steepholm

I find people are very ignorant on how tax works. They often think, for instance, that if you get into a marginal tax bracket you have to pay that tax rate on all your earnings, rather than the slice above. I think PAYE, while generally an excellent idea, makes this worse because it's all done for you and invisible. Same with VAT, nobody knows about it really. In Canada, the VAT equivalent is done at the till, so you see that the price is X and you actually pay X +tax. While in some ways infuriating (you can't sort out your exact change while standing in line without doing math) it makes you much more aware that it is a real tax and you're really paying it every time you buy something.