There are a pair of articles in the UK’s Daily Telegraph today which illustrate the difference between the US and the UK in their citizens’ attitude to taxes. The articles appear to have been triggered by a story this week about miscalculations in the UK council (local) tax programs which have led to overpayments by as many as 400,000 households, all of which was covered up by the government. The relation of these other two articles to that story is tenuous but there is a link.

The first article, written almost in blog style, focuses on the payment of VAT (sales tax) on services such as plumbing, construction and childcare, where many UK citizens pay cash to avoid paying the tax. It’s written from the point of view of the writer and includes several personal experiences. It’s pretty weak on substance and ends with an unpleasant conclusion. Here are some key passages:

Without taxes there would be no education for all, no health care from cradle to grave, no armed forces to defend us.

…

Like taxes, laws are a good thing. They are the opposite of anarchy. Again, if you don’t like them, elect a government that will legislate in a way you do like. Until then, pay your taxes with joy in your heart. It’s not a perfect system, but it does work.

The problem is that the first paragraph suggests taxes go to pay for these universal goods (of course, healthcare is another area where the UK and US differ). But there’s no mention here of welfare, of abortion on demand, of huge government bureaucracies or any of the other myriad things that much of the government’s tax revenue actually gets spent on.

But the real problem is the conclusion – that we should pay taxes with joy in our hearts because if we don’t like where the money goes, we can “elect a government that will legislate in a way you do like.” This seems startlingly naive since none of us single handed can “elect a government” and even if we collectively elected the most taxpayer-friendly option available, the fact is that we would still be stuck with the vast majority of taxes we pay, including all the stuff we don’t like.

The second article, which is actually a masthead editorial rather than being attributed to a particular author, is in a similar vein. It makes more concessions to common sense, as one would hope from a paper which is generally conservative, including the second paragraph:

The risk of being punished for tax-evasion is not, however, the only reason why most people comply with the tax code: as Nigel Farndale points out, most of us believe we have an obligation to obey the law, tax-law included – even if many of us also believe that the share of our money that the Government wants to take is far too high.

It focuses on the fact that most British taxpayers pay their taxes honestly because they believe that the government acts with integrity and there is little corruption. I suspect it has more to do with British respect for the rule of law generally, to be honest, but it’s a fair point. But that doesn’t mean, as the first author suggests, that we have to be happy about what we pay.

But all this illustrates a big difference between the UK and the US. While in the US we have major parties and major politicians making serious pleas for lower taxes, this strain of political thought is all but absent in the UK these days. And that’s pretty worrying, because the UK’s taxes are already quite a bit higher than those in the US, and are still rising. At some point, the UK will have to cotton on to the changes that are happening in the rest of Europe in response to economic stagnation, but it may well not be before the UK again becomes the sick man of Europe, as it was in the 70s.