I’VE always thought if I ever won a substantial amount in a lottery I would put it all in a bank and live off the interest.
It’s probably revealing that I come from a generation where “living off the interest” could be part of your lottery-winning fantasy, given that last week was the first time that there had been an interest rate rise in 10 years – to just 0.5 per cent.
Actually I should really add updating my lottery-winning fantasy to my extensive to-do list. It would be a nightmare to have £20-odd million land into your current account and find yourself ill-prepared for it.
Although… 0.5 per cent of £20 million is £100,000 a year. Surely £100,000 a year is enough to give my family a pretty good life?
Of course, having £20 million in the bank would make me a top-rate taxpayer, so I’d be more likely to get 0.3 per cent in a basic savings account after tax – netting my family £60,000.
I think we could survive.
We could live extremely well by shopping around high street or online banks for a better rate – all the while paying our taxes.
We could invest a bit of that in a business – local or international – and increase our returns, all the while paying our taxes.
Here’s the thing. I can’t see a situation where winning £20 million in the lottery would leave me in such dire straits that I would need to find some sort of way of avoiding paying my taxes in order to keep the wolf from our door.
It just wouldn’t. I would be stupendously wealthy.
On the interest alone I would be in the top six per cent of UK earners. The top six per cent. For just sitting in front of daytime TV and letting the most basic interest accumulate in my account – after paying my taxes.
Taxes which keep schools open, pay nurses and doctors to treat sick people, fix holes in the roads, provide hearing aids for the deaf, meals-on-wheels for the elderly, psychiatric care for our most vulnerable.
Seriously, rich people, you don’t even need to try very hard to make the world a better place. You don’t have to set up a foundation and funnel some of your tax-deductible money into it to help your fellow man. You don’t have to buy dinner with Lady Gaga on a yacht at a charity action to save that child with acute leukaemia.
You just need to PAY YOUR TAXES.
Be the laziest rich person in the world. I really don’t care if you never get out of bed. Just make sure you pay the person who brings your breakfast, lunch and dinner a real living wage and PAY YOUR TAXES.
Yes, it is amazing when rich people give extraordinary amounts to charity, but, as the Paradise Papers showed this week, it’s downright despicable that many are withholding extraordinary amounts of money they owe the country.
The huge leak of financial documents has revealed how the super-rich legally invest vast amounts of cash in offshore tax havens.
There’s Lewis Hamilton, who is worth an estimated £130million, and appears to have used shell companies in the British Virgin Islands, the Isle of Man and Guernsey to avoid the entire £3.3m VAT bill triggered when he imported his £16.5m private plane to England from Canada.
There’s Queen Elizabeth (the actual HM in HMRC) who has had millions of pounds from her private estate invested in a Cayman Islands fund as part of an offshore portfolio that has never before been disclosed.
There’s Apple (worth three quarters of a trillion dollars), which moved its subsidiary from Ireland to Jersey in order to continue avoiding billions in taxes, after an EU crackdown in 2013.
According to HM(cough)RC’s figures, £30 billion in tax goes avoided, evaded and uncollected.
These are not people on the breadline, wondering where their next meal is going to come from.
It begs the question, how much money is enough?
Some would argue the super-rich already have more than their fair share. But it seems what they really want is everyone else’s share as well.
