The Curious Case Of The Arshavin In The Tax System

One player who certainly has made an impact upon his arrival in the Premiership(or First Division as it should be is a certain Mr Andrey Arshavin, his beguiling talent making a fairly mediocre Arsenal side watchable again and putting what turned out to be one of the final nails in Liverpool's title hopes' coffin. However all is not well in the Arshavin household, not only has his no doubt fragrant wife had to put up with the supposed unkemptness of our English roses but it seems Andrey has been a left a little shortchanged by Mr Darling, his agent and Arsenal's negotiators. It seems Andrey didn't realise that a huge chunk of his £80,000 a week wages would not be going to buy materials for his dressmaking business but would instead be being used by HM Government to plug the black hole in its finances.

Now I may be being more generous than most but I would attribute Mr Arshavin's taking umbrage to something other than mere greed, namely the unfairness of it all. This is because most of his peers, many of whom lack his considerable talents, do not make the same generous contribution to the upkeep of the nation. Savvy agents have long insisted on wages being paid net and many clubs and players upon the announcement of the 50% Tax Rate will have swiftly renegotiated the payment of their wages as interest free loans or some other such method of keeping their star names happy and in Gucci manbags. Arshavin's contract was negotiated during the snow ridden chaos of the last transfer deadline day and so, no doubt, he failed to employ the creative accounting that others will have used in order to ensure that their cash is used for monogramed kitchen tiles for themselves rather than for the ducks of Gosport.

But Arshavin here is surely the exception: his travails are what millions of hard working people experience every day. Those with ordinary incomes (unlike Andrey), who lack the time (like him) and money to ensure that we make as small a contribution as possible to the public purse can only look on in envy at those who can. This is the inherent bias in the tax system towards the very rich. Not only do they sometimes earn unjustifiable sums of money due to markets' occasional bouts of insanity but they then pay far less as a percentage of their income even than those who one would class as rich. A basic principle of any progressive or even moderately Tory society is that the top earners pay a larger percentage of their income in tax than those in the middle or at the bottom.

To me a major moral case behind this is our humanity: We need money in order to exchange it for the things we need to live first and foremost. From there we need it to break up the monotony of our existence by either treating it as an end in itself and using it to open doors or by buying luxuries. The more one earns therefore the less each actual pound is 'worth' to its owner. Someone may struggle to live on £4,000 a year, £30,000 a year may allow one to live in relative comfort, the difference in quality of life between the two sums is significant. If someone is earning £100,000 a year then that same increase would make a not completely insignificant but far, far smaller contribution to that person having a better quality of life. Perhaps this difference is not to be sniffed at. It could after all mean a better car or an extra bedroom, not particularly significant when compared with the difference it could make to a child in poverty but one can understand why an increase in this person's tax bill would be unappreciated. However where I honestly cannot fathom the sheer selfishness is amongst our astronomical earners: precisely those who pay a much lower portion in tax. They may be earning £10m a year, losing £5m of that £10m rather than £2m would make absolutely no difference to their quality of life, that £3m could, if put to good use significantly change the lives of a huge number of people by providing better services such as good education, healthcare, housing, transport, or enabling us to pay off the debts incurred escaping a recession created by many of the same people who howl about higher tax, perhaps in better times we could even cut tax on those at the bottom, in the middle or even moderate high earners. Of course in reality life is much more complicated than this simple method of money vs quality of life: there are considerations about incentives, the rich moan that we must be 'competitive' (why to attract more greedy nation wreckers?), whether a government puts this money to good use etc. However surely as a starting point we need to have at least the super and very rich, who benefit from our public services as much as anyone else (how would companies make money if they had a workforce that was ill, illiterate and unable to travel?), paying the same percentage or more of their income in tax instead of being always one step ahead and contributing as little as they can to the country that has given them so much. He may not be very happy about it but we need more Andrey Arshavins: here's to more snow next January 31st.