Tax Reform

Right, here are some BIRD THOUGHTS on how to make tax a little bit less of a cunt.

1) COUNCIL TAX is a particularly scabrous and pox-ridden cunt, for various reasons. It's one of the few taxes that you actually have to write a cheque for yourself. And it's a big cheque. And because of this stupid crap about paying it over 10 months instead of 12, you can't just set up a standing order and forget about it. There will always be those 2 months where you have a lot more spare money to remind you of not having it in the other 10.

The solution is simple: Get rid of the fucking thing altogether and stick it on income tax instead. As well as making the payment markedly less painful for the victim, this also makes the whole system a lot simpler; the council can get rid of its whole Department of Cunts for Giving People Grief about Council Tax and just bank one cheque from central government instead. So it makes life better for everyone concerned (apart from the people who lose their jobs with the dissolution of the Dept of Cunts, but they have forfeited any claim to sympathy by taking a job as a cunt in the first place.)

2) ARSE TAX is the next one to be dealt with. This is a convenient catch-all term for all the multitude of arsey taxes by which you are taxed on everything you spend as well as everything you earn. Taxing you twice is a bloody cheek, and an arse has two cheeks, so it's quite an appropriate term as well.

The most obvious arse tax is probably VAT, but there are lots of other ones as well. Fuel tax, for a start - indeed one could say that motor fuel is a case of arse tax with piles, since first the fuel is taxed and then VAT is charged on the price of fuel including the fuel tax, so even your fucking tax is taxed. Then there's tax on beer, tax on fags, tax on domestic energy supplies, car tax, and all the bloody rest of them.

Same solution applies - scrap the whole bleeding lot and compensate by increasing the rate of income tax proportionally to the average revenue from arse tax. Yes, this would mean that people have less money coming in. But they also have less money going out now that they're no longer being taxed on what they spend, so everything is cheaper and it all evens out. Indeed people would probably be so amazed and overjoyed at being able to fill up their cars for 15 quid that that alone would make it immediately popular.

3) INCOME TAX can go next. At which point you are probably thinking "hang on, but isn't that supposed to be increased to compensate for not having the other taxes?" To which the answer is: not really, I've just been using "income tax" as a shorthand for "the thing which replaces income tax that I haven't got around to describing yet", which is what I'm about to do here.

The first thing to do is to make it a flat rate. No more of this fuckarsing around with varying allowances and split rates and people having different tax codes and all that shit. Just level the whole thing out and tax everyone at the same percentage rate. This to include national insurance as well, since it's bloody stupid to have two income taxes one of which is called tax and one of which isn't - just put it all in one lump and cut the cackle. Having thereby made the whole thing one whole fuck truckload simpler we can then go on to the second thing.

This is the second thing. Get rid of this stupid shit of saying a job pays eg. 25k a year when what you actually get is only 20k odd (at the time of writing). Quoting the gross pay is essentially a lie because nobody actually gets that; it's how much you're left with in your pocket after all the tax and shit which is important. Unfortunately at present the gross pay is the only generally-applicable figure they can quote because of different people being taxed at different rates.

But since we're going to have a single universal flat rate that won't be a problem any more. Instead of saying x job pays 25k when in practical terms this is bollocks, x job is now said to pay 20k, since this is true, ie. if you do that job for a year then you get 20k in your bin. No matter who you are. Everyone gets 20k because everyone is taxed the same, there is no more complicated shit about some people get less because they're taxed more and others get more because they're taxed less.

And having done that it's a simple matter to take the next step and make income tax the business of the employer, not the employee. No longer do you get a wanky form sent to you every year to tell you that you earned 25k but only got to keep 20k because they took 5k in tax. Nor do you get extra wanky entries on your payslip to remind you further of this on a monthly or weekly basis. What happens instead is that you earn 20k and you get to keep the whole lot. Giving an extra 5k to the government is now entirely your employer's business and fuck all to do with you any more.

This brings a whole bunch of useful consequences. Instead of millions of individuals paying tax at different rates you have only thousands of employers all paying the same x percent of their total wage bill. At a stroke the system becomes vastly simpler to administer, the government saves a fuck tonne of money by getting rid of a whole army of useless wankers out of HMRCunts, and everyone else is saved a bunch of hassle.

Well, nearly everyone. Greedy rich wankers pull various snidey dodges to avoid paying tax like everyone else has to. Things like having a house in the Isle of Man or wherever and pretending they actually live there, or getting their wages paid not to them but to some company in Switzerland which they have invented for the purpose and doesn't really exist and then "borrowing" the money back off the fictitious company under terms which say they don't have to start paying it back until long after they'll have been dead. Shit like that won't work any more when the tax is paid by the employer based purely on the total amount of their wage bill. What a shame.

I suppose there would probably also be objections from people who are stupid enough to think they have been diddled out of 5k of their wages even when they have a piece of paper in their hand that tells them they have got exactly the same amount in their bin as they had before. But such objections would be entirely their own fault for being too bleeding stupid for words, and so they don't count.

It also makes it a lot easier for the government to vary the rate of tax when it no longer affects anyone's income but only changes an employer's tax bill. An increase in the rate will no longer piss off millions of employees because they will still be getting the same amount regardless. It will only piss off the employers and they have orders of magnitude fewer votes. And on the upside they won't have to deal with their employees hassling them for a pay rise to make up for the difference in tax.

And it will drop a big wet blanket on the self-righteous fuckheads who do some completely artificial job that comes somewhere on the scale between "totally pointless" and "everyone would be better off if nobody did that job", but nevertheless hold themselves above people on benefits on the basis that they are at least "making a contribution" by paying tax (and thereby tacitly admitting that their actual job is indeed totally useless and so does not itself count as a contribution). This is a bollocks argument anyway because - apart from the point that people on benefits do pay tax; they pay arse tax - paying tax does not count as "making a contribution". It just means that The System has given you some money and now The System is taking some of it away again. Rather than take some of it away again it would be a lot less trouble to just not give you that bit in the first place, and when that is what's happening it might help make these cunts shut the fuck up with their horseshit.

However, this is beginning to take us away from tax reform and towards areas like work which is not necessary or is positively maleficial, the concept of The System as a singular entity, and ceasing to fuck people around for their whole lives thereby making sure they never get the chance to do anything to justify their existence. And that is a subject for a separate article...




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