Why your taxes are about to go up by at least 30%

Unlike me, you probably have a life and so don’t spend your time reading through 100-200 page government reports. But sometimes, amidst all the bureacratic blether produced by our over-paid, over-pensioned civil servants, there is the occasional gem. One I recently tripped over was a table of figures showing our Government’s projected tax revenue for the next few years. Our great leaders expect to take around 30% more in tax by 2016-7 than they do today. It’s probably quite understandable that the Coalition doesn’t talk too much about this figure preferring to hide it away where nobody can be bothered to find it.

Originally when the Government produced this 30% figure, it was hoping (praying?) that economic growth would drive tax revenues up. But this isn’t happening now and isn’t likely to happen for a few years. Yet our national debt is already £1trn. Even with the projected 30% increase in taxes, debt will shoot up to £1.3trn by 2016. If the 30% tax increase doesn’t happen, we will get into a ‘death spiral’ where increasing debt leads to increasing interest payments leads to more debt and so on.

The Government is between a rock and a hard place. It has to have 30% more in taxes; economic growth will not give this increase; so the Government will have to massively raise the taxes we pay. But when it does raise taxes, this will take money from our pockets and stifle economic growth reducing the tax take and pushing the country into another death spiral – more taxes leads to lower growth leads to lower tax revenues leads to the need to increase tax levels and so on.

There are solutions to this problem and they are not complicated. But they would require a great Chancellor and a great PM – all we have are two self-serving, arrogant, incompetent fools. So, prepare for Britain to go into a death spiral.