I like buying stuff, so I was thankful when HMRC sent me a breakdown showing me how they have been spending the taxes on my income -- otherwise known as the stuff they bought with my money. Im a big fan of receiving such information, and I sincerely hope the government keeps it up since its vital if they ever hope to turn the UK into a democracy. However, the presentation wasnt very useful. It looked similar to the one here [1]. As you can see, they use a doughnut chart to convey the relative percentages of the different spending categories. Doughnut charts are just pie charts with a bite out of the middle, and pie charts are notoriously bad for this kind of stuff (use your favourite search engine to find out why -- heres the first result in my search as an example: [2]). To make it more convenient, I reformatted it into the bar chart labelled My tax spending according to the HMRC below. In it Ed. is education and Env is environment. Then I started thinking about it. The first thing I noticed (to be fair I noticed it in the doughnut chart too) was how much Im spending on welfare. It seems a lot, and I bet a number of tax payers in the UK seeing this will be very angry. It makes me wonder whether theres some ulterior motive presenting the budget in this way. That said, I dont mind buying welfare for my fellow human beings in need, and I was curious how this breaks down. So using my trusty search engine I came across [3] (as well as a bunch of other sites -- strange that its not very easy to find out how my money is being spent in detail; I wonder why that might be). So using the categories and data in [3], I split out the monolithic Welfare category into Caring for families with children, Caring for the unemployed and others on low incomes, Caring for older people, and Caring for the sick and disabled. I had to do a bit of number fudging, because the governments numbers on welfare spending dont add up when broken down by function according to [3] (Welfare is actually closer to 30% so I reduced all the functions by a bit to fit into the original government value around 25%). The update chart below is labelled My tax spending according to HMRC with welfare broken down (breakdown data fudged based on Institute for Fiscal Studies). It should be noted that [3] used the term benefits aimed at, whereas I chose caring for. I presume the government also uses the former, but I feel better thinking that my money is going towards caring for people rather than providing them with benefits. I wonder if there is any intention behind the usage of the word benefits. Looking at this chart, I actually feel pretty good that my money is being spent on lots of good things. I like health and education. I like caring for the elderly, sick, and otherwise vulnerable people. I value things like transport and culture. Maybe the categories arent exactly the ones Id want, but they are pretty close. However, thinking about the relative merits of each, Im not sure that the governments balance is the same as I would choose if I had a say. So then I made the chart labelled My desired tax contributions which has my preferred spend. The nice thing about this chart is that I didnt have to pander to voters, as the government does when its coming out with its budget. Nor am I constrained by existing contracts and such. So I realise that it may not be possible to rebalance to it overnight. However, it represents my current ideal, and Id back a political system aiming to achieve something approximating this. Id be happy to chat about any of the choices here, and love to hear other peoples preferences too. Im happy to share my Excel file with anyone wanting to make their own preference chart. I made the chart labelled Winners and losers when I was considering the similarities and differences in my values and the governments ones. The percentages in it are how much I would increase or decrease spending in each category by. It seems I care a lot more about the environment, overseas aid, housing & utilities, government administration, caring for families with children, culture (here it should be noted that in my chart above I separated sport out of culture and gave museums and libraries most of the budget. Sport got a big pay cut compared to current government spend), transport, caring for the unemployed and supplementing low incomes, debt interest, and contributing to the EU budget. Im also a little bit more concerned for caring for the sick and disabled, and justice then the government is. On the other hand, the government cares considerably more on defence, business & industry, caring for older people, state pensions, health, and education. Here are a few rationales for my choices: I care a lot about the environment. It also makes sense to me to increase spending on the environment now by a not so small amount as an investment to reduce the more considerable amount future generations will have to spend if we dont. Id rather spend more on feeding people in foreign lands than dropping bombs on them. Id also rather spend more on improving the nations housing and transport infrastructure as a whole in order to reduce the burden on the health and elderly care system, rather than directly fund them. Culture is important for everyone, not just children. Also, I am a big believer in education, its still one of my top priorities; I just cant justify it being as high as it currently is relative to everything else. Service the debt to get that monkey off our backs so that we can have more money to spend on the things we care about in the future. Related to that is state pensions. A lot of the debt is for them, but also they hold a lot of the debt. Crazy. This should be rationalised and pensions should be reduced across the board until the national debt is much smaller -- better a reduction now than the alternative of defaulting on the debt and making the pensions go away over night. Perhaps its unpopular to say this but good government and justice (and by this I do not mean increasing the number of prisons for poor people, but rather going after tax avoiding corporations, and fraudulent bankers) requires investment. Also, I dont understand why I should be spending my money on business and industry in a capitalist society. I left a bit in for them but really Id hope over time that my income tax spend on them would reduce to less than zero (really their profits should be subsidising me the worker, not the other way around). And if the UK is part of a bigger system (the EU), then it makes sense to me to spend my money to care for others in that union and have a greater say in the way it works. [1] i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02871/taxtable1_2871685b.jpg [2] https://stevefenton.co.uk/Content/Pie-Charts-Are-Bad/ [3] ifs.org.uk/publications/7424
Posted on: Thu, 20 Nov 2014 08:33:34 +0000
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