We do already have a pay per mile tax on fuel.
If you are a 40% tax payer (could even be 45%), which is increasingly probable due to the state pension being taxable income and if you now live off hard earned savings, at the marginal rate, which is where the fun spending often sits, you can pay 40% on the initial income which was put into savings (there used to be no cap on tax relief on investment into pensions, but there is now). Then, in retirement, 40% on interest / capital gain as you draw down your savings or InheritanceTax, if you leave any behind,. Then when you spend it, there's VAT @20%. You can be left with as little as 29% of what you actually earned, or the state gets 71%, plus employer and employee National Insurance on the original salary. Then there's road tax, council tax and dividend tax (which is witheld even in ISAs) eating into it further. No wonder there's an industry around tax planning. And, it's still not enough to meet the state's costs, so government debt grows.
Don't get me started!
