:: edit :: should read -
... however, if you are not employed in the above two sectors ...
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KMO
I do walk quite often and enjoy it,however your answer has no bearing on the initial question does it !
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I agree Mr.Tee - forgive me for de-railing your thread but I am new to this but have been reading it for a while and I do notice that with this particular forum there are a lot of people who try and kill a post if they do not agree with it rather than put up a logical and reasonable argument for onward discussion - or am I taking it too seriously.
(I will probably get a reply telling me not to use this forum if I don't like it)
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Taxes on motoring may (or may not) be too high, but the case for is weakened when the definition of tax is stretched beyond credibility.
Taxes are an imposition on spending or earning that cannot be legally evaded, so no argument with VAT, VED, fuel duty etc. Fines for parking speeding etc can almost always be avoided by obeying the law, the money goes to government but they are not taxes. Charges for parking are not taxes either, my fiver a day for parking at the station goes to a private company, how does using the council car park over the road turn it into a tax?
I guess it can be argued that licensing of drivers and vehicles benefits all, not just those licensed (safety gains, tracing of ownership etc) so all should bear the cost, but its the vehicles that create the need for a licensing system in the first place.
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This was not meant to highlight the rights or wrongs of taxation of the car,but merely to highlight the number of possible ways that have been formulated ,to extract money from the use of a single item,namely the car and other motor vehicles.
I cannot think of any other neccessity and i really do believe vehicles are neccessary,that has been subject to so many measures to extract money from their users, most of it ending up in the Government coffers.
Strange then,that on the one hand,the Government wants to be seen as " Green " and limit the usage with yet further taxes and on the other, having an extremely big hole in their finances if they were successful.
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Strange then,that on the one hand, ....on the other, having an extremely big hole in their finances if they were successful
they have had years of practise on this with tax on cigarettes.
as i implied in my first reply, the tax has to be raised one way or another to pay for all the "essential" life services provided by the government for parliament, councils, pensions, social benefits, health, roads, rail, rubbish-collection, defence, police, fire-brigades, immigartion staff, jails, prison wardens, druggie support workers, customs and inland revenue staff, doctors, nurses, paramedics, medi-helicopter pilots,etc..
that money just gets recycled via the spending directly on the wages of the public sector and the procurement of srvices/goods from the private sector. and those wages get spent buying goods and services for day to living including water, electricity/gas/energy, food, cars, petrol, salesmen's commission, car showrooms, bbc, sky, cinema, west-end theatres, restaurants, polish plumbers and builders, estate agents, lawyers, insurance brokers, accountants, web site developers, forum moderators, etc. ...
the money has to come from somewhere. as few people are not motorists, very few people can escape paying. and you pay roughly according to your ability to afford motoring. (the bigger the polluter, the more you pay in one way or another - either in initial purchase price, or running costs including petrol and maintenance, or via road-tax bands.
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I take a simplistic view (arithmetically) that I'm going to be taxed at standard VAT rate, 17.5%, on everything I spend, either now or later AND I'll have to pay fuel duty on all the fuel I buy.
If motoring taxes were cut then either all the working people would have to pay more income tax OR I'd have to suffer a reduction in spending on state pensions, health, law and order and my grand-kids education.
By far the main motoring tax is fuel duty, it's effect is directly proportional to road usage which spreads the cost of taxation fairly between rich/poor and working/retired.
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Any Government decides how much it needs to raise in tax to provide all the services required (or promised) annually and then works out how to raise it.
Motorists, drinkers and smokers are the simple, most profitable sources, followed by businesses.
One small way of regaining some of the lost ground would be to drastically reduce the number of MPs, Ministers etc required, whose value is but a fraction of the vast sums they cost taxpayers annually.
MPs take a 10-week holiday in the summer, yet the country still seems to survive without them....:-)
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What\'s for you won\'t pass you by
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Unfortunately tax is a fact of life - what I see as the problem are the disproportionate levels of tax. It's easy enough to accept a bit of tax, but I'll return to an earlier comment I once made and add a twist. It shows how some things are a bit overdone in my opinion.
I do a small job for a client and he pays me £117.50 of which my company gets £100. If my firm makes a profit on the job then any profit gets charged at 19% Corporation Tax. If I take the £100 as salary I only get to see £49 - the rest going in Income Tax and NI. (and my company has also paid Employers' NI on the payment to me too!).
I put £49 of fuel in the car of which something like £39 (guess - but close) goes in tax. That leaves me with £10 worth of net fuel. If I go and die with more than around £300k in assets, those who inherit my estate pay 40% tax on all my assets. Theoretically that includes the fuel left in the tank that I never got round to using.
They are taking the michael
Have you read about the two co-habiting 80 year old sisters in today's DT? They share the house equally and when one dies the other will have a bill of £200k. So the family house gets sold.
I'm retiring soon and ought of here PDQ.
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Oops, Edit:
I'm retiring soon and OUT of here PDQ.
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A Labour government has never been any different - high taxes, high spending.
Remember 1976 when, under Labour, inflation reached 26.9 per cent and the IMF had to be called in to bail out the UK? Three years later came the Winter of Discontent...
Which is why the Tories were in power for 70 of the previous 100 years before Labour reinvented itself as New Labour and gained power in 1997.
However, leopards never change their spots...:-)
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What\'s for you won\'t pass you by
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>> .. That leaves me with £10 worth of net fuel. ..
that £10 goes to shell or bp or texaco or esso or whoever. they then pay tax from that and pay their employees and contractors and suppliers, who all pay tax on their take. some of the profit is reinvested and spent on more projects and all the people/companies in that chain get to pay tax as well. the remaining profit gets distributed to shareholders who get taxed on the dividend, and any reminder is spent by them and taxed again. the goods and services they buy are again provide more employment and tax revenue for the chancellor. in the end, all the money goes back to the treasury or bank-of-england/scotland, who issued it in the first place.
so really all of the £49 you spent on petrol also goes back to the treasury eventually.
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so really all of the £49 you spent on petrol also goes back to the treasury eventually.
except for the pennies hidden behind your sofa, or anything you take to the "other side" with you when you go to meet your maker !
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