Apart from the climate change conference, two tax stories are floating around today.
The first concerns Whitehall parking tickets. Over the last six years it appears that government ministers and Whitehall mandarins have racked up £60,000 in parking fines. Last year the bill was £16,830. Illegal parking of the chauffer driven cars is necessary for security reasons according to the government.
It is claimed that taxpayers are footing the bill, but the taxpayer pays it out and it ends up in the public coffers. Surely it’s just moving it from one budget into another?
I say clamp them and make them walk.
The other story is a report from the TaxPayers’ Alliance (TPA) about the excessive green taxes that we in the UK cough up every year. The author of the report ‘Ending the Green Rip-Off’ is Matthew Sinclair, the TPA’s Research Director.
In the report he highlights that green taxes (net of road spending) for 2008/09 was £26.4 billion, a 6.9% rise on the previous year. This compares with the actual ‘social cost’ of a tonne of greenhouse gas emissions which, depending on where you get the figures, can be anywhere between £2.8 billion and £16.2 billion.
Therefore the amount of tax taken to compensate for emissions is at least £10.2 billion too much according to the report. That’s nearly 40% too much.
Now compare that to the total tax collected of about £435 billion and you see how much the ‘green’ taxes are propping the system up.
And now we are pledging more to the EU and to Africa to ‘compensate’ them for our green ‘crimes’ of the past this amount is set to climb higher over the next decade.
You may also like:
HMRC lose £40 billion to tax evasion and fraud
Climate change conference heats up, or is it cooling down?
------ Other articles of interest ------
The UK is recovering, but not rebalancing
The new green taxes slapped on UK companies
The government bounty hunters
Vince’s graduate tax
Tags: economics, News, tax, taxpayers alliance, tpa
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