@bbcquestiontime Having done quite a lot of qualitative work to understand perceptions of tax, I recognise this anger - it comes from two core misunderstandings:
@bbcquestiontime 1. Very few have a sense of where they sit in the income distribution (and across that distribution, few feel genuinely comfortable as they tend to spend in line with their peers and neighbours, not the national average), and
@bbcquestiontime 2: few understand marginal tax rates - that the increased rate applies only from the 80,001st pound onwards - they just see the %age and feel aggrieved at giving away that much of ‘their’ money
@bbcquestiontime And cutting across all of this is a much wider set of beliefs, that most of us hold if we’re honest - we over estimate proportion of our success that is down to our own hard work (e.g. deserved)& attribute our less positive outcomes too much to bad luck or external factors.
