Wildly complicated, and impossibly simple.
Tax is hard, because there are always outliers and exceptions
Fuel, for instance. There is an argument that the cost of running the roads should be borne by fuel duty.
you want a big fat polluting truck, then you pay more purely by the fact that it uses more fuel.
Except there are people who are driving big fat trucks BECAUSE they dont do any miles, and thats how they afford it.
Similarly, If you put HGVs in the same situation, haulage costs would rocket.
Many people buy those pickups named after condoms because they are written off against business expense and they can claim the tax back.
And then you have red fuel for agriculture. Thats a tax avoidance.
a mnimum wage worker is forced to drive to work, where as a well off middle manager or consultant can "work from home".
you end up penalising people you didnt intent to. And there is always some clever dick playing the system to wiggle out of it.
What is simple is the "world" should agree to start holding the "mega corps" to account!
Amazon (for example, but it could be any other), pay the minimum they can get away with. Their staff are paid so low they get propped up by the tax payer benefits.
Their health deteriortates due to long hours or over work required to get by and when they are ill who pays to support them?
who builds the roads they move their goods around on?
The problem is that they are using loopholes left open by politicians who are paid to leave them open, or who leave them open for their own benefits.
ive lost my train of thought.
Heads on spikes. Its the only way.
Primarily because you’ve fundamentally misunderstood what a median is and how distribution shapes affect it’s relationship to the mode and mean.
try rereading what I wrote.
I'm talking about "the pot" not the people.. if you will then each earnings is a big bag of coins laid out and put in bins.
It's pretty meaningless to take each persons earnings without binning as £39,999.99, £40,000.00 and £40,000.01 are all different numbers.
Simply bin each band say £0-£1M and £1M to £2M up to £99,999M to £100,000M+ etc. and line all the bins up in order
Now take the middle bin... (50M) .. do it again and do it every 100k, 10k. Your median value will change with the bin range.
Of working age people, 3.7% are Unemployed, and 21% are Economically inactive (i.e. unemployed but not looking for work). That’s millions of people.
Yes but they sit in the lowest value bin and don't have much to tax anyway...
There are ~20,000 earing >£1million/year
And <20 billionaires
Where is that plucked from and what does "earning" mean in that context?
Do you think people with £100M income declare it as such or the money they spend is classed as "earnings"?
To you and me earnings is money that comes in that you get taxed on and can then buy "stuff" with.
To someone with £100M "income" is money that wasn't spent and hidden away they may have to pay tax on or in business terms its petty cash. This is what I mean by in that context.
If you want to buy some new wheels you earn money.. pay tax and buy wheels..
If say Simon Cowell (semi random) wants some new wheels he probably pays out of his petty cash BUT if he wants a new Lear Jet or Helicopter or Rolls Royce one of his companies will buy it.. thus reducing profits and hence corp tax (assuming the company is UK based) , he will use it and depreciate it.... and his company will replace it with something else.
A quick google and Irish Times article claims
Simon Cowell
The music tycoon is the sole shareholder of two British Virgin Islands (BVI) companies called Southstreet Limited, set up in February 2007, and Eaststreet Limited, set up in October 2007. The companies were set up at a time when Cowell was planning to purchase two plots of land in Barbados, where he holidays most years.
That's a celeb ... most of us have heard of but then how many other people essentially make tens and hundreds of millions we never heard of and manage their wealth invisibly through offshore companies so their wealth is never "income"??
how many other people essentially make tens and hundreds of millions we never heard of and manage their wealth invisibly through offshore companies so their wealth is never “income”??
Fairly irrelevant as they can live anywhere (taking their assets with them) and if you attempt to tax them at anything other than a very modest rate, they just move elsewhere....
Where is that plucked from and what does “earning” mean in that context?
Even lowering the nominal threshold to £0.5million makes it the top 0.1%
There simply aren't that many people in the country earning seven figure salaries* that messing around with their taxes specifically can make a difference to the overall tax take, 50% of half a million, of 0.1% of the adult population is a lot, but it's only a few tens of billions, not even enough to run a large government department!
Compared to the 'above average' demographic earning £50k-ish paying ~£15k-ish tax and made up of ~20million people (which back of an envelope maths tells us is nearer £300billion).
*incomes, earnings, however you want to define it.
That’s a celeb … most of us have heard of but then how many other people essentially make tens and hundreds of millions we never heard of and manage their wealth invisibly through offshore companies so their wealth is never “income”??
And lives in LA, and registers in a tax haven.
Simply bin each band say £0-£1M and £1M to £2M up to £99,999M to £100,000M+ etc. and line all the bins up in order
Now take the middle bin… (50M) .. do it again and do it every 100k, 10k. Your median value will change with the bin range.
What in the arbitrary nonsense does that tell you then?
What in the arbitrary nonsense does that tell you then?
That statistics can be made to support or not support any narrative?
You make a circular case to some extent firstly on "incomes" but then on what is meant to be measured.
If we start with this hypothetical pot and how much of that pot can be taken in taxes and used for the common good then you can start with the people or you can start with the pot.
Starting with the pot just makes more sense for the above goal and then drives how the data is binned.
There simply aren’t that many people in the country earning seven figure salaries* that messing around with their taxes specifically can make a difference to the overall tax take, 50% of half a million, of 0.1% of the adult population is a lot, but it’s only a few tens of billions, not even enough to run a large government department!
*incomes, earnings, however you want to define it.
This last part is the important part... the entire idea of a salary or income becomes increasingly irrelevant as net worth increases. Despite being in court for financial irregularity Trump flew to New York.. stayed in Trump Towers etc. with a presumably expensive legal team.
Do you think he paid a single cent of that trip out of his "salary" or "declared income"?
Have a dig, see if you can find his personal income (as declared to the IRS)...
When every major cost in your life is paid for by a corporation that pays less tax the more it spends and you can pay a team of people to run it ... the entire idea of "an income" is meaningless. Especially when one part of your organisation is selling services to another part..
So going back to how many people have 7 figure incomes... it completely depends how you calculate or define income.
If you were to say people who have £1M a year they can spend and it gets magically replenished there are far more than people who have £1M taxable income... move that to £10M and the gap increases etc.
Just wikipedia and to illustrate the difference in "income" that is declared as income and not.. and how UK/US is different to Norway.
Trump
From his television show The Apprentice, as well as subsequent related licensing and endorsements, Trump received $427.4 million from the show's beginning in 2004 through 2018.
Due largely to income received from the show, he paid a combined $70.1 million in federal taxes in 2005, 2006, and 2007. He paid no taxes in 2008. When he filed taxes in 2009, he declared over $700 million in business losses and, on that basis, he asked for a refund of his federal income taxes paid in 2005–2007. He was eventually refunded the $70.1 million plus over $2.7 million in interest. As of 2020, auditors are still considering the matter. If he is asked to return that federal refund, then, considering added interest and penalties, he may owe over $100 million to the federal government.
The New York Times said: "He also received $21.2 million in state and local refunds, which often piggyback on federal filings," and he may be obligated to return those refunds, too.[24]
So he got a "income/salary" from the show... this he then should have paid tax on but he magically got to declare $700M in losses .. because he is a company/corporation.
So back to tax-reform.... or first what are these people actually bringing to the country? If they all left tomorrow who cares, they aren't paying any tax worth counting or doing anything useful.
And lives in LA, and registers in a tax haven.
again then who cares if he leaves ??? Like Trump he's simply a drain on the economy. Unlike the golgofrinchan telephone sanitisers they don't even do anything useful and a great deal of what they do is actively negative.
So lets take good ole Simon .. if someone remakes one of those reality shows (are they still going?) and he signs a contract with a UK company then it's personal money and personal tax.
Surely its win:win for the country? If he doesn't then nothing is lost and surely some other loser celeb will eventually take the job and pay personal tax on it .. if he does then he gets taxed as personal income with no offsets or losses just like the rest of us.
Same goes for wealthy investers etc. ... sure give some money/investment then get taxed as personal tax. It's either a company in all senses in which case the investor doesn't get a personal jet etc. without paying for it as a taxable benefit or not. If they don't want to pay tax on earning don't invest... they won't be missed.
This is the "pot" I was referring to... there is the small pot that people who pay income tax pay into and the big pot of corporations. A good share of that big pot is not real corporations but shells for people like Trump/Simon etc.
