My daily commute to work consists of driving around six miles a day and also consists of driving into pot holes that even a Challenger tank would struggle to get through. And year after year the roads get a cheap repair and subsequently end up as pot holes again within a few short months. And this in turn has me a) on the verge of a cataclysmic mental break down as my spine is shattered by what appears to be a meteor crater , and b) makes me wonder what the council’s authorities for our area are doing with our cash.
And so, upon arriving at work today on ungritted roads I made a few quick calculations as to how much of my monies have been taken from me.
So, here we go.
Okay, my yearly Income Tax payments work out to a staggering £3423. I’ve earned a pretty similar wage for the last ten years, which tells me that over the last ten years I’ve paid approximately £34,236 in Income Tax. It also tells me that after ten years of the same wage that I’m probably due a pay rise.
Then I looked at my National Insurance contributions. In a one-year period I paid £2073. Over ten years this comes in at a princely sum of £20,730.
So after spitting some tea over my desk as my calculator returned these numbers I then looked at my Council Tax bill.
My council tax for the last 10 years has been over £100 a month, but I rounded off at £140, the actual number these days is £159 but with fluctuations over the years I’ve rounded off to a more suitable number to accommodate the rises. My calculator returned a number of £14000 for ten years. Tea was then sprayed out of my nose and a meek cry squeaked from my throat.
Now, basing the above figure of £14,000, I then looked at the number of houses down my road, forty-four, and as all the houses down my road are the same, minus the occupants, the ten yearly Council Tax payments return at, and this made me pretty much launch my cup across the room, at £616,000. Remember, this is forty-four homes over ten years and I’ve been pretty generous in rounding off to the lower denominator.
Where I live, Wikipedia has the 2001 census as showing 14,732 residential homes. I appreciate that perhaps 60% of these homes either pay a lot less in Council Tax or get some form of support in paying it, yet still, if for the sake of being generous subtract 60% off we are left with 8,839 residential homes; now let’s be even more generous to the Council Tax that the remaining households pay and let’s say that they all pay £90 a month, quite a large deficit but I’m being generous, but now we are left with a monthly tax to the Council of £795,510.
Then over a ten month period of tax, as they so kindly allow us two months free of payments, we reach the figure of £7,955,100.
That’s the year done.
Okay, so 10 years?
Add another zero to that figure my friend. £79,551,000
And this is for a small town where the Christmas tree that the Council put in our town was dubbed by tabloids nationwide as “The Worst Xmas Tree In Britain” and now small businesses are rallying other businesses to put some of their earnings into a kitty so they can provide the next Christmas tree!
So where does our Council Tax go? Well, a breakdown of the taxation can be found here: http://www.canterbury.gov.uk/main.cfm?objectid=1416
Note that my tax is a touch higher per annum than the example shown on the Canterbury Council website, but do note that section “7” shows that the annual charge on this example is £1307.39 Then scroll your eyes up to section “6” and look at the breakdown of this tax.
And now look out of your window and wonder how on a national scale of taxation that this country can be in recession.
And remember I’ve only used Council Tax as a larger example – to show how this cartel aggressively take your hard earned money yet collects my landfill bin waste every fortnight and only provide enough recycling sacks per year to allow for 4 sacks of recycling waste a month.
I appreciate that the Council don’t just collect our bins, but I’m looking at the big picture. The one where surely the expenditure of Kent City Council cannot be above the cost of the tax paid across our little South Eastern county?
I’m basing all the above figures on a town that probably wouldn’t even be missed if it fell into the sea, I’m not including the larger cities, towns and villages in the area, I’m basing the above on a town with an estimated population of 35,188.
So with this in mind after having my skull smashed into the roof of my car repeatedly I started wondering about car fuel tax.
See the link below of how this is made up. http://www.petrolprices.com/the-price-of-fuel.html
This is ludicrous, how can the tax be over 60%?
Or how the cost of fueling your home so you don’t have to start pulling down your fences and torching them in a metal bin in your front room to keep warm.
Or the VAT on every item you purchase at a 20%.
Car tax. This is a big “Wow” for me, because again, with Council Tax payments and Car Tax payments I still can’t travel from A to B without my car breaking up like the Challenger Spaceship.
Cigarettes and alcohol – you can’t even kill yourself for cheap in this country.
And then you start getting really pissy and start looking at Congestion charges, Travel costs. TV licensing, the cost to use a public toilet, and I’m not talking about the fear of assault or STDs caught off the taps, airport costs, the cost of buying a house and so on.
The cost of living in the UK is now at a point where your wages are gone before you’ve even seen them. Disposable income is something we will tell our grandchildren about as we sit around a fire burning the coffee table and family albums.
Jesus H Christ, where is this all going? Can we smile? Or will that be taxed soon as well? But then again, the fact we are being raped of all that we earn; it makes it difficult to keep turning that frown upside down. It’s a good thing this country doesn’t have the same gun laws as the USA because this country is bleeding hard working folk dry. And there are only so much of us that you can consume before you end up in a revolt.
