There's one for you, nineteen for me

Rant mode...

Comedian Jimmy Carr is in the news for using a tax avoidance scheme.  He has allegedly sheltered £3m per annum in the scheme, thereby probably avoiding tax in excess of £1m each year.

I have a small amount of sympathy for Carr.  Clearly he has been unfairly singled out when such practices are common place.  Apart from wealthy celebrities, practioners include major corporations (who will often be close in various ways to successive Governments), friends and families of politicians, and even the media proprietors whose newspapers occasionally expose this sort of thing.  The fact that none of these have received the Government opprobrium that has been heaped on Carr by the Prime Minister and others is a cause of interest.  

However, Carr has made the news and I don't want to sit on the fence here. What he has done is shitty. It is stealing from you and me. Admittedly, we have probably all done that in a small way at some point. But that doesn't make it alright and it doesn't detract from the fact that Carr is a very rich man who has made his wealth largely from the British people and who has systematically taken (apparently) several million pounds that rightfully belong to you and me.

Most of us pay a full'ish amount of tax and I hope most of us decline to defraud the country when the opportunity arises (for example when the plumber offers a discount for cash). Some will consider that naive, but bear in mind that if you are one of those people, then your actions are significantly worse than Carr's. At least what he did was legal.

And there is the crux of the matter.  Although what Carr did was legal, it was clearly unethical. What is it that people don't understand about taxes? Why do people think they are a bad thing? Is it because they read The Sun and Rupert Murdoch tells them that it is so? Taxes are necessary unless we want to live in a state of anarchy.

We can argue about the right rates and how they are spent, but in the meantime we should pay the amounts that the spirit of the law dictates (and here I'm talking to you, Vodafone, Barclays, Goldman Sachs, Philip Green, Tony Blair, etc, etc).

As I understand it, Carr is either a UK resident or makes the bulk of his earnings from the UK. Therefore, if he is earning on the order of £3m each year his marginal rate should be 52%. At least that is what the current tax legislation intends. Until his scheme was reported by The Times, Carr was apparently paying a marginal rate of somewhere around zero. As many people have pointed out, that was within the bounds of the letter of the law. Some people have gone further and argued that he is blameless for exploiting a loophole that is the responsibility of Government. They are wrong. Ethics are real. We make moral choices all the time that have nothing to do with "the letter of the law".

How many ways does it need to be said?  "Carr should pay 52%"; "Carr should pay a higher rate than someone on average wage"; "Carr should pay the same rate as someone on average wage"; "Carr should pay some tax"???  Take your pick depending on your political bent.  But don't tell me that it is OK to pay 0% on three million.  Not even George Harrison believed that.