Aug 6th!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 🙁
Is not happy
http://newdirectionfoundation.org/content/2014-tax-liberation-calendar-2014-steuerzahlertagkalendar

“For the fourth consecutive year, Belgium is the country that taxes labour at the highest rate in the European Union; an employer in Brussels spends 2.31€ to put 1€ into a typical worker’s pocket, making a Belgian worker’s tax liberation day August 6.”

Congratulations, have a beer tomorrow after you’ve earn’t the money to pay for it. Good effort from Belgium to tax people more heavily than the French do. That’s a title which is hard to win. Somewhat ironic that high earning French (more than 1m euro per year) have moved to Belgium for lower taxes, the Belgium system must be quite bizarre.

Thanks for the link , interesting.

My homeland scrapes into the top nine (i.e. 9th) France and Italy surprises me

I think it is a bit surprising unless you are an employer and are aware of the employer part of the whole thing. Health care here is great though so that’s a bit of a trade off but not much

I haven’t got time for this sort of nonsense but it should be pointed out that the Adam Smith Institute which likes to indulge in this bollocks puts UK “Tax Freedom Day” 2014 more than a couple of weeks later than your link does :

http://www.adamsmith.org/blog/uncategorized/happy-tax-freedom-day/

What they don’t calculate is how many days employees have to work for profit hungry employers before they can start keeping money for themselves. Funny that.

hoorah

I am in the black 🙂

(I do/did also get tax refunds every year so I cannot complain too much)

I’m just about to employ a new engineer for my team and we initially talked about employing him through Germany but now he’s coming to Belgium. It’s costing a lot more to offer him same net package 🙁

My homeland scrapes into the top nine (i.e. 9th) France and Italy surprises me

@howsyour – really ? You are surprised France has really high taxes on the average person ? France has massive taxes as it’s unemployment benefits are so generous and the country spends huge amounts on its own state bureaucracy.

What they don’t calculate is how many days employees have to work for profit hungry employers before they can start keeping money for themselves. Funny that.

You’re right we should all work for the state, not. Have a look where France sits in that table, a country with a bloated and inefficient state sector.

Yes, glad we are not in Belgium

http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/happy-tax-freedom-day

Yes, glad we are not in Belgium

🙂 Excellent. Was about to slap myself for a schoolboy error there

ernie_lynch – Member

What they don’t calculate is how many days employees have to work for profit hungry employers before they can start keeping money for themselves.

jambalaya – Member

You’re right we should all work for the state, not

I’m sorry what’s the connection between my comment and yours ?

I think it would be interesting if it was calculated how many days employees have to work purely for their employers before they start keeping money for themselves.

I presume by your reaction that you wouldn’t be interested, why not ?

If you are going to make a point suggesting that employees don’t start keeping the money they’ve earned until their work has paid their taxes, then it is perfectly logical that you extend exactly the same principle with regards to their employer’s profit.

It is after all their work which pays for their employer’s profits.

Although as I said in my previous post I think all this stuff is nonsense, but if you want to play this silly little game then at least play it properly.

BTW this sort of stuff reminds me of the claim that if you were to line up all the dollar bills that make the US government debt it will reach to the moon and back four times, or some other such bollocks.

And as I also pointed out the UK’s Tax Freedom Day in OP’s link contradicts the one given by that spiritual home of the anti-tax ranters, the Adam Smith Institute. Perhaps they just pluck figures from thin air and mix them up with half facts ?

Be a banker – 60p out of every £ earned is paid out to workers way before the owners get a sniff!!

Actually that is true for many organisations.

Employees get paid directly – weekly or daily in advance of any distribution to shareholders, so what is your point Ernie. Excuse how that sounds (not meant to be rude) just don’t get your link either – I am possibly being thick here.

By definition, TFD is always an estimate BTW.

Employees get paid directly – weekly or daily in advance of any distribution to shareholders

Which makes the Tax Freedom Day pointless too then, taxes also tend to be paid weekly, not for several months at the start of the year.

But if you want to use the logic of Tax Freedom day then it should apply to the work that employees have to put in to pay for their employers cut before they start earning their own money. How many weeks in the year or hours in the day, whatever.

As I keep saying, I think all this stuff is nonsense but if you want to play this silly little game then at least play it properly. Don’t simply pick and choose what suits your agenda.

Obviously we can’t cut taxes. How else would we subsidise employers through tax credits?

One has a choice of employers, Ernie: oneself, the state, charity, evil corporate bastards etc.

In the UK we have only one choice of fiscal regime…

Tax is unavoidable, your contribution to the capitalist pot of filthy lucre is to some extent not .

Well unless you’re properly loaded and run the whole shooting match via the British Virgin Islands 🙂

One has a choice of employers

So let’s calculate how many days employees have to work purely for their employers before they start keeping money for themselves then.

If of course we want to play this little game that tax freedom day supporters want to play – it seems only fair.

Besides, it would be quite interesting, don’t you think ?

Obviously it might be a bit depressing but then that’s the motive behind the calculation of tax freedom day – is it not ? It’s certainly not about sensible debate.

Just like this is suppose to depress people rather than engage in sensible debate – the US debt visualized as $100 bills next to the Statue of Liberty :

http://demonocracy.info/infographics/usa/us_debt/us_debt.html

You’ll note that the site includes this fascinating snippet of information :

If the national debt would be laid in a single line of $1 bills, it would stretch from Earth, past Uranus.[/b]

Obviously this amazing fact simply refers to the physical size of $1 bills (if they were half the size presumably they might not even reach Uranus) but that’s hardly important when you are trying to scare people and make them feel depressed.

What if the company I work for loses money? Does that somehow make me better off than if the company has a great year and makes loads of money? As long as I still have a job it’s irrelevant to me how much money my employer makes, but the tax I pay is an unavoidable fixed % of my salary

What if the government builds up a deficit by spending more money on stuff which benefits me than it collects from me in taxes ? Does that somehow make me better off ?

Yes we can all ask silly questions.

Well yeah why not? Depends on how you value those benefits, some do rather well on that side right?!

Yes we can all ask silly questions.

Ok, you might be good at it, but there’s no need to show off.

What ernie says

In the UK we have only one choice of fiscal regime..

You could vote for another way that more suits your personal take on capital and private ownership of wealth

would you like some links? 😉

It is just part of the drip drip that the state is bad
We dont get a day you first paid more tax than benefits you received day [ Many of us would never reach it] nor do we have the day ernie proposes either.
Its a fair point to say it is about spin and agendas.
IMHO the state is not necessarily bad nor is taxation unless you dont like free healthcare, nice roads, educated children,[ wars, police and prisons for the right wingers ]

What about trickle down tuesday when the wealth trickles down to us all ?

Bankers bail out pay off day what year do we reach that ?

Some people think the state is not so efficient at spending money so would rather choose where to spend it themselves.

Its amazing how it is often the very rich who have no need for the helping hand of the state who think this or th every right wing who think that free enterprise is always best.

I simply ask them to explain to me how the wonderful G4S handled the Olympic security v the wasteful state sector.
To claim one is always better is to put politics before reality as it is down to peoole either being able to do their jobs or not*
For every G4S there is a MOD procurement scheme/overspend

* I would say there are certain areas where we do not want people to think of the costs first like healthcare. the us system is more expensive and has worse outcomes than we do for example
http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2011/08/07/JRSMpaperPritWall.pdf

I was thinking more of something like pension provision. Richer people might think they would be better off if they could keep their NI contributions and invest themselves for their future.

But yeah, not sure Gov’t is that efficient when it comes to projects. UK ain’t that bad but how efficient is the EU when it comes to spending money?

I’ve never heard free marketeers go on about ending subsidies to landowners (including the queen, Eton college etc etc etc) via the EC.

Sounds like the date of tax freedom day should be wound back earlier in the year by the amount you benefitted from the state (to offset the amount you paid in).

I think in my case, my tax freedom day would probably be about January 2nd, as I’ve had a fair amount of state-paid healthcare and support this year, and I place a pretty high value on living in a mostly safe, mostly just society in which people mostly don’t starve to death, go uneducated or die unnecessarily from illness. But I say that as someone who grew up in a society where those things did happen, unlike most of the Adam Smith Institute workers, I’d guess…

I’m sorry what’s the connection between my comment and yours ?

I think it would be interesting if it was calculated how many days employees have to work purely for their employers before they start keeping money for themselves.

I presume by your reaction that you wouldn’t be interested, why not ?

If you are going to make a point suggesting that employees don’t start keeping the money they’ve earned until their work has paid their taxes, then it is perfectly logical that you extend exactly the same principle with regards to their employer’s profit.

It is after all their work which pays for their employer’s profits.

Although as I said in my previous post I think all this stuff is nonsense, but if you want to play this silly little game then at least play it properly.

@ernie, the connection was so obvious to me that I didn;t feel it was necessary to state it but for your benefit I will.

The reference you made was with regard to working for your employers profit, well the state sector in non-profit so if you don’t want to work any days for someone else’s profit work for the state.

Profit margins typically run around 5-10% of revenues, so I estimate you are working 10-20 days per anum for profit. However profit is what the shareholders require for giving a company their money in order to start and run their business. It is that investment which means an employee actually has a job. As an aside it seems to me most people get more days holiday (ie paid leave) than they do working for the companies profit, seems quite a reasonable trade off to me.

Bankers bail out pay off day what year do we reach that ?

@JY as an aside the US has exited all (I think) the investments it made to shore up their financial sector (including the big insurance company AIG) and they have made a profit.

The UK situation is a bit worse as whilst the government stakes in Lloyds and RBS where at a profit back in 2010 they didn;t sell any and now they are back at a loss. The various large loans made to banks have been repaid and/or are profitable. The “insurance protection” scheme made available to Lloyds and RBS has been very profitable, Lloyds bought their way out and RBS has never made a claim despite paying a few billion in “insurance premiums” for the cover.

The prime beneficiaries of the bank bailout was all of us, the whole UL economy. Had one of these big banks failed it would have made small business and consumer lending almost impossible to get for quite some time which would have meant a materially greater decline in the economy.

I believe job losses in banking are about 150,000 since the crises and there are more to come.

The reference you made was with regard to working for your employers profit, well the state sector in non-profit so if you don’t want to work any days for someone else’s profit work for the state.

But I didn’t ask for your advise concerning who to work for. So your comment is completely irrelevant to my point, which was, it would be interesting if it was calculated how many days employees have to work purely for their employers before they start keeping money for themselves.

I day

Salaries are paid daily, weekly, monthly whatever. Distributions to shareholders, once a year after the year end. Workers paid well in advance.

To the extent that there is a deferral of payment than that is the gap between first day of the month and pay day.

Workers paid well in advance.

What’s this …… some sort of competition between you and jambalaya to come up with most completely irrelevant point ?

As I’ve already pointed if you want to use that logic then it applies to “tax freedom day” too, ie, no one spends the first few months of every year just paying taxes.

Talk about irrelevant, that is not what it says either! But hey….I guess you could simply look at the ASI website to see what the TFD idea is all about,

You’re not paying attention THM. I pointed out yesterday (up ^ there) that the Adam Smith Institute puts UK “Tax Freedom Day” 2014 more than a couple of weeks later than the OP’s link does. I even provided a direct link to the relevant page on the Adam Smith Institute website.

All of which suggests that I have already looked at the “the ASI website” and fully understand “what the TFD idea is all about”.

Profit margins typically run around 5-10% of revenues

What industry are you in?

@ernie – seems relevant to me to suggest an alternative if you are complaining about your current lot, or are you (not so) secretly just the type who just likes to complain all the time rather than changing your situation ?

Also who cares if the tax freedom day moves a week or two depending on the institution calculating it, I certainly don’t. The important point is the time in months and the relative positions of the countries.

What industry are you in?

@kona I was just trying to show an average figure over all businesses and I actually picked high numbers so as not to be accused of bias in making my point.

Good for you. As you also note, I commented on it on the actual TF day 2014 and you replied. So I am well aware, just wondered why you had forgotten what is was all about.

Anyway, too much work to do to worry about TFD and I am earning for myself now!!!

so as not to be accused of bias in making my point.

Do you find you’re often accused of bias then jambalaya?

@ernie – seems relevant to me to suggest an alternative if you are complaining about your current lot, or are you (not so) secretly just the type who just likes to complain all the time rather than changing your situation ?

Where’s the bit where I complain ?

I said …… it would be interesting if it was calculated how many days employees have to work purely for their employers before they start keeping money for themselves.

Don’t you agree with that suggestion then ? Why not ?

And btw for the last couple of years I have almost always not been working for anyone but myself, which means that no one made any “profit” out of me. And no, I don’t work for the state.

You see jambalaya as an obvious conservative with a typical selfish right-wing outlook on life you automatically assume that everyone is the same as you and that I had only made the comment because it reflected my own personal situation.

I believe in a democratic society where there is social justice for everyone, not just for me. A peculiar concept for you to understand I’m sure.

Wow, judgmental or what? I guess social justice does not extent to treating others with due respect?