Owen Tudor

There’s  a fantastic letter in the Financial Times today by Simon Hallett, who has bucked the trend of people likely to be affected by the new 50p tax rate for those on over £150,000 a year. Since the budget, the FT has been full of articles about how greedy rich people will feel the pain of punitive taxation (sic), and how, in an act of childish pique, they plan to make us ‘suffer’ by leaving the country (I hope my sarcasm is coming over clearly enough here).

As someone who claims he will himself have to pay the new rate, he lays into the argument of some greedy rich people that, of course, they wouldn’t mind paying the new tax rate if they were convinced the state would spend their money wisely (apparently, they expect Alistair Darling to spend the £2.94 billion receipts on whoopee cushions and MPs’ expenses…)

Please read the whole letter, but his paragraph on private sector waste is worth relishing at length. He writes:

“I have been in the investment business for some 20 years, during which time I have seen just how many lunches, clay pigeon shoots, tickets to the rugby and nights at the opera come between the average pensioner and his pension, or between a charity and its investment income. Don’t tell me the private sector hasn’t been wasting my money like it grew on trees.”

It’s about time more people spoke up against the greedy rich people who are opposed to the new tax rate.