I’m fed up of hearing about all this nonsense about the rich being amoral by avoiding paying their appropriate amount of tax. It stinks of jealousy and narrow mindedness that probably keeps the people making those comments where they are in economic terms.
Before anyone calls for my head, including HMRC or equivalent bodies in other parts of the world, let me be clear that I totally condemn tax evasion which is illegal. Tax avoidance on the other hand is a perfectly legal technique to reduce the tax an individual or company are liable to pay.
There is some merit to wishing that everyone pays the same proportion of tax regardless of income levels and I also see merit in that proportion rising the more you bring in (with a reasonable upper limit of course). However, it is hardly amoral for the rich or indeed anyone, to want to pay less using methods that are in line with the law and guidelines of the country from where that income is derived.
Not many people could claim that they actually want to pay tax, and I’m sure that a high percentage of those that do would be being less than honest with themselves.
If a rich person such as Sir Philip Green is paying less tax by living in Monaco and having his businesses in his wife’s name then good for him. If this is ‘wrong’ then we should be shouting at the Revenue for allowing such rules to exist in the first place, not at those smart enough to be taking advantage of them.
Let me turn this thing on its head (excuse the pun which you’ll understand in a moment). There exists a law in the UK from way back when, that putting a stamp with the Queen’s head on it upside down is counted as treason* and as such, punishable by the full force of the law. This is an actual active law in the United Kingdom. Would any sane, rational and reasonable person also insist that anyone caught doing this should be sentenced to life imprisonment?
*I know there is some contention as to whether this law is actually real or not. But for the purposes of that paragraph, it doesn’t really matter.
