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They share the common purpose of evading the basic truth that for ordinary voters to have the benefits we expect, ordinary voters have to pay the taxes. Until the evasion stops, slow state collapse continues and we stay in the cycle of election victories based on lies then immediate disillusion. 2/2

Two decades? "The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else." Bastiat (1848).

I often hear "why should my taxes pay for asylum seekers/welfare scroungers/foreign countries etc". And I think, would love to do a ledger on your lifetime taxes/benefits/benefits in kind. And imagine the person moaning will be paying next to no or no tax at all.

Inside the treasury there are 5 buttons labelled IT, NI, VAT, CGT and “can’t someone else pay it?”. Each time Rachel Reeves pressed the last one someone lost their job and it’s now broken from misuse.

If a party facing declined public services, a tight fiscal reality and a stomping, fairly compliant majority won't commit to real fair and efficient tax reform then I don't think I'll ever see it tbh.

They shoild start by consolidating income tax and employee’s NIC. The distinction is now largely meaningless, and if you had a unified set of rates and thresholds landlords and investors would pay the same as working people, only the new rates wouldn’t be as high as 20+8, 40+2 etc.

I would never get elected.

I'm retired on a pension but sometimes can do incidental work checking acedemic references etc. Often people think they're being generous offering £30/hr which post 62% tax is far less than I pay casual support work at home So instead I mop my own floors instead of paid work and the economy shrinks

Finland is running a pretty high deficit and consumption taxes are a lot higher. 13.5% on food we would zero rate and 25.5% on most everything else.

They just have *considerably* higher tax rates on average earners than we do (as do both France and Norway).

Nigel Lawson equalised IT and CGT (with an indexation relief so he wasn’t taxing inflation) so Kemi could hardly complain if Rachel Reeves did the same. As Lawson said, the rate difference encourages trickery and distorts investment decisions.

We must then wonder loudly why voters are so ready to listen to populists