Evan loves tax!

[jackstarbright]

Despite the naff title, this program, which starts on R4 at 9am Monday, should be interesting.

Evan Loves Tax

As he explains in the trailer, we hate paying it but love the things it buys. The age-old dichotomy.....

Thanks for the pointer, jackstarbright. I'll experiment with the podcast thingie ... .

animula - it's also repeated tonight at 9.30pm.

Have listened. He has a good way with an analogy. I liked the logs one.

Yes - the 'north sea oil' log the 'peace premium' log and of course the 'pension fund' log. All burnt now....!

Today's programme was good too! Why is tax so complicated? And tax changes to 'signal fairness' rather than actually being fair (there's no point in being fair if no one notices).

Geat stuff.

This sounds really interesting, could do with being shown to a much wider audience, for example on BBC tv instead.

The recent media stories really show how little people understand about tax and what it pays for, all those complaining about their underpayments don't seem to realise that without tax we don't have public services.

You'd have loved the first episode, toriana. Evan discussed just that. Do people want to pay higher taxes for a great public sector?

They covered the fact that we haven't, ever, had a real debate about that, but that there is a strong suspicion that people say they would like to do that (pay more taxes ...) but then vote no. And they used the "Bristol experiment" as an example. But they did say you couldn't, wholly, extrapolate a simple "no to taxes" from that.

And he looked at the whole "Effect-of-the-horror-of-1992" on New Labour causing them to evade having that public debate.

It was done pretty niftily.

Today's was good, too.

Here's a thing - middle class people, apparently, are the ones who mind paying tax the least. Maybe there's a spin opportunity in that - make it common knowledge and then market loving tax as an aspirational thing. Kind of like a bugaboo, or pasmina, or something.

Aspirational? Don't make me laugh. Middle class people do mind paying tax just as much as everyone else. But they have also have a strong sense of social responsibility, of fairness and, besides, would be far too polite to complain.... Because of this, because there will be no riots or downing of tools, they are routinely taken for granted & expected to cough up without blubbing. As a middle-income earner myself (no six-figure salary sadly) I look at the enormous amount of tax I've paid at the end of every year and wonder why the letters M.U.G aren't stamped on my forehead

Ah, but maybe you're not middle-class enough, Chil1234?

(Just teasing - you see how it might work? Agree, it needs a bit of tinkering with ... .)

My take from the research was that all classes broadly saw paying tax as 'good' from a social responsibility point of view.

But the middle class tended to feel that they got 'reasonable value' from public services. Less affluent people seemed to be less satisfied.

Anecdotally, my nurse sister claims that middle class people do tend to get a better service from the health service. They are more likely to turn up on time for appointments, demand second opinions, take their medicine and act on advice. There is probably a similar argument to be made in education.

Yes, Jackstarbright, that was definitely in there. And I think you're right. I was sitting listening, thinking about all the things I get out of taxes. Especially, just now, education, but lots of other things, too.

They did make the point that a lot of people don't make the jump between what they pay and what they get. And the chappie they had on did particularly single out the lower tax payers for that.

I must admit, my inclination was to add on lots of riders, such as "Is that wrong? Isn't it plausible that lower-tax payers may well be justified in their perceptions? ie. living in areas where there is less spent on maintenance, and in schools with greater needs, and indeed, specific needs not being met? And won't they use some of the things tax is spent on less, often because they can't afford to access some of those things?"

It's a great programme for generating discussion, though. I think we should stealthily get more people listening.

I thought the Royal Festival Hall analogy was fairly good, but would perhaps have worked better visually.

I was wondering if it was chosen to flag up the whole debate about (middle class/not just middle class - you decide!) arts funding. Which always depresses me utterly when it comes up, but they kind of avoided that particular bone of contention, and managed to stick with NHS, transport, prisons, and education. I was glad about that.