So said Leona Helmsley, the notorious New York hotel owner. For trying to put this maxim into practice, the late "Queen of Mean" was jailed for tax evasion. (When Leona went to meet her maker, she left her fortune to her dog. Well, what else would you expect a bitch to do?)
In today's UK, Leona would probably be Gordon Brown's chief tax advisor. The Government has already watered down proposals to increase tax on the so-called "non-doms", wealthy foreign nationals who live in the UK but do not pay UK tax on their global income. It has watered down its proposals for capital gains tax reform, vastly reducing the burden on such worthy wealth creators as the buy-to-let investment crowd. Now it's about to back away from plans to tighten up the tax regime for the offshore income of UK based companies.
All of these retreats have come in the face of bare-faced threats from those wealthy souls who sensed that their oxen were about to be gored. The non-doms would quit the UK in droves, while UK companies would relocate their HQs to more "friendly" tax jurisdictions.
At the same time the Government has gone ahead with the abolition of the 10p income tax rate, a move which has increased the tax burden on on large numbers of the lowest-paid members of society. Oh sure, Alastair Brown is thrashing around trying to compensate some of those worst-affected, but the plain fact of the matter is that he can't help them all without reinstating the 10p rate. Still, never mind -- unlike the non-doms or the big corporations, the poor are in no position to up sticks and leave.
Things have come to a pretty pass when George Bush is doing more to help those hardest hit by the slowdown in the global economy than Gordon Brown is.
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