 |
| The enemy of the family |
In a month that has shown how common corporate tax avoidance* is, where companies like Amazon have been shown to fiddle the VAT on ebooks (paying over 3% to Luxembourg tax authorities but charging 20% to publishers) and Starbucks have avoiding paying any UK corporation tax for years by essentially charging itself a royalty fee and buying it’s coffee beans from itself (thereby shovelling all the profit out of the country to places like the notorious coffee bean growing country that is, erm, Switzerland), it’s nice to see the government has their eye on the ball and is determined to wrangle the deficit under control by punishing targeting families.
This time, the department of Work & Pensions, AKA the department of penury doom, are floating the idea of capping child benefit to two children. So if you have 3, 4 or five children, or indeed triples, the government wants you to suffer. This is outrageous- how will parents be able to buy double-mocho-choco-lattes from Starbucks to enable them to shift even more profit to coffee growing tax havens.
How much will this policy save the tax payer if it’s adopted? £200m a year apparently. That’s less than Amazon, Google, Starbucks, KFC or any number of other multinationals avoid paying each year in corporation tax.
*a polite way of saying evasion because technically it’s not illegal