Total Lifetime Tax

How much will the average person pay in tax during their lifetime?  Find out in this TaxPayers' Alliance Research Note.

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Comments

[David Chester]

I have been interested in taxation and its effects on the national economy for many years. I recognise that many of us believe that smaller amounts of taxation would do us as individuals some good. However since governments need a certain amount of incoming public money, that it would be better not to avoid taxation completely but to modify its means of application to the macroeconomy as a whole.

More recently I have built a macroeconomic model and used it to investigate the effects of making changes to a stable economic system similar to that in parts of Europe.

This model is unique in that it is simple and its variations can be calculated by hand not computer, and that it is also sufficiently comprehensive as to cover all of the social/economic situation in which we live.

I work and live as a mechanical engineer and I have treated this model as an engineering system (like any other, such as used in my profession). The small number of assumptions are true of Western communities and the method of analysis completely mathematical. Consequently there is no way that preduice or policy can get into the "rules" by which it works and of which many come from within.

Although my model provides some interesting results about which one can draw conclusions, I find that these results are distasteful to most economists who expect to get the answers that they have previously decided to be true (but ain't necessarily so).

May I ask if you have a unit or group who deal with economic models and if they do so in an unpreducised way? If so, I would be very glad to share with them my model and its discoveries.

Another question is to do with different kinds of taxation and the influence of each kind. It seems to me that most organizations have not investigated even this simple aspect of taxation before they beging to make various claims about what is fair etc. Would your people care to make a comment about this - one that is posted on your web-site, and not simply an anti-tax approach?

Regards, David Chester

[howard scott]

Maybe people who have paid cumulatively a lot of tax in their lives say £250,000 should be exempted from paying any more. Their contribution would have far exceeded anything they could possibly have taken out of the economy and would have paid for enormous amounts of benefits in the form of health, education etc for others. Perhaps they should get time off for good behaviour. Not quite the same, but in France they have a law that nobody can pay tax in a year of more than 50% of their income (and I bet this comes down pretty fast in future).