarly) but I do not pay anywhere near 60% of my earnings in tax. Adding up all the taxes I can think of, I reckon I pay either about 30% or about 40% in tax; the lower figure is if I count capital gains (largely untaxed because most of my assets are in tax-efficient things like ISAs and pension funds) as "income" and the higher figure is if I look only at salary.
(Maybe the numbers look worse for contractors than for salaried employees? I am not counting, e.g., corporation tax paid by my employer; neither do I see any reason why I should.)