Useful Information

Some close chums of Goldman Sachs have opened the Conservative election campaign in earnest by sending me one of the Chancellor's fraudulent annual tax summaries. It consists of a pie chart showing that a quarter of my taxes went on a big red slice called Welfare, thus stimulating my Daily Mail receptivity centres with the idea that more of my tax money is spent on scroungers than on state pensions, education, health or keeping me safe from Islamic terrorists and the beastly Russians. Unfortunately, the document is a little imprecise. There is, for example, no indication of how much Welfare spending goes to pay for idlers' plasma televisions and how much goes to top up low wages in the face of unrestricted rents. There is no indication of whether the money thrown at private companies to chivvy cancer patients into work counts as Welfare or as Business and Industry. There is no indication to show how much of the health budget goes on actual healthcare, or to show how much more could have gone on actual healthcare if Iain Duncan Smith's mother had been given a free abortion. There is, however, a list of figures, headed How your tax conributed to public spending and linking my tax payments to specific expenditures, with a note at the bottom stating that the figures show no direct link between my tax and any specific expenditures. There is, in addition, a redeemingly useful bit which tells me how to opt out of receiving any more annual tax summaries.