Jimmy Carr is a totally unfunny posh boy, but he has done nothing wrong, apart from slating people who dont pay tax himself. If i was rich/bright enough to do it, i would do it myself too. If Cameron wants to save money,start clamping down on the benefit cheats,immigrants who get houses, money and healthcare thrown at them as soon as they set foot in the country and then just live off benefits and crime, and stop wasting money bailing banks etc out of the crap for bad management and greed. Plus get the money off them lot down the other end of the M27.
You do realise benefit fraud (cost £1bn) is massively dwarfed by tax avoidance (cost £40bn) don't you?
Even with tax avoidance, the rich still contribute tax and are often job creators, whereas benefit cheats contribute little and get right up the nose of decent working people. I'm surrounded by good people raising a decent next generation, but I also see slobs raising future slobs. I don't rub shoulders with the very rich, so its the layabouts that annoy me.
But if we closed tax loopholes we would have 40 times more money than if we stopped all benefit fraud (which is impossible without cutting off lots of people who actually need them, as is already happening for disabled people for example). By any rational measure, tax avoidance is a much bigger problem. We've all seen the newsworthy cases of a single person cheating the benefit system for thousands of pounds over many years, but most benefit cheats do it because they are desperately poor and have no other way of making ends meet. On the other side of the scale, those who avoid tax are able to do so because they're rich beyond the wildest dreams of the majority of people. Not defending benefit cheats at all, but it's a simple need vs greed argument for me.
My apologies for my rant. Point 1 - I was making a statement - not saying that I thought you had said that. I was not referring to your comments as total crap. It was aimed at comments that always seem to come out from the government when they explain why they cannot do certain things that incense the public. Governments say all kinds of crap to get elected and then they come up with all kinds of crap to say why they didn't do what they said they would. The HMRC are generally very good at catching up with individuals and closing down loopholes. They don't seem so keen to do the same with large companies though. The fact is the UK is a huge economy and multinational corporations will always want to do business here and make profits by selling us their goods and services. To do that they have to employ people here. So regarding point 2 the fact that companies are registering in countries such as Luxembourg is just a symptom of our high rates of corporation tax. Moving back to the main topic though singling out one individual by Cameron is hypocritical. I don't think it is the job of the prime minister to comment on people going about their lives in a legal manner. His comments were pathetic as were his comments regarding PFC. I'm sure the local companies and charities ripped off by them were felt totally insulted by it too.
I agree Sussex Saint The PM shouldn't be digging at individuals in that way, especially in light of his disregard at the PFC situation. I do wish these politicians tried to run the country for the good of the people rather than the good of themselves or their careers.
Totally agree with 'pass the football'. Besides if you pay 40% on £10 million you are still left with £6 million, how much money do they need for **** sake. To pay only 1% is not only morally repugnent it is evil. Footballers are just as bad with their demands and their shady dealings, corrupt agents and offshore deals. Personally if I pay for a ticket or Sky subscription I would feel better if some of that money helped fund the local hospital rather than lining some accountants pocket.
Really? Have you considered that every one person who doesn't pay their fair share of tax increases the tax burden on everyone else? That includes you by the way.
Yes a lot of People would like to pay 1% tax, but a lot of People would also like to be able to walk into a shop and take whatever they like for free (don't believe me, look at the case of Pirate Bay). So in my opinion, the argument that 'it's OK for Jimmy Carr to pay 1% Tax, because we all want to do it' is bunkum. The reason we have this thing called 'society' is because we recognise that doing what we want all the time probably isn't a good thing for anybody (including, eventually, ourselves), so society is there to control our selfish desires. And society covers a whole range of things, not just the tax system and what it (rightly or wrongly) provides. It also covers the legal system. Unilaterally opting out of one part of society (i.e the paying of what is deemed a fair rate of tax) is not right if you expect the other parts of Society to keep looking after your interests. What i'm getting at is, I want to be able to watch Jimmy Carr's latests DVD for free, so i'm off to Pirate Bay...
I live for my sins in Salisbury where the local taxes are extremely high. Many large companies have had businesses here and prospered due partly to us having one of the lowest paid workforce areas in the country. Now many are leaving or have left and many smaller businesses have gone under because the expence is not being covered with a fair profit margin. Tax is something which is becoming an ever bigger burden on the populace. We are living longer and at an ever increasing cost to the country. The companies that have left all seem to say that the costs have now passed the rate where they are able to remain competitive. If we keep the bigger companies away by forcing loop holes such as those that they use to be closed where will any of our workforce be actually able to get a job. Work is hard enough to acquire now as it is but the situation could be made far worse if the government acted as some have suggested. As for Amazon. I wouldn't mind betting that they use every trick in the book to lighten there tax load. In fact I know of nobody who has worked that hasn't added something onto their returns as a means of lessening the amount due to be paid. Self employed people as I was for a while use accountants for that very purpose.
I don't see why whether someone's posh or not matters at all. Call someone a chav and it's classism, call someone a posh ****er and somehow it's not, double-standards methinks. I also don't see why Southampton fans get so upset about Cameron mentioning Portsmouth in the Commons, he was clearly just humouring Penny Morduant and had no intention of actually doing anything about it.
With big companies like Amazon that are all based in Luxembourg or somewhere so don't pay any tax here, the problem is that nobody has the guts or the will to call their bluff, but if you closed tax loopholes, the UK would be less profitable, but would still be a lucrative market to operate in and would they shut the whole thing down just to avoid paying a proportion of their earnings in tax? I don't think so. And by the way, corporation tax is only 24% and is going down to 23% next year so the argument you always hear that having a personal income tax rate of 50% or more is 'driving business away' is complete rubbish.
Yeah, I think he is a **** comedian, but I still think what Cameron said about him is totally out of order, he should not be mentioning names, by doing this I only think it can back fire on him.
It is one thing to bemoan the level of tax, and we should always make governments justify their polcies on tax, but it another thing to circumvent those tax rates by exploiting loopholes. I much rather live in a society in which the paramedics don't ask you for your medical insurance details before deciding which hospital to take you. There is too much bad attitude fed by individualism, where you look after 'number one' and sod everyone else both at the top and bottom of our society already.
Solution to all this: Make Jimmy Carr the Prime Minister and David Cameron a comedian! Oh, he already is!! Of the clown variety!!
Jimmy Carr is an easy target because he's an individual rather than a corporation threatening to run abroad or a football club with avid fans, many of who vote Tory. I don't condone this sort of tax dodging, but I do think it is deeply unfair that Cameron is singling out Jimmy Carr. Many corporate leaders and people in Cameron's circle do this too. If Carr had slipped the Tories a wedge then Cameron would have kept his gob shut. Double standards IMO.
Agree with post completely, people keep on moaning about benefit fraud, but far more pwople are avoiding tax.
That's like me saying I don't care about slobs as I don't rub shoulders with them. Tax avoidance is massive compared to benefit fraud.
