The Daily Express presents a gold-plated masterpiece of a one-sided equation. See if you can spot the missing figure...
THE taxman is snatching almost £9 billion extra from hard-pressed pensioners every year just because they live longer, research shows. The taxes gobbled up by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs has soared by a quarter in the past year thanks to longer life expectancy, leaving pensioners hundreds of pounds worse off.
Currently, the average pensioner household pays out 30 per cent of its income through a combination of direct and indirect taxes... MetLife says the average retired household gets 36 per cent of its gross income from occupational pensions, 50.5 per cent from [taxpayer funded pensions and] benefits and the rest from investments and savings...
Then along comes the ever reliable TPA with the oxymoron of the week:
John O’Connell, research director at the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: "The taxman doesn’t stop taking when taxpayers stop working and these figures show just how much Treasury coffers are boosted by pensioners. Taxes are too high, the system is way too complex and hard-working taxpayers are the ones that lose out, even when they are trying to enjoy their retirement. We need reforms to ease the burden on taxpayers and leave more of their own money in their pockets."
Monday, 14 February 2011
The New Maths
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9 comments:
I'm deeply grateful for the bold emphasis as cluebat, but that's such an incredibly stupid and ill-thought-through article I suspect even I might managed to spot the missing number (their incomes being paid for longer) and the TPA mannie's "now let me sort through this list of handy quotes" response......... :-)
Looks as though some journo got completely the wrong end of the stick from a press release.
The one which gets me is the double taxation system. You pay tax overseas on anything earned and then the UK government takes another slug from you for having the temerity to earn something o/s.
Long, long ago, I was the beneficiary of a wonderful rule whereby I had a salary abroad and one in the UK and the foreign one was taxed in neither jurisdiction. It then turned out that I could use its existence to make a pension contribution in the UK to reduce the tax on my UK salary. Whoopee!
Mind you, I can see why the rules got changed.
FT, I can't track down the TPA 'research' but I'd assume that the DE article is just cut and pasted therefrom.
JH, while most taxation is ultimately double-taxation (noteable exception: LVT), there is usually a full credit for the tax already paid overseas, so it is not really double taxation.
D, what's so surprising about that? Technically you were using UK income to pay UK pension contributions (or else you'd probably have fallen foul of the remittance rules).
But why does the Daily Express think "taxes" are singular?
Coz they is stupid.
I suspect that whatever half-arsed, steam-powered content management system the DM uses has a crap built-in grammar checker, which flagged "Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs has soared".
On taxes, I'm confused by James as well. What double-taxation? Actually, feck, that reminds me to fill out my P85.
JB, where are you going?
So pensioners pay the government 30% of their income in taxes and get 50.5% in pensions. Considering that they are assumed to be the group in society currently getting most out of the state (though only after a lifetime of paying in) that is a fairly large clawback. The admin costs of all this taxing, paying out & taxing again must cost at least equal to the 20.5% the pensioners end up with.
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