How to Evade Tax and Get Away With It

courtesy of Tescos

Cheap booze! Gotta love it, because it's booze and it's cheap.

However, there is something wrong with cheap booze; no, it's not the gangs of feral youths, pissed off their head from half a shandy who will undoubtably rape your mum given half the chance, or the £3b/year cost to the NHS.

No, it's worse: it's tax evasion, on a rampant scale, being aided-and-abetted by Tescos (and other supermarkets), those cheeky bastards!

How much is £1 worth?

See, most people would answer the above 'a quid'. And thats why most of us are poor.

Rich people would say 'it depends': on how much it costs to get that quid, how many quids you already have, how many pounds you need, when you're going to get the pound, and various other factors, one of which is how much tax you're going to have to pay on it.

For an example, lets change the tax rate to something less confusing than 17.5%: lets say that everything has a VAT of 10%, except booze, which has a duty of 50% instead.

Now, you earn £1 on bread, or clothes, or newspapers or bogroll or anything other than booze, and (ignoring production costs etc) that £1 is worth 90p to you, as 10% of it is tax actually, something that cost 90p before tax and that then takes a 10% tax would come to 99p, and to cost £1 after tax it's original value would have had to have been 91ish-pence, but fuck it I'm going to ignore that for the sake of simplicity

But, you earn £1 on booze, and it's only worth 50p to you, 'cos that's how much you get to keep after tax.

Obviously, then, a quid made on bread is worth more to you than a quid made on booze; it's less efficient to earn money on booze...

E.g., imagine you spend £3 on cider, and £3 on bog roll (cos cider gives me the squits): thats £1.50 Tesco keeps on cider, and £2.70 it keeps on bog roll, for a total of £6 received and an after-tax net income of £4.20.


"Bingo!" say the execs at Tescos, "we'll lower the price of booze and subsideze it with an increase across the board on other products".

So this is what happens: you're pleasantly suprized to find that you only have to spend £1 on the cider, then slightly miffed to have to spend £5.70 on bog roll, but you can't be arsed to buy your cider from one supermarket and your loo-roll from another, and anyway the total bill is still £6, so fuck it.

Tesco gets to keep 50p of that money spent on cider (after 50% duty) and £4.43 from the bogroll (after 10% VAT) for a total after-tax net income of £4.93, which is more than £4.20, so a win for Tescos by effectively transferring pounds from products where they would have to pay 50% tax to other products where they only have to pay 10% tax.

Those clever gits!

In fact, if you spread the increase thinly across products no-one will really notice that they're a bit more expensive, especially if Tescos shares some of this goodness with it's customers: e.g., for every pound lost due to cheapening the alcohol (that pound was only worth 50p to Tescos, remember), only 70p extra will be made on other goods (that's worth 63p to Tescos after 10% VAT), resulting in us customers paying 70p more on other goods for every £1 less spent on booze, for a net saving to us of 30p for every pound we would have spent on booze whilst Tescos make 13p more per pound-we-would-have-spent-on-booze.

What?

OK, the end result is cheaper overall prices for us customers, and higher net income for Tescos, with the added benifit that they can attract customers with the promise of lower booze. Everybody wins!

Except the government; because this scheme works by avoiding (or, you could say, evading) the duty (also known as tax) on alcohol, the government misses out on some tax revenue at a time when it reeeeeeeally needs money and probably isn't in a mood to tolerate what amounts to large-scale tax-evasion being co-ordinated by the supermarkets.

No, counter-intuitively enough, you DON'T like cheap booze (this statement sanctioned by the government)

Of course, this is a sticky situation for the government. Times are tough, and we want to save money and quite like the option of getting pissed every now and again with our mates on the cheap. The government are being blamed for times being tough and don't want to piss us off. Yet, the government effectively has to tell us that either taxes are going up to compensate for this new, exciting, world in which Tescos helps us evade tax, or we're going to have to lose our only-recently-aquired cheap booze. "Boo!" either way.

So, here's what I think is going to happen.

The government are going to approach newspapers and say that they will grant interviews with high-level figures, invite the reporters to all their meetings, and give them sound-bites from the PM, BUT only if they tow the 'cheap booze is bad' line. Any newspapers caught trying to point out that 'mostly drunk teens don't rape peoples mothers' or 'if you increase the price of booze beyond the point where youths can afford, some of them might get jobs ohwaittheyarentallowedto they might start nicking stuff to buy booze' won't get invited to the press conferences or granted interviews with Officer Highup, and therefore will have a harder time actually writing articles.

So, furnished with Official Figures given to them in interviews with Important People, we get articles like the one I linked to earlier, bemoaning the cost of alcohol to the NHS whilst carefully avoiding mentioning that the £3 billion/year cost is easily off-set by the in excess of £7 billion/year claimed in alcohol duty so that the government will keep talking to them and giving them a hand writing their articles

(btw, that source: download the XL spreadsheet, and it's in tab A2, 7.278 UOM in the period 04-05 from alcohol where UOM = Units Of Mystery, which are only refered to as being 'in real terms'; from tab A1b, which is measured in £millions, a quick addition confirms a total from-alcohol-duty income of somewhat in excess of £7billion)

So, my prediction is:

• an increase in newspaper articles mentioning:




• The total cost of alcohol to the NHS and thus taxpayer, and how this could be avoided if only alcohol cost less, thus discouraging 'binge drinking'


• emotive examples of a small number of crimes committed by people who had binge-drunk, followed by figures of total number and/or cost of alcohol-related crimes, subtly implying that all alcohol-related crimes were committed by people pissed out of their heads because they'd binge-drunk cheap booze from Tescos


• shocking stories, with emotive details, or how Johhny Teen raped someones cat 'because he was pissed', probably with Wild Speculation as to how many feral youths might rape our cats if they can afford a bottle of scrumpy (answer: ALL OF THEM!)


• Expert Opinion from Experts in the Alcohol Business (i.e., landlords) who's completely unbiased opinion which they're offering for free as a service to society is that Tescos selling cheap booze is a Bad Thing




• whilst religiously avoiding mentioning




• the fact that, according to the government, alcohol duty is more than alcohol's cost to society, effectively admitting that duty isn't an exercise in internalization so that we don't blithely overspend, but rather an exercise in taxing us a lot on our hobbies because we won't exactly stop doing it and therefore because they can, the cunts


• suggesting that if someone goes out and gets pissed and beats someone up, they're probably just an arsehole who likes both beating people up and getting pissed, and if he couldn't afford to drink he'd probably just beat someone up, steal their money, buy booze, and then beat someone else up for fun


• finishing the stories that a nice police representative helped you write by answering all your questions with 'but then he got pissed in a pub, not off of cheap supermarket booze, so it's kind of irrelevent', or with anything other than 'therefore cheap booze is bad boo!'


• mentioning inconvenient facts about the crime stats, such as 'the person who binge-drinks 27 pints and is still capable of beating someone up is an exception, not a representative example of people who commit crime whilst drunk


• suggesting that some, let alone most, underage drinkers don't commit crimes (except underage drinking)'


• sarcastically focusing on 'unintended consequences', such as people who are too young to legally work stealing to buy expensive alcohol, or a likely increase in illegally imported booze in response to it's rise in price


• pointing out that the landlords probably are biased by a cheap stay-at-home-where-you-can-smoke competitor


• relatedly: interviewing the brewers to see what they think




• Culminating in a Sun/Express 'campaign' to 'save us from the horrors of cheap booze'


• A compliant government, democratically bowing to our demands and passing minimum-price laws


• but not on spirits, that's what they drink

tl; dr?

So, in summary, the government will manipulate the media into manufacturing a demand for less cheap booze, and then pass minimum-price laws so that they can carry on taxing us for something that they know we won't give up. The bastards.

Free speech*

*Some terms and conditions apply.

This is weird. I don't like the BNP, racist fuckwits that they are, but I was under the impression that 'valid political parties' had gotten themselves excempt from laws such as this, on the grounds that suppressing or controlling political groups is tantamount to censorship: you can't form a group to politically discuss X.

A common argument against censorship is that what starts off to, say, prevent child-porn, will then be 'expanded' to prevent bestiality and other 'obscenities' before then being expanded further to suppress terrorism, then racism, then glorification of crime.

Sounds natural, until you realize just how much that covers: according to the people who censor the telly, glorification of crime, for example, includes anything that condones or glamorises violent, dangerous, seriously antisocial behaviour, or crime; anything explaining how to commit a crime^[1].

The problem there is that as 'crime' includes, say, refusal to pay tax, attempting to overthrow the gov', organized civil disobedience (smoking in pubs, maybe), and so on, then the law essentially is that you can't use the telly to suggest/co-ordinate civil resistance to the government: the government is in charge, challenging that is illegal, and thus it is illegal to publicly discuss ways to challenge it (excepting via the non-functional Electoral System). Hell, it sounds like it forbids mentioning WikiLeaks on the telly, as that explains how to break the censorship laws.

Or broadcast child porn, which is the reason touted out whenever the TV censors need justification.

Anyway, in order to safeguard at least themselves against totalitarianism, I was under the impression that political parties were excempt from certain laws, such as censorship and racism. After all, if the political parties of the 60's were subject to public decency or corruption of minors (e.g., 17-year-old's) acts, then they wouldn't have been able to discuss the decriminalization of homosexuality.

So it's odd seeing the BNP, who, for all that they're assholes, are a political party, being held to the race-relations laws, given that that would kinda destroy them.

You may form a political party for the decriminalization of gays, but, by jove, you can't do so in such a way that condones homosexuality for that is illegal.

You may form a racist political party, but, by jove, you may not do so in a racist way.

Hmm... I wonder if you could get "you may form a political party to actually give power to the people, but, if our broken electoral system doesn't work, you may not suggest that people take power, for that is illegal. By jove."?

(Oh look, apparently you can: for all their genuine political complaints, and for all the political cheating by the UK government, for a while some separatist Irish political parties were censored within the UK.)

On the other hand, given that their proposed change is to omit the whites-only requirement but have a requirement that every member "bona fide supports and agrees with each of the Principles of the Party", I'm not sure how that'll work:

Wikileaks

Some guys from Wikileaks have given a talk which I think is relatively interesting as it gives an insight into how the media works, tho it's over an hour long. Also, Wikileaks itself is quite interesting, and worth checking-out.

Wikileaks (site currently more-or-less down) is a website that acts as a 'clearing house' and secure drop-off point for leaks, ranging from internal business documents to suppressed newspaper articles to documents protected by the Official Secrets Act, and they're currently trying to create an 'information safe-haven' in order to forcibly bring transparency to the governments and power-groups of the world. They also ultimately want some kind of open-source/wiki approach to fact-checking, verification, etc., presumably to deal with the massive over-head of analyzing all of the data.

Some interesting bits from the talk:

They mention a company (Trafigura) 'allegedly' dumping toxic waste off of the ivory coast: a fact which made the front-page of the Guardian, thus earning them a Secret Gagging Order; the BBC, the Times, the London Independent, also had to remove stories about the incident.

If you're wondering why you haven't heard about any of this... well, it's because it's been censored, so it hasn't been on the news: a Secret Gag Order is essentially 'meta-censorship', where you're not only forbidden from reporting on a certain topic, but you're also forbidden from reporting the fact that you've been gagged... the UK apparently has 2-300 of these currently in effect. We can't tell if they're justified or not, as we don't know what they're about (this is why meta-censorship is bad), but New York recently passed legislation basically saying that a UK libel order cannot be upheld in New York, and similar USA-wide legislature is partway through being passed; that's how bad the UK is on 'thou-cannot-say' laws (the worst liberal democracy, as the Wikileaks guys call us)...

Anyway, at the height of the censorship, an MP had to actually stand up in the House of Commons and read out the URL of the Wikileaks page with the censored stories on it -- colons and slashes and all -- to get the word out about it, which I thought was kinda cool.

What else... they mentioned their 911 pager messages: released in 'delayed real-time', they are 'an objective snapshot of communication of the time, including NYPD, doctors, secret service, etc.'. Or an attention-grabbing stunt, depending on how cynical you want to be. Still, it's interesting that there was, for some reason, a wide-spread intercepting and logging of pagers (including that of civvies).


They also host leaks from the European Union Institute for Security Studies; according to the Wikileaks guys, the EUISS is a think-tank on security, well-listened to by the EU, who suggest, basically, that 20% of the world are 'globalizers' (1st world countries, trans-national corportations, etc), whilst the other 80% are 'localizers', i.e. 'poor'; and that said 80% are unhappy (probably at being so poor), and are 'limiting the 20%'s wealth', which -- according to the EUISS -- neccesitates an EU military, so that they can extract global resources (e.g., rainforests) from their owners who otherwize might not let the 20% use them; an approach which is apparently tantamount to declaring war on the poor. The report where they suggest all this is available on Wikileaks.

Another leak is a high-level US special-ops hand-book: amongst others pieces of advice, the International Monetary Fund is described as 'a financial weapon' to be used to exert America's will on foreign countries. It's just as interesting that this hasn't been reported despite being leaked and there for the reading -- this (potentially juicy and newspaper-selling) leak was not picked up on by the press, presumably because the report is 200-odd pages long, written for above-averagly intelligent people, and full of military acronyms: hence journalists didn't bother reading and reporting on it.

The Icelandic loan book was also leaked, showing who was withdrawing all their money from the Icelandic Bank before it went bust.

Iceland is so small that everyone was effected by the banking crisis. The leaking of the book allowed them to look at which insiders took all their money and ran before the country went bust; i.e., who knew that the ship was sinking; who 'sold them into debt-slavery'.

5 minutes before Iceland's equivalent of the BBC went on-air to report this, they got an injunction: so, as they went on-air, they simply posted up a picture of Wikileaks, hint-hint nudge-nudge.

And this is why Wikileaks is trying to persuade Iceland to become an Offshore Publication Centre.

For those not familiar with the dodgier side of economics, an Offshore Finance Centre is a small island without any large source of income that agrees to pass a very convenient set of laws -- no money-transfer logging, no money-seizure, no public records, low(ish) tax, etc. -- in order to allow them to be a nice hidey-hole for rich people who don't want to follow laws, or pay too much tax.

An Offshore Publication Centre would essentially be the same, but for information: Sweden's source-protection laws, Belgium's journalist-protection laws, the US's 1st amendment (protection of free speach), etc. In return, Iceland could pick up some well-needed cash from the hosting/server fees.

Iceland, btw, has recently undergone some political upheaval, with riots on the streets and the government resigning and an early election putting a new party in power, all over the financial crisis. (Iceland had the worlds highest Human Development index, and now... well, now it does not. Iceland feels shafted by the bad guys, and bullied by the IMF and the UK (we're using their desired entry into the EU as a hostage to try to get them to pay us four times their GDP, which they apparently owe us, and using anti-terror laws to seize the Icelandic Bank's assets (hardly diplomatic...)), so the country has been somewhat 'radicalized' by the perception that they are the first 1st-world country to be a victim to globalization, with a bill nearly passing (tho the Wikileaks guys didn't say where... EU?) allowing for the military seizure of Icelandic assets in leu of payment (as usually happens to 3rd world countries)...


They also mention that it's not uncommon for Journalists to have quid-pro-quo deals with secret services/intelligence agencies: I'll report this for you, if you tell me such-and-such insider information...

An interesting watch, all-in-all.