@ToraToraTora
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Public sector are paid out of taxation, they pay tax, yes but the money we pay them is already public money
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I am foxed by the expression "it's already public money". Public money is shared money. Are you saying there is something inherently wrong with pooling our resources?
Does it sound too much like collectivism? Communism?
Shared money is for expenditure on solutions to shared problems.
Time was, taxes were only raised when the king wanted to go to war and needed to pay his army. Do you want to return to a feudal setup like that?
// I prefer too hang on to it.//
Everybody does. But imagine if you had to pay private tarmac gangs to msintain your commuter route and every other public service was run by some profit-hungry, money grubbing crook with sll the integrity of a cowboy builder and a toothless oversight authority, or none at all as they're public bodies, too.
Your precious money would be creamed off in all directions. Prices are not what things cost but "what the market will bear". What it will bear is a divvying up of the sum total of everybody's disposable income.
So, if taxes were set to zero and retailers failed to hike their prices, to take up the slack, they'd be insane. As things stand, lack of disposable income is what keeps prices from spiralling. Everybody wants all the consumer goods within their affordabilty reach and manufacturers want a slice of as many people's income as they can get away with, short of repelling them. So a balance is struck.
I concede that increasing tax dampens consumerism and hurts product makers. The exception is people so rich that they've got everything they want (except the next yacht up the scale) and any tax reduction just goes into a bank account and becomes idle.
I exaggerate, there. They will seek to invest, with a decent rate of return, to get that bit richer.
The only way to ensure they invest in the right places (ie in UK) is to incentivise them with tax breaks. Which is why we have a hideous tax system, practically built out of loopholes.
I do crave a simpler system yet, in an age of spreadsheets, I cannot understand the retention of "tax bands" which seem inspired by the need to do calculations with pen and paper. There is nothing to stop us having a gradual ramp-up, from zero-rated, in steps of 1% or 0.5%. This does away with unfairnesses at the current tax band boundaries. Imagine it going 21,22,23 as your salary creeps up, instead of straight to 40%, above the threshold, as it does now.