This is a question I very often see people ranting about on Facebook. They complain that they work their arses off just so lazy people can scrounge all their money off them. This is an idea that is, of course, perpetuated by the mainstream media. Newspapers like The Sun and The Daily Mail are always running stories on scroungers who live a life of luxury without ever working whilst laughing at those of us who pay for them. As somebody who works seven days a week doing two jobs (one on weekdays and one on weekends) I wanted to research this. After a fair bit of research it came to light that approx 0.9% of your tax goes directly to the unemployed.
This means that the other 99.1% of tax that pays for everything else has managed to slip pretty neatly under the carpet.
I found this out by going on a website that calculates the amount of tax somebody will be paying a year depending on income. This website then splits how much tax you pay per day into different sections on where each small amount of money is going. I looked at someone earning £22,000 a year who would be paying £8,621 in tax which equates to just below 40%. This person would be spending 21p per day towards the unemployed which works out at about 0.9% of their tax. The chances are, most of you reading this will be on less than 40% tax so you will be paying even less than 0.9% of your income towards the unemployed.
This begs the question, why do we blame the unemployed 'scroungers' for our high rates of tax when such a small amount is going towards paying for them? The answer is simple, it's what we are told to believe. Right wing media such as the newspapers I mentioned before tell us a lot of other things to make us angry at the wrong people. They tell us that that our country is more dangerous because of Muslim extremists rather than our decision to invade countries in the Middle East. They tell us that unemployment is high because of the amount of immigrants entering the United Kingdom rather than the fact we are in an economic crisis largely created by the rich and powerful of our country. They tell us that we pay high taxes because the lazy scroungers in our country take all of our money.
All I'm asking is this, at least do some research before you become the idiot in the supermarket I have to listen to ranting about how "fuckin scroungers and fuckin foreigners are takin all my fuckin money whilst I work my fuckin arse off."
This is not a role model. 