Tweets that cause rantage – or you can prove anything with statistics.

Yesterday I saw this.

What Nick Clegg won’t tell you: the top 10% pay an astonishing 55% of income tax but earn just 33% of income. Is that fair enough for him?

Which proves one thing and one thing only – statistics can be used to confuse any issue.

There is so much wrong with the concept of fairness that Mr Nelson is expressing here. As if there is some absolute percentage of income that is fair to tax, regardless of what it means to everyone else. Is it fair to tax everyone at the same rate? You’d think that would make sense.

But only in the way that it would be fair to buy my children the same colour and size of clothing. One is a 9 year old boy, the other a 12 year old girl. So if I bought something in a neutral colour for an age 10 1/2 that should suit them both, shouldn’t it?

A real headdesk moment.

If someone is earning �500,000 and paying 50% tax, they’ve still got �250,000 to live on. (No, I know that doesn’t take into account tax allowances, NI, all that kind of thing. Give me a break, I’m not trying for accuracy, I’m trying to unpick the fair thing.) But if someone is earning 5,000 and they get taxed 50% that leaves them with 2,500 to live on. And we can all see that that won’t work.

The people on the very lowest salaries don’t pay tax at all. Which grudgingly the rich people admit is reasonable. But actually what would be more reasonable would be if they were paid a living wage in the first place, instead of being forced to grovel and feel like scroungers to get top ups from the state.

That’s another thing that annoys me. The term the state’s money. The state has no money. It’s ours, all ours. It’s taken from us and redistributed. And I, like many others, would be happy to see a little more taken so that it could be distributed more fairly. But I don’t want to see it wasted. I want hospitals with fairly paid cleaners and plenty of care staff with good morale and fewer managers. I want an education system that educates all children, not just the ones with clued up pushy parents that are prepared to move houses to get in the right school. I want a welfare system that looks after the disabled, the sick, the old, the vulnerable.

And yes, I want a taxation system that takes from those who can afford it. Those who, quite frankly, shouldn’t be getting the wages they are getting in the first place. Because most top salaries are hugely overinflated by greed and the old boy network. And they don’t recognise that without the cleaners, the frontline staff, the sales people they look down on, there wouldn’t be that money for them anyway.

Gah.