Nothing but a drain on some of society. Those who pay a fair slice of tax quite rightly get the most worked up about what it gets spent on. Some simple stuff for those on a fixed income in case you didn't know. Say I was a shop owner with 3 shops instead of a PAYE salaried bod. I start a limited company as an umbrella for my shops. The Missus, co-director, sits at home mucking about, but I pay her just enough to be under the threshold for NI, but enough that although she doesn't pay a bean, she still gets a stamp towards her pension. And a tax free 9,000 (or whatever it is) goes in our pot. Then I pay myself a salary - just enough to pay some tax and NI - say about £1,000 a year. This keeps you in a pile they'll never get round to looking at. Your accountant (who they deal with) has two offices each in a different tax area. Every 5 years they move your accountant contact to the other office. More security. And another £9,000 in the bank. That's £18K for me and £1K for the taxman. I drive my car around between my shops overseeing it and a great deal of private milage might get lost in that. say 20,000 miles at 50p/mile. another £10,000 for me tax free. That's £28K to me., £1K to the taxman. Obviously I have to run my empire from somewhere. That'll be my study. You can see it get's used a lot - the wife gets £9k use out of it and me too in the evenings. So I'll claim 1/4 of my fuel bills against tax too. That's another few quid. The employees - 6 to cover each shop = 18 employees working 16 hours per week each on minimum wage. We don't open on Sundays, I might have to pay them more! At those hours, I don't have to pay a jot of empoyers NI. In fact no tax or NI for any of them either because they don't earn enough. At the end of the year I've made some profit. In the good old days of gordon brown when he was new, there were about 3 years when he decided there should be no corporation tax paid on the first 10,000 of profit. Fot those years, you could take that 10,000 as dividends on your shares. I don't know what it is now. So £38K for me, £1K tax and NI, me and missus and 18 employees in my empire. If I make a bit more I'll pay a bit more, but no doubt there are many other ways to avoid paying too much. Then there's VAT of course. I had a VAT reg LTD co once. 99%turnover was profit. Vat was 17.5% which we had to hand over. UNLESS we ticked a different box. That way we charged at 17.5%, but paid at 12.5% (most in my sector had lots of costs) and didn't claim anything against costs. Say turnover was £100K, Vat charged would be £17.5K and Customs and excise got £12.5K. I pocketed the difference obviously. Every little helps. Easiest £5k to earn each year. That alone is as much as some people manage to earn in a year in their part time jobs, and just for using a different VAT scheme. And of course there's child allowance. And tax credits on such low incomes. I kid you not, it can be done though I didn't. The whole tax and benefit system is grossly unfair and seems to be more unfair the less you earn until there's a crossover between tax and benefits and an almighty scrap. Those above this level glide on. The rat race eh?
Footnote to say that if you are the shop owner, bigger rats - the property owner and the local council - grab the lions share of you profit for doing naff all. The higher you rise the easier it gets...
Then the system is your enemy, not the benefit scroungers. Stop the system!! Anarchy!!! Oops forgot me age there.
Whilst some of the maths is a bit off on today's rates, I can agree most of the above. Flip side is no holiday or sickness pay, no pension and risk...it's not all a walk in the park.
National insurance is around 7450 pa before you start to pay. What's wrong with using the wife's tax code, why should you pay more tax than required. Remember you earn't it so why would you do what ever you can to pay more tax - for what 9 kids and half a mil house.... Remember tax avoidance is legal, evasion illegal.
Yes but your not allowed to reclaim vat on purchases and if memory is correct only valid for certain turnover
is it end of this month we have ta get tax return in i cant remember , ive paid so much i cant afford a calender .
I can see there has to be advantages to starting a business or nobody would bother. I'm not complaining. And the maths were e.g. I'm out of touch, but probably no way out. Just saying, many people have good reason to accept the status quo. Others have goos reason to resent it, but the problem is more general than a few benefit scroungers justifying themselves by pretending their worthless, useless lives are enjoyable. Nothing wrong at all, I did the same for 20 years, that's why I know a bit about it. Point is the society has gone mad. How can someone theorically run 3 shops employing 18 people, earn £30-£40K themselves and pay £1K tax to cover all 20 of them. The answer is all the tax they're legally avoiding and the poor rate of pay they're legally paying. The 18 part time workers claim benefit - you can't live on 16 hours of minimum wage. The money comes from tax payers of whom this fictional businessperson hardly qualifies! So where's his virtually tax free profit come from? It's come from savings made on Tax and NI perhaps without which his business wouldn't work. So who's the biggest drain on the state, the workers in the shop, or the business owner? The only winner here is a goverment who can pretend there's such and such amount of employment when really it's a bunch of people on benifits and a tax avoider. Not much help to the country's coffers.
I didn't have expenses! Maybe 1% of turnover. Others in the sector were multi-national engineering co's
i know zed n then we got old , we have seen alot of change too ,my old gran saw two world wars horse n cart ta F1 n rides in my fast cars she loved it to , does make you wonder what the grand children n that generation will see, very scarey i say .
I started to watch it and then thought , you know what, why do it to yourself , its the media pick of a bunch of a cross section of our nation picking out the 'sterotypes' that the mass's want to see, name, shame and hang out to dry..............I see the other side to everyday, yes there is work out there, but some people can not get it for numerous reasons , yes even the cacky jobs, some live on peanuts and some take the michael, I think I have given similar examples of this on previous threads...........however more to the point I switched over to watch Stephen Fry ( I was recording it) from a form of purposful media persecution, with the above programme, to shocking scenes of persecution and intent to persecute saddening, enlightening and thought provoking all at the same time, well done Mr Fry documentry well made !
