THE TaxPayers’ Alliance has just published a report which shows that the average UK household will pay £1million in taxes over a lifetime.
A new analysis of ONS data reveals that the poorest households will work for 24 years to pay their tax bill, leaving just 16 years of income for themselves. This is the longest of any group. The lifetime tax bill for the top 20 per cent of households, or families with an income of £137,669, would be £2,573,815 in direct and indirect taxes, which would take them 19 years to pay off.
This devastating report reveals the average household is set to pay almost £180,000 in employer and employee national insurance contributions over a lifetime, even beforethe planned rise that we were assured on Sunday will still take place.
This is alongside nearly £480,000 in income tax and £190,000 in VAT.
We at TCW have previously deplored the astronomical waste and cost of the government’s lockdown and Covid policies. This interview with top economic Ewen Stewart last autumn predicted what we’d be in for as a result. You see watch it here. Writing more recently here on the tragedy of the Chancellor who couldn’t say no, he went further into some of the gross waste we are expected to pay for: ‘The NAO’s analysis into the [Covid] loan book is staggering. Of the £47billion lent, £2billion has been paid back with £28billion described as ‘recoverable’. Worse, £12billion, or one quarter of what was lent, is expected to end up as a bad debt; even more disappointingly, fraud is estimated at £5billion, or 10 per cent of the book.’
He also points out for the £370billion spent on lockdown and Covid by the government you could feed each and every Briton three square meals a day for more than three years. Or you could fund the armed forces for eight years. Or you could abolish income tax for more than 20 months.
Now that’s a thought worth holding on to. But no, it looks as if we will pay for it doubly: taking the (mismanaged and unnecessary) Test and Trace scheme alone – that made so many small businesses inoperable – the TPA research shows it will take more than 33,500 average households’ total lifetime taxes to pay for its £37billion budget. It should be shut down now.
The TPA go on to point out that taxes taken throughout the working lives of almost 14,000 households would cover just a single year of the 0.7 per cent foreign aid budget. It’s clearly a budget we can no longer afford. There is something called balancing the books and it is time that MPs (who constantly demand ever more largesse for green and eco projects) woke up to it. The public didn’t vote for the uncontrolled borrowing and spending that they’d later be hit with.
So no wonder, with the tax burden reaching the highest level in 70 years, that the TaxPayers’ Alliance are calling for spending to be brought back under control, and for hard-pressed households to be protected by scrapping the planned Tory tax rises and cutting their lifetime tax bills.
We endorse that – all wasteful projects should be excised forthwith. The Government needs to act fast to scythe its bureaucratic interventions, including all ‘woke’ progressive, diversity and gender projects, appointments and ‘compliances’ and upcoming unnecessary but costly hate crime ‘reform’ legislation. It is high time ‘the State’ went on a ruthless diet and reverted to its basic responsibilities of maintaining our borders, the rule of law and the nation’s infrastructure – all of which are in dire need of concentrated attention.
You can read the TPA report here.
