Taxing issues

Always a difficult one - tax is extracted through so many variable methods and rates that its easy for politicians to lie about it. They are, again, trying to make it a central issue of the election campaign.

We don't care, though.

See, some people on benefits are given a Council tax benefit to help them pay it. Now, while they hand the money over, actually pay it to the local authority, really, that is one arm of the state giving money to another - central to local. That is, the burden of council tax is not falling on the person who pays it.

Likewise with the rest of us. We sell our skills and abilities to get money to live on, and achieve a market living wage. If our living standards fall, we either strike to push them back up, look for new work, or stop working as hard as we once did - that is, we try and restore the market price of our labour power. Thus, when taxes go up - as they did for me with national insurance last year - we push our wages up so that our take home pay compensates - which is, again, what happened to me.

That is, like the central government, our employers are giving us money to pay taxes. We pay them , legally and physically, but the real burden falls on our employers. Which is why they like taxc least of all.

So far as socialists are concerned - when we have common ownership, a sociuety administered for need that doesn't require money, there will be no taxes at all, and we can end the sham and simply have the conscious debate over allocation of the common resources - wouldn't that be much more sensible?