Education what do you get for your VAT

as I understand it your (VAT) is the same thing as our sales tax. in South Carolina our sales tax is like .05% then depending on which county you are in they may throw another .01 or .02% at you. I see where yours is 17.5% what value do you get for that 17.5%? here they use it to pay state paychecks and road(highway)construction.






Thanks
CCM

 

Free health care?

 

Thats what national Insurance is for...

 

No, That's national Insurance, supposedly.

VAT is just another revenue stream into the Gov't's coffers.

I would like to know where fuel duty goes though - I'm wondering if they could reduce it to buffer us a little from the Oil Price rises.

 

Its the duty thats doing the buffering, drop the price, raise the demand. Net result cost of fuel goes up.

To the best of my knowledge almost all taxes just go into a pot for redistribution, this includes income taxes, sin taxes and duties.

 

They like to keep quiet that you pay VAT on fuel as well as the fuel tax. They claim that fuel tax hasn't gone up since whenever but nobody ever points out that everytime the price goes up at the pumps the amount the government gets from VAT goes up.

 

Everybody points that out, just that all governments ignore it. Plus a business can claim back VAT on their fuel so the road hauliers don't bring VAT into their protests, just fuel tax.

Most countries use a VAT-style tax now, it's even been proposed for the US. Our 17.5% is actually one of the lowest in Europe.

So back on US taxation, what pays for sending folk to the moon and military expenses? Is it really just borrowed from China?

 

Yeah, 21% over here...

 

We get most of our VAT back at the end of the year.

 

Do we?

 

"We" as in my family.

 

I think you mean "'We' as in my family business."

 

Money? Family business? What is he, Sicilian?

 

One thing I've never understood about VAT is why dealings between two VAT-registered businesses are subject to VAT on the transactions.

For example, I (as a VAT-registered business) buy something from a supplier (who is also a VAT-registered business). The supplier charges me VAT, which I promptly claim back from HMRC, meaning that the net amount of VAT is zero. So what's the point? If two companies can prove to each other that they're VAT registered, why do they need to charge VAT to each other?

 

I thought if you provided proof that your vat registered you didn't pay the vat to the company? That's how places like makro work, i thought, a private individual pays vat at the end a vat registered company doesn't because there account shows that they have provided proof of there vat status when they opened there account. So the documents you send to HRMC are for places where you have not opened an account thus providing proof that your vat registered ie tesco.

/ramble

 

Hmm, so the Government can play around with the money?

 

It's rather simply once you put on the tinfoil hat, a bigger amount of money changes hands, which means a increase in trade on the statistics.

Its the same idea as counting shipping potatoes from the uk to portugal to wash them and then bakc to the uk to sell them as real exports and imports from both sides...

 

To reduce fraud. Every transaction has a double-check.

 

VAT is basically another way of saying "bend over, you didn't break the law"

It's great really, we get to pay for things like Politicians banning everything that could be fun, or rather, trying to.