Hacker News Reader

Comment by berdario | Hacker News Reader

The concern of tax rules being unclear and causing confusion and distress is a real concern, but that's off topic.

Uber willfully misunderstood tax law to their advantage. Were most other taxi companies charging VAT as tour operator even before Uber started? If so, you would be right that this a concern of unclear rules and arbitrary application of them...

But that's not the case

https://www.accountingweb.co.uk/any-answers/should-taxi-firm...

> Given government spending is out of control

UK spending is barely above average for industrialised countries. After a decade of austerity, British people are getting poorer and poorer.

View on HN

P&G was able to argue in court that Pringles are a type of cake rather than a type of potato chip (crisp in the UK) which means VAT doesn’t apply to them. In the UK cake is sold free of VAT.

I guess my point is that there is clearly a precedent for success by doing this sort of thing. Unfortunately.

Yeah, they look like crisps, but they're actually made from different flours, unlike crisps.

I know but even so to classify it as a cake rather than a crisp is absurd.

There was no austerity. Government spending actually went up during that period.

Total spend or age adjusted per capita? Those are very different things when you have a growing and ageing population

Total spend went up.

You're wrong.

"Spending per cent of national income" it went down every year, from around 2009 until the pandemic.

https://obr.uk/forecasts-in-depth/brief-guides-and-explainer...

Sometimes I wonder about people who make such transparently incorrect statements like “there was no austerity”. When confronted with the data like you provided do they actually absorb that information? Usually it seems the answer is no but I don’t understand how you internalise it in a way that doesn’t conflict with your priors.

Government spending actually went up during that period. See chart 1: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/public-spending-sta...

You can try and redefine austerity into whatever best fits your politics if you like.

Well done on redefining austerity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com