Taxing matters...

Not wishing to harangue readers too much on my thoughts on UK taxation (hang on - thought that was the whole point of writing a blog - ed), - well I want to show some pretty pictures that show where the government takes our money from and after that where they spend it. There is a point to this, but you are going to have to wait for it (tick tock - ed).

So even if these pictures are quite lovely I need to remind you to pay attention to what I write as well (well worth reminding your one reader from South America, 'Hi Rafael' - ed) ( Hold it! According to the stats there is no-one from South America reading this blog - social media ed)

Strange thing going on here. This post was started before the previous four posts, as I wended off chasing this and that and ended up having to split the others out - so even though this was first with respect to taxing matters, it is now later than the others.

So having split off some of the tax sub-topics (if it were sub-tropics might be more interesting to the reader as you could have inveigled some attractive girls in a beach shot - ed) into different posts, I am now, back on track (sigh - if only Network Rail were - transport ed)

I tried yesterday to find a source for government tax receipts by tax. This turned out to be harder than I initially thought. Ended up in a morass of different government web sites including the OBR and HMRC neither which obviously game the figures. Time passed and suddenly it was today!

Today I found it quite easily. If you are interested it can be found at the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) - the almost brand spanking (careful now - ed) organisation that Georgie Boy created to try  "to provide independent and authoritative analysis of the UK’s public finances" and so give the figures more credence (clearwater revival. I did like that scene in Die Hard 4 where Bruce Willis turns it up to annoy Matthew Farrell  - music ed), as no-one trusts HMRC's figures any more!

Anyhow, I hear you asking, where is that pretty picture. Well I was trying to find one for the last financial year, but the nearest I could get was one from wikipedia (please donate here), which was slightly out of date. as it is for 2008/9. But that doesn't particularly matter, it is the ratios that are interesting (that word again - ed)

What is not clear from the figure is that when you add all of this up - it  turns out to be a very large number indeed.....£541 billion!

Note: This is an estimate from the March 2008 Budget and it actually turned out to be substantially lower than this i.e. £508 billion (that will be when the deficit started to increase significantly won't it - economics ed), followed by a further major decrease, 2009/10  to £477 billion, 2010/11 up to £528.9 billion and 2011/12 an estimated £550.6 billion.

The Guardian keeps an up to date page of UK Government Tax Receipts (not by individual tax) which shows just how much the taxation figures keep on rising.

So the game is, how few of the above tax do you NOT pay?

Well have reached this point in the post and I just have to stop, so I will put the expenditure into a different post called "Spending Matters" (or something similar - ed).