TAX AVOIDANCE - RIGHT OR WRONG?

The media has been going wild recently because Starbucks has only paid £8.6m in tax within the past 14 years via the K2 tax scheme – good for them, right? Wrong apparently. Tax avoidance is a sticky topic in Britain at the moment as another tax avoider who has been named and shamed is Jimmy Carr, but Starbucks and Carr are simply playing the game. The dictionary definition of ‘tax avoidance’ is ‘the minimization of tax liability by lawful methods’. Lawful methods. I know that if someone asked me if I wanted to save myself money through a one hundred percent legal – yet slightly frowned upon – method, I’d give them a big, fat ‘Yes please!’.

After Jimmy Carr’s so-called ‘dodgy’ tax scheme was uncovered by The Times in June, the viewing figures of his programme 8 out of 10 Cats have almost doubled. Even bad press has worked in his favour, so why can’t we all just be happy for him? It’s jealous, irrelevant people who put down the likes of Jimmy Carr because he is richer than them, he is more well known than them and, most importantly in this case, he is smarter than them. The people who are genuinely upset about Carr paying a lower percentage of tax than they do would actually get up off their backsides and find a way for the K2 tax scheme to work for them, but...people don’t do that. In my eyes, the reason for that is because it is not the tax itself that is the issue, it is people being disillusioned by their jealousy of celebrities and buying into the latest ‘let’s-target-someone-famous-for-fun’ magazines because they have got more going for them. Why is it okay to target a specific person or a specific group of people? Isn’t that sort of similar to what Hitler did? Shame on you.

As for Starbucks, the most famous cafe ever – surely they put enough money into the economy as it is? Some imbeciles have been saying that Starbucks should leave our country if they’re not paying the ‘right’ amount of tax, but we have only just come out of recession. No one would benefit from getting rid of a highly successful business at this time seeing as they are paying tax. It may be a small percentage, but they are still paying and, in figures, the amount of tax that Starbucks pays is a damn sight more than what a lot of businesses pay.

By and large, tax avoidance doesn’t really affect us, but there’s always the whingers who complain that ‘it isn’t fair’ that they pay the higher percentage of tax, but the likes of Jimmy Carr and the owners of Starbucks earn the higher wage. However, it also isn’t fair that when my brother comes home from university, he uses my parking space even though he technically no longer lives with us. It also isn’t fair that Robert Pattinson dies at the end of Remember Me just as things are getting serious between him and Ally. Life’s not fair! At least the likes of Jimmy Carr and Starbucks have the initiative to keep their finances healthy. I’d bet my last penny that the people who claim the K2 tax scheme is ‘morally wrong’ would jump at the chance of legally saving themselves money. Hypocrites. All of the bad press and all of the hate messages on Twitter won’t mean squat to the tax avoiders of our nation...think about it: you’re whining about your financial hardships whilst they’re laughing their way to the bank. So who comes out on top? They do. Always.