So trivial, yet it really ticks you off.

[KILO NOVEMBER]

I'm indifferent to the VAT vs Sales Tax concept - gotta pay either way.... It does, however, drive me up the wall when in the US, having to remember everything costs more than it actually says it does on the label.... I assume when that's your cultural norm you don't notice it, but I found it a real pain!

They harmonised the mechanism with VAT (all to do with the single market), but the actual level at which VAT is set remains up to individual nations. I've never been aware of it being lower than 15% in the UK, though it has varied between that, 17.5% and 20% in the last couple of decades. I certinly wouldn't miss paying it myself, though to be fair I also want the services it pays for!

While I understand the general workings of a VAT, I would like to understand how the value added is computed at the first instance. For example, suppose I operate a coal mine. The value of the coal in the ground is zero. It's only value is potential. No one can use it until it is extracted. So it seems to me that the value added is infinite, or at least not calculable.
Any European tax wizes here?

 

[Trenchfriend]

A positive thing. Back to the 90s:

When did you have a multi-liter canister of needlewood foam bath, the last time? I grabbed a 3 liter canister mountain pine bath in supermarket, today. Want pic?

 

[Zombie_61]

...Ebay is interesting in that regard too - with some things I watch at fixed prices, I've noticed I'm increasingly being offered 10% and 25% and whatever off on those as listings wear on. Online sellers in general may be doing well out of the pandemic (online shopping as opposed to bricks and mortar soared here in the UK during lockdown, and that hasn't reversed since), but I suspect a lot of them individually must be hurting given many folks have less to spend right now.

I've received more than a few of those "XX% off" on evilBay in recent years and have taken advantage of a few, but on most of them the discount still wasn't quite worth pulling the trigger. I did however get a cheap cotton Trilby from China, shipped to my front door for the extravagant cost of $3.58. Yep, I got a hat for less than the price of a Big Mac, and that cheap stingy brim quickly became a favorite.

 

[GHT]

While I understand the general workings of a VAT, I would like to understand how the value added is computed at the first instance. For example, suppose I operate a coal mine. The value of the coal in the ground is zero. It's only value is potential. No one can use it until it is extracted. So it seems to me that the value added is infinite, or at least not calculable.
Any European tax wizes here?

It's not whizzes that you need, it's politicians. Nobody gets more creative when it comes to inventing taxes.
Have you got in the US a tax on a tax?
Our fuel duty is currently levied at a flat rate of 58p per litre for both petrol and diesel, while VAT at 20% is then charged on both the product price and the duty. It makes our fuel both the cheapest and dearest. Pre-tax it costs 35p but when you add on the fuel duty and then add the VAT, the tax alone comes to more than twice the original cost at 78p. A litre of fuel at the pump varies from garage to garage but a mean average is £1:13.
VAT is paid by the end user, meaning that if you are a trader and you are VAT registered, you will charge VAT on your goods but the VAT that you have paid for goods and services is redeemable. So lets say that in a tax period you have charged a total of a thousand pounds but you have paid a total of five hundred pounds, you will only need to pay the taxman five hundred pounds.

 

[tonyb]

WHen we did our drive-in theatre over the summer, we required people calling in for tickets to specify the type of vehicle they'd be using -- it was necessary to assign larger vehicles to back rows so as not to block the view for smaller vehicles. Very very telling it was, how often the owners of monster-sized SUVs got sore because they couldn't have a spot right down front regardless of how many people they'd block behind them. One of our parking crew came to me and told me what exactly he'd been called by one of these drivers, and it wasn't "friend" or "neighbor."

It isn’t that people in other types of cars aren’t their own sort of obnoxious. My wholly anecdotal observation is that it’s drivers in compacts and subcompacts who apparently think it’s their “right” to drive 5 to 10 mph under the posted speed limit in the left-hand lane.

 

[Edward]

I've received more than a few of those "XX% off" on evilBay in recent years and have taken advantage of a few, but on most of them the discount still wasn't quite worth pulling the trigger. I did however get a cheap cotton Trilby from China, shipped to my front door for the extravagant cost of $3.58. Yep, I got a hat for less than the price of a Big Mac, and that cheap stingy brim quickly became a favorite.

Sometimes they're helpful, yeah - I always like paying less if I can! That style of trilby gets a bit of a bad rap often, but I prefer to see them as a gateway thing.... my first brimmed hat (which I think I still have somewhere) was a wool, brimmed hat I bought in Marks & Spencer or Debenhams, one of the two, for something like £15 on sale (£20 full price) way back in 91 or 92. Used to wear it with a black wool trench coat, black shirt, black jeans.... I think it was probably my first conscious "look" that I put together overall. Definitely the genesis of me wearing a hat regularly, if not daily. A lot of the patterns of these things are quite similar to a very traditional type of tweed hat over here, especially in Scotland or Ireland. Think the hat worn by Connery in Last Crusade. When I was much younger it wasn't uncommon to see older men in their seventies in Scotland or the North of Ireland wearing one of those rather than a flat cap. (In those days, you'd almost never have seen a furfelt fedora, at least not on the generation who would have worn one back in the day. I think the hatless trend caught on much earlier on this side of the Atlantic). I've often kept half an eye out for a canvas type hat for Summer travel use with the practicality of a Tilley but a much older look. Some of those cheaper ebay options might just fit the bill. Course, as the man said, money off is only money saved if it's something you otherwise wanted or needed...

I've recently been cruising Aliexpress and made my first order on there. It seems to offer vouchers on a very regular basis - my fist order ended up half price. We'll see what comes of it, but it seems to be a nice place for picking up bits and pieces of Chinese stationary. The wife loves stationary and novelty pens; I usually pick up a few when I'm in Beijing, but with not being able to travel there in 2020 (and in all likelihood 2021), it's nice to find an alternative. Almost moreso than ebay, though, it's very easy to find a whole heap of cool little trinkets and quickly run up a huge total if you're not careful. The bonus of online shopping, of course, is no embarrassment t being seen to put half your basket back on the shelves...

 

[KILO NOVEMBER]

It's not whizzes that you need, it's politicians. Nobody gets more creative when it comes to inventing taxes.
Have you got in the US a tax on a tax?
Our fuel duty is currently levied at a flat rate of 58p per litre for both petrol and diesel, while VAT at 20% is then charged on both the product price and the duty. It makes our fuel both the cheapest and dearest. Pre-tax it costs 35p but when you add on the fuel duty and then add the VAT, the tax alone comes to more than twice the original cost at 78p. A litre of fuel at the pump varies from garage to garage but a mean average is £1:13.
VAT is paid by the end user, meaning that if you are a trader and you are VAT registered, you will charge VAT on your goods but the VAT that you have paid for goods and services is redeemable. So lets say that in a tax period you have charged a total of a thousand pounds but you have paid a total of five hundred pounds, you will only need to pay the taxman five hundred pounds.

Fifty years on and it still resonates:

"If you drive a car, I'll tax the street
If you try to sit, I'll tax your seat
If you get too cold, I'll tax the heat
If you take a walk, I'll tax your feet"

 

[Lean'n'mean]

While I understand the general workings of a VAT, I would like to understand how the value added is computed at the first instance. For example, suppose I operate a coal mine. The value of the coal in the ground is zero. It's only value is potential. No one can use it until it is extracted. So it seems to me that the value added is infinite, or at least not calculable.
Any European tax wizes here?

It's pretty easy really. VAT has 3 flat rates. 20%....5%.....0%
Each rate contains a list of catagories which will be taxed at that rate. So your coal, if sold & bought as home fuel for example, will have 5% VAT. since home fuel is always taxed at 5%
Nothing has a VAT value until it is sold or provided ,so your coal, extracted or not, has no VAT value until you actually sell it.......

 

[KILO NOVEMBER]

It's pretty easy really. VAT has 3 flat rates. 20%....5%.....0%
Each rate contains a list of catagories which will be taxed at that rate. So your coal, if sold & bought as home fuel for example, will have 5% VAT. since home fuel is always taxed at 5%
Nothing has a VAT value until it is sold or provided ,so your coal, extracted or not, has no VAT value until you actually sell it.......

This isn't how I thought about VAT. It was my impression that at every step in the distribution chain, VAT is assessed on the difference between what the buyer paid for something and the price at which the buyer sells it on to the next person in the chain. That difference being the "value added".

So if a product goes from a manufacturer to a wholesaler, to a retailer, to me, the VAT accumulates at each node in the network until I end up paying all of it. At least, that's how that fount of all knowledge, Wikipedia, describes it.

 

[Edward]

The last time I bought a car it was a smallish Ford SUV. Not only is it easy to get in and out of, it has enough headroom that I don't have to remove my hat to do so.
My wife recently bought a hybrid Toyota SUV (RAV4). It seems bigger than mine, but I still have to remove my hat.

There is a swathe of North London where you almost only ever see a specific model of Volvo, rarely another car, parked at every home. Seems unusual until you discover it's an area where the dominant population is London's Hassidic community, who of course like the extra headroom that model provides for their hats; probably the last community in London of a significant size where brimmed hats are regularly worn. It's a fascinating little example of how one specific criteria like that can open up a significant market.

 

[Edward]

Fifty years on and it still resonates:

"If you drive a car, I'll tax the street
If you try to sit, I'll tax your seat
If you get too cold, I'll tax the heat
If you take a walk, I'll tax your feet"

That was the era when the UK had a much bigger range of tax bands. Income tax here currently is 0% up to £12.5k, 20% from £10K to £50k, 40% from £50k to £150K, and 45% over £150K. It is taxed progressively - i.e. if you earn, say, £160K, you only pay the 45% on £10K, 40% on £100K, and so on - with nothing to pay on the first £12.5k. Back when George Harrison wrote this, the tax bands went all the way up to a top band at 90%, though by the time someone got to paying that on a proportion of their income, they already generally had more than they could spend anyhow. Notably when Harrison died, he was worth somewhere in the region of $400 million. I can comprehend his frustration, but I fear my sympathy is limited. He was probably lucky he wasn't 20 years older - the top rate during WW2 was 99.25%, and the state was much smaller (pre NHS) then - the money of course went into the war. Possibly fitting, as income tax in the UK was first created in 1798 by Pitt the Younger as a way of funding the Napoleonic Wars.

 

[Lean'n'mean]

This isn't how I thought about VAT. It was my impression that at every step in the distribution chain, VAT is assessed on the difference between what the buyer paid for something and the price at which the buyer sells it on to the next person in the chain. That difference being the "value added".

So if a product goes from a manufacturer to a wholesaler, to a retailer, to me, the VAT accumulates at each node in the network until I end up paying all of it. At least, that's how that fount of all knowledge, Wikipedia, describes it.

Yes that part is more complicated as some products have few steps in the distribution chain while others have many but the consumer will pay a fixed 20% VAT (provided the product falls in the 20% VAT rate) In fact, VAT registered businesses can claim back the VAT they themselves payed on products & services which they then sold to the consumer.
VAT isn't just payed on products though, many if not most services also carry a VAT charge as does the hospitality industry. Normaly the VAT is included in the displayed price so there isn't a shock when paying up but if you use the services of a plumber or an electrician etc. or take you pet to the veterinary surgeon, then that 20% added at the bottom of the bill can hurt some.

 

[Zombie_61]

...That style of trilby gets a bit of a bad rap often, but I prefer to see them as a gateway thing.... my first brimmed hat (which I think I still have somewhere) was a wool, brimmed hat I bought in Marks & Spencer or Debenhams, one of the two, for something like £15 on sale (£20 full price) way back in 91 or 92. Used to wear it with a black wool trench coat, black shirt, black jeans.... I think it was probably my first conscious "look" that I put together overall. Definitely the genesis of me wearing a hat regularly, if not daily...

I had been watching a marathon of the Rocky movies starring Sylvester Stallone, and decided to see if there were any "close enough" hats out there somewhere. I stumbled across this one on evilBay which was already less than $9 shipped, and the next thing I know a coupon appeared making the total cost less than $4. I thought, for that price even if I only wore the hat a few times to annoy "the right people" before it fell apart it would still be worth it. I was able to somewhat re-form the front of the brim "snapped" up to resemble a Pork Pie hat, and it's probably the most fun I've ever had for $4. My wife rolls her eyes every time I put it on, but that's part of the fun.

 

[Trenchfriend]

A question, that came to my mind.

When you're eating a yummy Atlantic Mackerel, do you eat the sturdy skin, too?

 

[ChrisB]

I just got back from the supermarket.

They were putting out Christmas stuff.

Happy Festivus everyone.

 

[GHT]

I just got back from the supermarket.
They were putting out Christmas stuff.

Go in on New Year's Day and the shelves will be full of Cadburys Creme Eggs.

 

[Bushman]

I just got back from the supermarket.

They were putting out Christmas stuff.

Happy Festivus everyone.

Mine was putting them out last weekend. I purposely cursed at the decorations loud enough for them to hear.

 

[Trenchfriend]

 

[Trenchfriend]

Haha, I'm the guy with a hard for old GSM-mobile phones!

Right now, I resurrected an nice old LG GS101 white (2011). It was shortly before dumping and my parents already had dumped the charger. But luckily, my simple SwissOne GSM-phone from 2019 has the matching charger! So it's now working and charging.

These cheap no-bullshit mobile phones probably came out of the same production plant.

 

[Trenchfriend]

We have no Karens (and Beckys) in Germany, but there are a def. some Su(s)annes, matching the point. Either married and aggressive OR lone and psychic wrecked (and aggressive). Usually viragoes.