Tax And How It Is Spent.

Yesterday Christine Lagarde was lecturing the Greeks about paying their taxes. Today it has been revealed that as an employee of an international organization she actually pays no tax whatsoever on her salary, which is in excess of £300,000 a year plus fringe benfits. Unlike the Greeks she has no need to dodge paying tax. Meanwhile, here in Britain the right-wing think tank, Centre for Social Justice (now there's a misleading title), has said that the government should scrap targets to reduce child poverty on the basis that "the poor are always with us." Or at least they will be if the Tories have anything to do with it. Though the British super-wealthy have made tax dodging into the only growth industry in the country and George Osborne seems to become strangely incompetent when it comes to closing loopholes, the rest of us have to pay our taxes whether we like it or not. Still we can take solace in the fact that our tax money is being diverted away from the undeserving disabled, unemployed and feckless and is now being spent on more worthwhile things. Can't we? Well, that depends on whether you think that the Wildlife minister, wealthy landowner and keen shot Richard Benyon, should spend your money on shooting buzzards in order to increase the number of pheasants available for the wealthy to take pot shots at. His ministry, by the way, has no brief to help out gamekeepers in their struggle to provide suitable targets for their rich masters and her certainly has no brief to kill a protected species like the British buzzard for the benefit of a tiny minority of Tory landowners. Not to worry though because Michael Gove has used his appearance at the Leveson Enquiry to air his belief that our shools, and presumably our schoolchildren, should generate profits for corporations making room for more tax cuts - not for you of course, but for his rich mates. The "News in Shorts" has one question. How much longer are we going to have to put up with these latter-day robber barons, spivs and conmen?