A sanctimonious liberal like any other respectable 16-year-old, I made a seminal lurch to the right the first time I opened a pay slip. I was manning the register weekends for the Ice Capades Chalet in Atlanta and made about $40 a week. Or so I imagined. Then where the hell was it? The significantly lighter payment was my rude introduction to taxation at source.

Indignation at being fleeced at a minimal income persisted into my adulthood. I lived on a wing and a prayer for decades, and having to pitch anything whatsoever in the communal pot was consternating. I fancied that I asked for nothing from government; in trade, they should ask for nothing from me. I wasn’t yet a grown-up.

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By that definition, a large portion of Britons are still not grown up, either. Indeed, the arrangement that suits about half the public is to ask for a great deal from government and put in little in return – for 50 per cent of British taxpayers contribute only 10 per cent of income tax revenue, far less than the roughly £20,000 that on average each adult costs the Exchequer.

Labour would still have us believe that the solution to the UK’s chronic deficit is to hammer ‘the rich’. On the street (meaning in the comment sections), loads of Guardian readers still cling stubbornly to the conviction that all their wealthy compatriots deploy devious, shady loopholes to pay practically nothing.

Hardly, but no endless repetition of the figures........

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