Lots of useful tips as to how to avoid overpaying tax to a bloated Governmental System. Surely the thing to do is change the system.
Don't get me started... well, you just did. One of the consequences of all the 'fiddling around the edges' that has gone on in the last 10 or 12 years is that the whole system is so much more complicated... the tax guides that are published every year get thicker and thicker... there are all sorts of 'little things' that are used to raise what I suspect are, relatively speaking, piffling amounts of the total tax take. Putting a tax on insurance premiums is one of my ‘favourites’... all the things like that take a huge amount of time and effort to administer... for what?
I could have written 'one of the unintended consequences of all the fiddling around the edges'... but I am sufficiently old and grey and cynical to imagine that it was all done with the full knowledge that there would be still more Government employment created, with incumbents who would vote for the Government who employed them...
Whilst it might, as a headline, be a very unpopular move, I do sometimes wish that some party would have the courage to say: "Right, we are going to stop all these complex bits and pieces, raise the basic rate of income tax, and we'll halve the number of Civil Servants that you are paying to administer it." I realise that this would be a tough message for the HMRC, etc., staff, who, as we have all agreed, are very decent and helpful folk, but how long can we go on paying for such complexity? And, it's only a short time ago that the basic rate was 25%... and yet everyone expects more from the Health Service, people are living longer and so drawing pensions for longer, and so we have to scrap the Harrier Force, decommission the Ark, and put the Prince of Wales into mothballs before we get any use out of it (the carrier, not King Designate).
Sorry, Mods, rant over. I'll just go and lie down in a darkened room for a bit... 