The teenage trot is at it again. This time, the Paradise Papers.
The Paradise Papers show tax avoiders thrive by exploiting legal loopholes, at the expense of a state they refuse to contribute to. This rotten system must be replaced
Aggressive tax avoidance and the exploitation of loopholes will continue when the state insists upon stealing large sums of money from people whose only crime is to have large sums of money. A low tax economy would make such activities unnecessary. So, Jones can fuck off, frankly.
Using sophisticated loopholes to avoid tax on an industrial scale is a choice, a conscious decision, that an individual or business has to take.
Indeed and well done them. I would do exactly the same in their circumstances – the more that money is kept from the state, the better it will be spent. Remember, none of these activities are illegal.
Many choose not to.
More fool them, for they are contributing to the socialist hell hole that scum such as Jones would have us endure. Those loopholes exist and are used precisely because the state is over large, over greedy and is fiscally incompetent. Continuing to enable it is immoral. Avoiding tax on a grand scale is much the same as keeping the drinks cabinet locked when a drunk comes to visit.
Owen Jones once more confirms that he is an idiot.
Those who crow about the “legality” of tax avoidance are, of course, being disingenuous.
Nope. Tax avoidance is legal. Tax evasion is illegal. Those who try to conflate the two or come out with the fashionable “fair share” bullshit are the ones being disingenuous. So, er fuck off.
This level of tax avoidance requires an encyclopaedic knowledge of tax and the law, and extraordinary amounts of cunning, pedantry and sophistication. You are, after all, trying to find loopholes and grey areas that lawmakers did not intend; you are going against the spirit, if not the letter, of the law.
Too bad. Get over it. If I was the holder of vast sums of wealth, I would cheerfully spend some of that on a cunning accountant who would help me keep it from the avaricious, spendthrift state. The law is the law. You cannot be advised on the spirit of the law nor expect a court to find on the basis of the spirit of the law. Tax due is what is due according to the letter of the law, not its spirit. So, er fuck off. Twat!
Most workers are on PAYE, and cannot deviously exploit loopholes to slash their tax deductions.
Abolish PAYE. Then when people have to hand over the cash as I do, they might start to question the amount that HMRC picks from their pockets and what it is wasted on.
Small businesses will find HM Revenue and Customs knocking on their door pretty promptly if they mess up their tax forms, and are being driven out of business by tax-avoiding corporate giants.
No we aren’t. This is what is known as a big fat hairy lie. Oh, yeah, this is shit-for-brains Owen Jones; socialist scumbag, so what do we expect?
Interestingly enough, given the organ publishing this dire drivel and its usual audience who are all too willing to engage in the politics of envy, no comments are allowed on this risible pile of cack.
Owen Jones; Idiot.
I have always maintained that if one could have an omniscient overview of every person’s financial affairs, you would find more individual cases of tax evasion (not avoidance, actual criminal evasion) at the lower end of the income scale than at the top. Obviously the figures involved would be low per person, but given that for a poor person a few quid ‘in hand’ is worth a lot more to them than tens of thousands to a multi-millionaire, its pretty obvious that the poor have far more incentive to evade taxes than the rich. And do – anyone who has ever lived in those sort of areas will know that everyone is at it – ducking and diving to try and make a few quid on the sly. And the rich have no incentive to evade taxes, when they can often legally avoid them.
So even if you morally equate evasion and avoidance, the reality is that everyone is at it, because human nature is such that no-one likes having their hard earned money taken away involuntarily, whether its a pound or a million pounds.
What these people forget is that everyone engages in tax avoidance whenever they can, if they can. It isn’t just the mega-rich. I remember when there was a generous tax allowance made for taking out a mortgage – alongside getting the investment of bricks and mortar, it was one of the main draws for getting one, and getting as big a one as possible. Ditto pensions (although that might have been changed now), again, one of the reasons given to people who were thinking of making some kind of small investments with an eye to the future was to put at least some of it into a pension scheme, because tax relief was offered on payments. What’s that if it’s not tax avoidance? Just because the amounts are smaller and the arrangements less convoluted doesn’t make it a different activity.
Also, the question is never asked why politicians – who, don’t let’s forget, draw up the tax rules themselves – don’t simply change them, if they so disapprove of people taking advantage of them? The answer, of course, is that there’s probably a whole host of politicians – many of whom are also very wealthy people – who are themselves taking advantage of the very same “avoidance” schemes as are the people/organisations that they are currently criticising for doing so! Hypocrisy at its finest!
Yes, I remember MIRAS – Mortgage Interest Relief at Source IIRC, and also LAPR, Life Assurance Premium Relief. Incentives by the government of the day to attract funds into specific areas. Pension tax relief is a bit different, I think, if pensions are regarded as deferred pay, on which you pay tax when it is received. But as LR so rightly argues this moral outrage assumes that every penny extracted is used exclusively to fund schools and hospitals and other worthy causes and not the disgusting troughing where most of it actually goes. The more complicated the rules “to catch the tax dodgers” the more loopholes they create.
My income is based on state and employment pensions. I discovered recently, by doing some work for a colleague, that for every £2 over a certain amount, currently £27,000 a year, I have £1 taken off me by HMRC. The amount I was paid was not that much, but to have that taxed at 50% is an insult. I have been offered the chance to do some more extra work for that friend. Should I ask for cash in hand or declare it?
PAYE is the greatest con ever visited on working people. For all the pompous reporting in The Grauniad at how so-so many people would happily pay more tax, I absolutely guarantee you that if those people were taken off PAYE and forced instead to write a cheque to HMRC every single month they would feel very different about the amount of money the Government takes in tax….
Indeed. That’s my point exactly.
That was a pleasure to read. I hate Owen Jones and everything he stands for
Yeah, me too. Everything he stands for is utterly vile.
A big difference between rich and poor when it comes to tax is the actual proportion of your wealth that the government would like to relieve you of. For us normal plebs it is around half, for anyone who is even a little bit loaded the government would happily take everything they have if it could. Legal tax avoidance is pretty much essential for such people if they don’t want to end up destitute.
Regarding tax relief on such things as pensions and mortgages. It is in the government’s interest to encourage people to be self reliant and less dependent on the state. On the other hand, non self reliant people are easier to boss around.
I’d put the percentage higher than 50%. For a while in the UK (I am now in New Zealand and have been here for almost 9 years) I kept a record of earnings, expenditure and tax paid. It went sort of like this:
Earnings … PAYE taken … Residue
Council tax = XXX
Fill car with petrol – tax (all) = XXX
Food, VAT = XXX
etc. and so forth
From the original amount I earned, I recall that the total tax paid from all sources was about 76% (relying on memory).
A simple spreadsheet kept for a few months will be an eye opener.
I am always amazed that perfectly sane people, even courts of law, choose to believe every word of large leaks of confidential data such as this one. As the leak of data from the Ashley Madison dating agency eventually showed, such leaks have the same relationship to complete and honest truth as baked beans do to windsurfing.
Now, suppose you had access to such a trove of information, and wished to embarrass certain public figures. The easiest way to hide a stonker of a lie is to surround it with material which can be verified as being true, but where the release of the data is a major shock to the original keeper of the info.
This has happened here. The originator of the information will not verify any of it, for fear of destroying what little reputation they have left. The persons referred to in the data will similarly keep schtumb.
So it is left for the hard of thinking to assume that if most of the data can be verified, then it ALL must be true and correct.
What fools some people can be!
Owen Jones needs to get a proper job. Just to see what really earning a crust means, and just how hard it is to hang on to your hard earned assets.