Sitting here looking at the stamp duty bill for moving house. This could turn into a standard tax-is-too-high rant, so I’m going to try and avoid that. I don’t have a problem with paying my entire salary in tax this year at all.
No, instead it occurred to me last night that we always go on about how corrupt these 3rd world governments are where you have to grease palms to get anything to happen, and how this makes them inefficient and poor. And yet stamp duty is just a chunk of money I have to pay to a bureaucrat in order form him to process my application to buy a house. The only difference appears to be that there is a set tariff and it goes to a central department. Is that they key difference between taxation and graft?