Thursday, June 04, 2020

Tax Freedom Day 2020 in the UK

I quote largely verbatim here:

"HAPPY TAX FREEDOM DAY



Well, sort of. Tax Freedom Day is that point in the year when you have paid all your taxes and at last start earning for yourself. This year, we had to work a gruelling 149 days for the tax authorities—from 1 January to 30 May! That’s nearly a full month more than we had to slave back in 1996. And some people might well ask what exactly all that extra effort has delivered us. But then we had Blair, Brown, ... Cameron, May...



Medieval serfs had it easy. They were only expected to work about a third of the year for their feudal lord. We have to work far longer for our government lords. No surprise that, according to our opinion survey (see ‘Lockdown hits young hardest’), people want lower taxes, especially younger people who are annoyed at being fleeced to pay for their parents’ generous benefits.



Where is tax heading? Well, the £300 billion or so spent on virus containment policies will take a lot of paying for. So Tax Freedom Day won’t be moving to January any time soon. But most of the cost will be met by borrowing (particularly now that the government has discovered people will pay money to lend to them—Ed.) Still, we can easily deal with that. We just leave the debt to our children... "



Freedom, freedom everywhere

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