As a UK taxpayer, I recently received one of those online summaries of where the tax goes.
I wanted to see how much the typical tax contribution to European Union budget was, per head of the population. My figures are different from many of the tabloids.
Admittedly, I used that fount of knowledge (GQ) to convert the figure into an average UK salary statistic. But that's okay. GQ got their average UK salary figure of £27,271 from the Office for National Statistics, where it is based upon 21,653,000 people's earnings. It creates a tax bill for this average salary of around 19%, which I've rounded approximated to £5,000 per annum.
This ONS averaging means that brokers, who earned £133,677 on average, chief executives and senior officials (£107,703), aircraft pilots and flight engineers (£90,146) and marketing and sales directors (£82,962) are well above the average and their tax bills should be significantly higher.
At the other end of the scale are retail assistants (£10,296), hairdressers and barbers (£10,019), cleaners (£7,919), waiters (£7,554) and bar staff (£7,404). Their tax bill should, with annual allowances (but notwithstanding NI contributions), be almost zero.
Here's a table of the contributions:
And here's one of the numbers of taxpayers by lower limit income distribution (derived from HMRC data 2017-2018)
Using my tax bill average, the calculation for the European Union component is still 0.7%. That works out to being around £35 per year of an average UK taxpayer's bill. Yes, brokers and pilots pay significantly more and the retail assistants, hairdressers and bar staff don't pay any direct contribution.
I realise that the tax contribution is only a part of the leveraged contribution that the European Union has made to the UK, but it is the piece that has been used to run many of the arguments. A direct cost argument, rather than an added value argument.
No, I am not in denial, but I don't like being massively misled.
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