Monday, February 14, 2011

A Progressive Tax System

This is progress???
A quarter of all of Britain's income tax revenues this year will be paid by just one per cent of earners, according to official data.

The figure is in sharp contrast to 1978, an era associated with supertaxes, when the top one per cent paid 11 per cent of all the tax revenues.

Experts suggested the projections, published by HM Revenue and Customs, was evidence of how the rich had got richer over the last three decades, while the tax burden on them had increased substantially in recent years.

The new top rate of 50p income tax rate came into force in April 2010, landing a small number of people with the highest rate of income tax since 1988.
I wonder who these "experts" are, especially when in the very next sentence we're told that tax rates went up. Lefties, you gotta love 'em.

1 comment:

mmazenko said...

The progressive system is based upon expecting more from those who have gleaned the most from the system in which all participate, and in which some begin with considerable advantages from which most will never benefit.

And the drastic expansion in income-inequality, even as productivity among the working middle class has gone, implies requiring a logical uptick in the percentage for which the top earners are responsible. As Dickens revealed with Bounderby in Hard Times, the top earners only expand their incomes by profiting more with increased production from workers who make do with less.

That said, I feel 50% is too high - but Sweden and Finland make it work pretty well. No greater drag on their economies than in the US or England.