Who pays what?

It’s time to pay less tax. That’s the call being made by Nick Clegg, who today used a speech to call for immediate changes to help the people who have become known as the 'stretched middle'.

The deputy prime minister wants the income tax threshold raised to £10,000 as soon as possible because the “finances of 23million middle and low earners” are “approaching a state of emergency”. To make up the shortfall, he proposes a “mansion tax” levied on the rich, which presumably would include George Osborne, with his fortune of £4million, David Cameron, who has strongly denied previous claims he has £30million stashed away in the bank, and all the other 21 millionaires in the Cabinet.

Ahead of the speech, Clegg said: "Because things are very tough, because utility bills were much higher last year than many people hoped, because the period of kind of austerity is going to take longer than we originally hoped, I believe we should do this further and faster.”

So what are the British rich actually saying about these proposals?

Not a lot, certainly by comparison to the American rich. Obama is currently considering instituting a 30% tax level for millionaires, a level which is still ludicrously low by European standards, and millionaires and billionaires have been practically lining up to ask to pay it. Bill Gates insists he is paying nowhere near enough, whilst Obama’s entire scheme was prompted by an admission from Warren Buffett, who revealed that his secretary was paying less tax than he was. In France, a group of billionaires came together to ask the government to hike up taxes.

For the allegedly tax averse Americans to step forward and call for higher levies is pretty astonishing, so where are the British billionaires wanting to do the same thing? Many of them are non-dom tax-dodgers, who would rather avoid paying anything to the state altogether. A recent estimate from the Tax Justice Network suggested £69.9bn of tax is evaded a year, whilst America has a rate roughly two thirds of this. It’s popular in Britain to snipe at America and criticise the Tea Party’s ridiculous stance insistence on lower taxes, but more of their rich actually pay what they owe and it seems many want to pay more. Perhaps it’s time the rich people of Britain stood up and allowed themselves to be counted.