Man in a Shed: Shouldn't Union Pilgrims be taxed as a benefit in kind ?

The argument for taxpayers funding left wing Union officials to sit at desks full time and do what Unions do is that they help the smooth running of the organisation by faciltating worker demands etc.

So a benefit eh ?

Well when its private health insurance or other perks we get taxed on it. Shouldn't members of Unions in govt departments that have tax payer funded pilgrims be taxed on the benefit of having them also ?

Anyone ( who isn't an anonymous blogger ) want to as HMRC about this. ( Though hold on I bet they have pilgrims also -- ah its all becoming clearer now... )

The pound in your pocket

"We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists." James Callaghan

“The trouble with theoretical economists is that they don't understand that when you have a deficit, you can only finance it by borrowing, and you've got to persuade people that it's worth lending money to you and that they'll get their money back... there's no way of escaping it.” Dennis Healey during the 1976 Stirling Crisis.

"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens ... Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of over-turning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose." John Maynard Keynes, 1920.

"To preserve [the people's] independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our selection between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude." Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States of America,1801-1809.

Inflation is taxation without legislation .. Milton Friedman