UK industrial design rate

Just curious, but if you get the to your stop at 9:30 and into work at, say, 10, how long is your day?

I start at 10 as well and finish at 6 (wake up at 7 and get home at

8.30). I used to wake up at 5 and get home at 7, but that got a bit much after 6 months.

Yea - VAT ( Value Added Tax) is a sales tax that is set by each nation in the EU at different levels. If you are VAT registered business you can claim back VAT on business purchases.

Council Tax covers the above except most is provided by central government not the local government

£250,000 is the threshold and then 40% of any of the estate above this. However the very rich use trusts and offshore accounts to get around all this, and can end up paying no inheritance tax. However in the UK - house prices have shot up so much in 10 years that a very large proportion of housing now falls into the 250,000 bracket and inheritance tax catches people who cannot afford trust lawyers to plan to avoid this tax. Trusts , set up in the time of the crusades to allow people to go off to Palestine and leave their estates 'in trust' are now, in my opinion, a social scam and a major cause for the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. The rich just don't pay taxes anymore to the same proportion as the poor on their disposable income. Its never , in the history of the world, been a better time to be a billionaire !! - The only threat to your money is your own or your childrens stupidity, nothing else, not even if your money is illegal because its still safe in Western banks. I think America is on the right lines in jailling finacial fraud - here they just walk.

If you are interested in Pre-Revolution history - read 'White Devil' by Stephen Brumwell - its about Robert Rogers who founded the American Rangers and is a real eye opener on the social fabric of the Mohicans and all the tribes living the North East. They were not as the Mel Gibson school of history portrays them - in fact half were English,Irish and Scots etc who prefered the woods to their fellow settlers;-)

It has a few interesting takes on the pre-revolution issues regarding tax on the colonists and the cost of the 1750s war with France and who had to pay ;-) and who did not ;-) - suffice to say - the American colonies were pretty much a tax free zone compared to the UK ;-). Pretty much the reverse situation to the last 50 years where the US has paid for the defense of Europe ;-) - so its all evened out in the end ;-)

TTFN

Jonathan

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snipped-for-privacy@SPAMuko2.co.uk wrote: ...snip

In the US it is the AMT or Alternative Minimum Tax that is catching the middle class every year. This tax was meant to make the well to do pay a minimum amount of tax even with all the deductions and loopholes available. But with many households with two breadwinners making an aggregate of over $100,000 per year this is starting to hit the upper middle class of whom there are quite a few. The law makers forgot to put an inflation adjustment into many of the "rich" taxes. It is hard to believe that when I was a little kid my dad could support the whole family and buy a house with a $90 per week pay packet.