The obscene Institution of ‘ability to pay’

I received this from a correspondent yesterday. It is food for thought.

“From my contract work, more evidence of the tax collectors’ wicked approach: He won’t come after your because your tax planning is fraudulent per se. You’ll attract their attention based largely on how much more they estimate they can squeeze out of you relative to the associated collection costs of the squeezing. That is, so called tax avoidance is not seen by the tax collector as a moral crusade. It’s pure revenue generation. So taken up to the very large scale of the likes of Amazon, Google, Facebook etc. there will be a ‘negotiation’ on their so called ‘tax avoidance’, related to how much more they are able to pay before they’ll simply ramp down their business activity and wealth production. The amount one is able to pay and the effort the HMRC are prepared to devote to the investigation will both meet at this ‘break point’.

“Here is more evidence of the obscene institution of taxation based on ability to pay – the break point is determined by the point where business will stop operating and the hard working self employed go back onto benefits, and all iterations in between. On this observation alone, how much more will be dead weight losses from total revenue collected, to add to all the other monstrous losses totting up?

Taxation is the root cause of bankruptcy and unemployment.*

Sure, there are other causes. Tax is the biggest.

* Editor’s comment: HMRC is the largest single initiator of bankruptcy proceedings.