How much of your shopping bill is tax?

-
You probably don't know, I certainly don't. So few of our receipts list VAT and none list other taxes such as fuel or alcohol duty. You know how much income tax, national insurance and council tax you pay, but you don't know how much you pay in indirect taxation.

Personally, I'm in favour of transparency in such matters. If the government is going to take my money off me, I want to know how much. So I was interested to see that Nigel Evans, Conservative MP for Ribble Valley, introduced a Private Members' Bill on the 1st of July this year. The Transparent Taxation (Receipts) Bill aims to make it a legal requirement that receipts list the total amount of tax paid.

Its second reading is on the 17th October and while Private Members' Bills hardly ever make it onto the statue books, it should be an interesting debate. I'm sure, like me, you'll be eager for the publication of Hansard on the 18th. No? Just me then.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Focusrite Saffire PRO 24 DSP and Windows 10

-
Snappy title, eh? I have one of these snazzy bits of kit plugged in to my PC for recording stuff in Presonus Studio One. It started to misbehave when I upgraded to Windows 10. There seems to be quite a few people around having some issues with the FireWire cards or the Saffire Mix Control software so when my setup started to act up, I hit the forums. The issue I was seeing was that Saffire Mix Control wouldn't open. The first thing I did was replace my FireWire card for one with a Texas Instruments chipset (TI TSB43AB22A) which seemed to fix things initially. But didn't. So it is possible that the original FireWire card (with VIA Fire VT6315 chipset) would be fine. I just can't be bothered to swap it back into the computer. The solution for me was to get Saffire Mix Control running in compatibility mode. I used the compatibility troubleshooter and the Windows 7 setting seems to work fine, Another issue that has shown itself is that I stopped getting sound out of the
Read more

Installing Chromium OS on a Dell Mini 9

-
I've had my Dell Mini 9 for 3 or 4 years now. It came installed with Ubuntu 8.10 and I've upgraded it every April and October ever since. This has been mostly fine (apart from the occasional WiFi glitch) until recently. I have been running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS since April, but recently system updates have been causing problems and last week I just couldn't get it to update properly at all. So, I thought I could either revert to Ubuntu 11.10, or try something else. As a Google Chrome user, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at Chrome OS, which the Dell team had conveniently ported for the Mini 9. It took far longer to install than expected due to a small but significant error in the installation. This led to a trawl of the interwebs for a fix. Here I present my mashup of useful information (with references at the end). If it doesn't work for you, please let me know and I'll investigate. Onwards: Download the archive (ChromiumOS_x86_April15_2012.img.
Read more

Commonwealth Games

-
I read this article by Michael Johnson the other day: his thoughts on the Commonwealth Games that have just finished in Melbourne. MJ could only talk of substandard competitors and the requirement of if you're going to prove you're the best, you have to compete against the best. It's a pretty poor attitude: best or nothing. No mention of people turning up and giving their all. Those people who don't get the millions in sponsorship required to be full-time, professional sportsmen or women, but rather have to train after work or at weekends. Real dedication in my eyes. There's no mention of sportsmanship or the joy of taking part or of pulling on the colours of your country. So what if someone was a second off world-best pace? They trained to the best of their abilities, turned up in Melbourne and said "hey I'm here and this is what I can do." Good on them I say and long may the Commonweath Games continue. No, the Commonwealth Games are not the World Ch
Read more