Castle Aching

[brianusa]

14 minutes ago, Donw said:

Typically people think extra tax should be levied on other people not ourselves.

 

Those few words sum it up very well.  I am happy to pay taxes as long as they do some good (especially me.) and for good reasons.  I do object to those taxes going where they will accomplish little and will cost a lot.  The usual battle cry of 'soak the rich' is alive and well in the UK as well as the US.  My upbringing and schooling had a lot to do with our livelihood and our current well being but sadly a lot of our taxes go toward those with less success in their lives.  A local left wing councilwoman of a nearby big city sees big business as a money tree with riches to be plucked from its branches, irrespective of the fact that it employs a lot of workers at a market rate salary.  To object to reckless spending, brings cries of elitism or racism despite millions that are being spent on welfare and other governmental benefits thanks to a high tax rate.  At the rate of published population increase in the near distant future, who will there be to continue subsidise  the growing problem?

         Brian.

[Nearholmer]

Arguing about the rights and wrongs of progressive taxation on a railway modelling forum is unlikely to lead to an increase in the sum of human happiness, so I’m posting the notice below as a reminder to myself not to do it.

 

Tempting as it is.
 

 

 

Edited November 25, 2019 by Nearholmer

[brianusa]

Agree with you Kevin, as long as I have the last say!

     Brian

[Regularity]

As railway modellers, we are unusually well placed to see this in action (inaction?)

 

Join a local club. Pay you subs. Look around.
 

For some members, it is a social event: a chance to chat.

For others, a chance to use the test track as they don’t have such a facility at home.

There are those who will work on the “club layout” because they don’t have the money or space for anything at home, but by pooling resources they can be involved in building one and in sharing skills and learning.

Some may (sadly!) simply want to flaunt their collection of bought models. (I have seen this.) 

But the point is, all pay their equal dues: all get something out of it.

 

Same with the basic principles of taxation.

 

Edited November 25, 2019 by Regularity

[Malcolm 0-6-0]

I must admit that I have no idea what Ms Wu was promoting, my eyes were drawn elsewhere ............. 

[runs as required]

Instead of WotW, I steeled myself to watch Panorama earlier this evening about the concentration camps in the Khazak minority Muslim areas of China. Are the Leaked documents and personal experiences of 'the greatest incarcerations since the Holocaust' genuine or are they, as claimed by the Chinese Ambassador in London, just Fake News? 

 

There is a railway background of sorts to this: 

During the 1990s I was part of a team from Kings Manor, Univ. of York sponsored by the British Council for a 3 year exchange with Beijing on techniques for deriving 'Economic benefit from Conserving Historic Cities'. When they discovered our interaction with the York NRM, our Chinese colleagues went to great trouble to book us by rail travelling around NE China: Qingdao, Jinan province, Chengde and down to Nanjing, Suzhou and Shanghai.

My favourites were the atmospheric overnight journeys in East German built sleeping cars (where the elderly lady attendants busy with hot tea jugs could speak German!). A good deal of steam was still operational in the north - with friendly footplate invitations.
Shanghai/Suzhou/Nanjing boasted very sophisticated double deck expresses.

 

I found it very humbling: the Academy high-ups (all older than me) were Professors who, at the hands of the Red Guards, had spent 30 years in exile labouring at planting rice through Mao's 'Cultural Revolution'. Now they were enthusiastically trying to propagate conservation of valued cultural places (in the face of opposition from rapacious city Mayors). I made close friends with a Daoist Prof who drew all his presentations in the dust on site with a stick he'd find. (I 'borrowed' this mode with much success).

He'd actually managed to conceal his most treasured artefacts from the Guards but had to lead them beating him with bamboos across his site on a sacred mountain to plausible looking 'seconds' to smash with their hammers . 

 

We first visited Beijing just a year after the Tiananmen Square massacre - squeamishly avoiding the joints in the paving slabs. We  wandered also around the still ruined areas of the Summer Palace pillaged by the punitive expedition of we Europeans and the US following the 1899/1900 Boxer Rebellion. It was interesting how these  - and the sites of the Japanese invasion of the 1930s, were the areas the Chinese debated most over whether to conserve or not. 

Discussion there and in the placements we arranged in Britain in places like Berwick, Co Durham, the West Riding, Wolverhampton and the Black Country provoked lastingly memorable dialogues.  

dh

 

 

Edited November 26, 2019 by runs as required
formatting

[TT-Pete]

7 hours ago, Hroth said:

 BTW Has anyone sorted out what the "sepia" segments are all about?

 

Flash-forward sequences. So you have the here-and-now with the Martians going all postal on us, then the "some years hence" sections where the Martians are gone, but effects of Martian terraforming (marsforming?) are being felt.

 

Bored with it now.

 

[Allegheny1600]

 

 

 

 

8 hours ago, Regularity said:

I won’t go into all the maths, and you can cut things different ways, but someone earning 4 times the average wage pays 11 times the amount of income tax.

I feel for people like that, the ones I don't have any sympathy for are those who earn 40 times the average wage yet pay barely as much tax as you or I.

Top sports-folk, investment people, high-level property, senior management and so forth. Heck, senior doctors/consultants even get into this transferring your earnings abroad in order to pay little or no tax - it's criminal.

IF the folk who should pay tax in the UK, paid it, then the amount required from the rest of us would be substantially reduced.

[Annie]

[Compound2632]

Income tax, 1905: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1905/apr/12/income-tax. 5%.

 

[Hroth]

6 hours ago, TT-Pete said:

 

Flash-forward sequences. So you have the here-and-now with the Martians going all postal on us, then the "some years hence" sections where the Martians are gone, but effects of Martian terraforming (marsforming?) are being felt.

 

Bored with it now.

 

 

Agreed, completely senseless. At least it'll be all over BEFORE Christmas.

 

 

1 hour ago, Annie said:

 

The Universal Translator made a mistake when they asked the previous Earthling to direct them to someone in charge.....

 

[St Enodoc]

11 hours ago, Regularity said:

I won’t go into all the maths, and you can cut things different ways, but someone earning 4 times the average wage pays 11 times the amount of income tax.

I read only today that the highest-paid 1% in the UK contribute 29% of the total income tax revenue.

[Regularity]

3 hours ago, Allegheny1600 said:

I feel for people like that, the ones I don't have any sympathy for are those who earn 40 times the average wage yet pay barely as much tax as you or I.

Top sports-folk, investment people, high-level property, senior management and so forth. Heck, senior doctors/consultants even get into this transferring your earnings abroad in order to pay little or no tax - it's criminal.

IF the folk who should pay tax in the UK, paid it, then the amount required from the rest of us would be substantially reduced.

Aye. Nothing wrong with earning lots of money: it's what you do with it that matters, and that starts with paying taxes!

Personally it's not paying taxes that I object to (it is how we pay for a civilised, well ordered society with a great deal of freedom), but how they are spent. I say spent, I mean wasted...

 

If I may correct you:

Quote

Heck, senior doctors/consultants even get into this transferring your earnings abroad in order to pay little or no tax - it's criminal.

I know quite a few of those my (soon to be ex-)wife being one of them, and I don't know any who are doing this. OK, they might not own up to it, but most of them are not that savvy financially, and I know one of their advisors who tells me on the QT that most "senior doctors/consultants" as you call them are actually finding things tight, despite their income.

Also, the point is that it often isn't criminal, in terms of breaking any statute law as opposed to "moral" feelings.

Not in the UK.

The UK is a haven for people wishing to avoid tax, via the various "off-shore" financial islands which are Crown Dependencies/Overseas Territories (Cayman Islands, Bermuda, Virgin Islands, etc) which if included within the broader definition of the UK's financial services makes the UK the most opaque financial centre in the world. And despite rumours started by Terry Christian, there is no new EU Directive coming into force on January 1st 2020: this is already in place. There are a couple of minor tweaks still to be implemented, but the UK's status as a conduit to tax-havens will remain, whether we leave or remain.

 

[Regularity]

4 minutes ago, St Enodoc said:

I read only today that the highest-paid 1% in the UK contribute 29% of the total income tax revenue.

I am not in that 1% - not even in the top 5% - but were I in that bracket, I would not object. After all, I would rather have free at point of use access to health, roads, refuse collection, lit roads, etc.

[Nearholmer]

Regularity

 

Couldn't agree more. And not empty words, I can assure you.

 

I can never remember the exact quotation from Bill Bryson when summing-up why he'd decided to settle in the UK, but it went something like: "On balance, I would rather live in a country with a universal health service than one where my local post office holds a meet-and-greet open day every year.".

 

Kevin

[Edwardian]

 

[Regularity]

5 minutes ago, Edwardian said:

 

That song is further away from us now than they were from the pregrouping era when they wrote it!

[Donw]

I feel it is morally wrong to avoid paying a fair amount of tax whether one is a billionaire employing clever accountants, a highly paid professional using clever schemes, a tradesman doing jobs for cash off the books or someone on benefits doing causual work undeclared, they all are cheating those of us who are honest. Note the first two are probably not breaking the law. I feel these loopholes should be closed.

I do feel some sympathy for the likes of footballers, artists etc. who may have a very short career. If you earn say £1m plus over two years and then your career is over you may need to live on that for some time. So a means of averaging the income over say five years may be reasonable.  

The tax people can be very unreasonable, one year when we moved there was quite a gap between selling one and buying another. The proceeds from the sale earned quite a bit of interest  and the tax due on it was £700 which I fully accepted. However at the end of the tax year I was advised I would be changing to a tax on the previous year basis so although the money had been used to buy a new property they were demanding  another £700 based on the prvevious year. I phoned them up and explained the money had gone their response was well you wont be taxed on that next year. It took a lot of time and trouble getting them to accept that in changing the tax basis I was being charged double on a one off benefit.  

Don

 

Edited November 26, 2019 by Donw
typing

[runs as required]

Thank you!

But I mustn't have been into irony - I never noticed it was a video shot in freezing winter.

[Compound2632]

How was income tax collected, c. 1905?

[Edwardian]

Just come across this .....

 

 

 

[runs as required]

Gosh interesting 1900 film!

No time to watch it all now ... but desperately sad optimism at the turn of the new century - how many of those Charlie Chaplin look-a-likes will survive WW1 ? 

Lots of smoke haze; no traffic, not even a tram.

 

Andrew Marr looks so young

What will 2019 look like in 2100?

dh

[Hroth]

21 minutes ago, Edwardian said:

Just come across this .....

 

 

 

 

I'll have a full look when I have time later today but, on viewing the first minute or so, the cinematic equivalent of the GoogleEarth car seems to be attracting a great deal of interest from the youths in the street. I suppose two very new technologies at once would have that effect!

 

Also, doesn't Andrew Marr look young...

 

(I appreciate that he's not a 1900 participant )

[webbcompound]

18 minutes ago, runs as required said:

Lots of smoke haze; no traffic, not even a tram.

 

 

although where do you think the camera is mounted?

[Hroth]

26 minutes ago, runs as required said:

What will 2019 look like in 2100?

 

Thats being optimistic!

 

6 minutes ago, webbcompound said:

although where do you think the camera is mounted?

 

I thought it might have been a car or one of those electric taxis, and didn't notice the vehicle was following the tramlines, the film was rather over-exposed and the wires were invisible too.

 

1900....  Still Victorian!