Why The Rich Would Rather Buy A Gold-Plated Pot-Noodle Than Pay Tax
It's amazing what people will spend money on when they have a lot of it. A cursory Google search for the ridiculously expensive quickly churns out a $3500 concrete doorstop, $175 gold-plated staples, a $65 perfume for dogs and a $25 million diamond encrusted wristwatch.
I did this search because a friend recently told me about Belu water, which I heard was a super ethically produced but ridiculously expensive spring water. As it happens, Belu water is currently retailing on Sainsbury's website for £3 per litre, which isn't as bad as I thought. But it's still quite expensive, for water, so why do people buy it?
If we believe the marketing on the website, people buy it because it is "the most ethical bottled mineral water available." Indeed the stuff Belu does as a social enterprise seems quite admirable, running an environmentally friendly virtual head office, offsetting other environmental impacts to make the business 'carbon neutral' and sending all of its profits to WaterAid.
But I don't think that's enough to make people pay over the odds for what is essentially H2O with some mineral impurities, and if they are honest with themselves, neither do the people at Belu. That's why they also make sure their product has a "striking and premium look and feel." People who buy Belu don't just want to save the planet, they want to feel good about themselves. Not only am I tackling global warming, they think, but I'm also wealthy enough not to worry about how much I pay for my premium mineral water. In fact, if I were extremely cynical, I'd say the important thing for such people is not the environmentally friendly aspect of the product, but the fact that they can afford it. It feels good to be able to afford luxury items. And if the environment was their main concern, well, tap water is much more earth-friendly.
Further investigation turned up a luxury Chicken & Mushroom Pot Noodle flogged by Harrods for £29.95 in 2008. The proceeds all went to charity, but if you're so bothered about charity, why waste essential resources gold-leafing a disposable noodle pot? It seems that some people need to be able to prove exactly how obscenely wasteful they can be with their own apparently infinite wealth, to make up for the embarrassing fact that they are doing a good deed.
Musing over these discoveries, my thoughts spontaneously arrived at the idea of tax. Rich people are, in general, notoriously hostile to being made to pay taxes. This is jarring when compared to the picture of the rich that companies like Belu want to sell to them, namely, that they are generous and care about the world and the society we inhabit. Something in the way tax is collected is different.
Firstly of course, paying tax is a duty rather than a choice. There's no getting away from that. But even so, I think there may be other psychological reasons why paying taxes is unappealing, while paying too much for ethical water is attractive. Tax collecting agencies tend to take a rather threatening and confrontational line towards taxpayers. We're closing in on you. There is no escape. Faced with this, it's understandable why people who have worked their way to the top, often stepping on other people on the way up, would respond with defiance. You could almost say that tax is badly marketed.
I mentioned this idea to another friend, who reminded me of the way attitudes towards drink driving have changed over the past thirty years as the focus of campaigns against drink driving has changed. In the nineties, there was a shift of focus away from the risks of drink driving and onto making drink driving socially unacceptable, changing societal norms and confronting drivers in denial. Surveys have shown that the attitude of the general public towards drink driving became much harsher during this period. The rate at which people were killed or seriously injured in drink driving incidents correspondingly fell from 28 per day in 1979 to four per day in 2009.
As things are, it is embarrassing to pay too much tax, or perhaps even to pay your fair share of tax - you're seen as a mug - while it's apparently socially desirable to pay too much for bottled water or a pot noodle. Maybe tax collectors and governments should think about this before they launch their next periodical, ineffective crack-down on tax avoiders. Of course, the penalties have to be there for those who really don't care what other people think, and the penalties need to be tough enough not to be shrugged off. But in addition to this, shame is a powerful motivator which I think could be made better use of in the campaign against tax avoidance.
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| A $3500 concrete doorstop |
I did this search because a friend recently told me about Belu water, which I heard was a super ethically produced but ridiculously expensive spring water. As it happens, Belu water is currently retailing on Sainsbury's website for £3 per litre, which isn't as bad as I thought. But it's still quite expensive, for water, so why do people buy it?
If we believe the marketing on the website, people buy it because it is "the most ethical bottled mineral water available." Indeed the stuff Belu does as a social enterprise seems quite admirable, running an environmentally friendly virtual head office, offsetting other environmental impacts to make the business 'carbon neutral' and sending all of its profits to WaterAid.
But I don't think that's enough to make people pay over the odds for what is essentially H2O with some mineral impurities, and if they are honest with themselves, neither do the people at Belu. That's why they also make sure their product has a "striking and premium look and feel." People who buy Belu don't just want to save the planet, they want to feel good about themselves. Not only am I tackling global warming, they think, but I'm also wealthy enough not to worry about how much I pay for my premium mineral water. In fact, if I were extremely cynical, I'd say the important thing for such people is not the environmentally friendly aspect of the product, but the fact that they can afford it. It feels good to be able to afford luxury items. And if the environment was their main concern, well, tap water is much more earth-friendly.
Further investigation turned up a luxury Chicken & Mushroom Pot Noodle flogged by Harrods for £29.95 in 2008. The proceeds all went to charity, but if you're so bothered about charity, why waste essential resources gold-leafing a disposable noodle pot? It seems that some people need to be able to prove exactly how obscenely wasteful they can be with their own apparently infinite wealth, to make up for the embarrassing fact that they are doing a good deed.
Musing over these discoveries, my thoughts spontaneously arrived at the idea of tax. Rich people are, in general, notoriously hostile to being made to pay taxes. This is jarring when compared to the picture of the rich that companies like Belu want to sell to them, namely, that they are generous and care about the world and the society we inhabit. Something in the way tax is collected is different.
Firstly of course, paying tax is a duty rather than a choice. There's no getting away from that. But even so, I think there may be other psychological reasons why paying taxes is unappealing, while paying too much for ethical water is attractive. Tax collecting agencies tend to take a rather threatening and confrontational line towards taxpayers. We're closing in on you. There is no escape. Faced with this, it's understandable why people who have worked their way to the top, often stepping on other people on the way up, would respond with defiance. You could almost say that tax is badly marketed.
I mentioned this idea to another friend, who reminded me of the way attitudes towards drink driving have changed over the past thirty years as the focus of campaigns against drink driving has changed. In the nineties, there was a shift of focus away from the risks of drink driving and onto making drink driving socially unacceptable, changing societal norms and confronting drivers in denial. Surveys have shown that the attitude of the general public towards drink driving became much harsher during this period. The rate at which people were killed or seriously injured in drink driving incidents correspondingly fell from 28 per day in 1979 to four per day in 2009.
As things are, it is embarrassing to pay too much tax, or perhaps even to pay your fair share of tax - you're seen as a mug - while it's apparently socially desirable to pay too much for bottled water or a pot noodle. Maybe tax collectors and governments should think about this before they launch their next periodical, ineffective crack-down on tax avoiders. Of course, the penalties have to be there for those who really don't care what other people think, and the penalties need to be tough enough not to be shrugged off. But in addition to this, shame is a powerful motivator which I think could be made better use of in the campaign against tax avoidance.
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ReplyDeletehttp://www.rollingpapersexpress.com/cigarette-rolling-paper-brands/shine-24k-gold-rolling-papers.html
Roughly one thousand times the cost of a regular rolling paper, you are almost literally burning your money. It must feel horrible to have so much money that you'd waste it on something like this.