Madam, – As a 32-year-old PAYE worker who has paid taxes since leaving full-time education, I am constantly baffled by the lack of personal responsibility displayed in “our great little country”.
I drive a 10-year-old car, I have a large mortgage which I dutifully service and I do not spend what I do not have. For this I do not expect plaudits, but neither do I expect to pay for the largesse of others: those who spent way beyond their means and now find themselves unable to pay, or those who invested in markets to win big but now want my taxes to indemnify their considerable losses. Why should the ordinary decent taxpayer be happy to underwrite their losses?
I am amazed to read on an almost daily basis of cases where people arrive in our courts to cry foul and argue that banks should never have lent them their borrowings and therefore they should not have to repay them. Invariably the judge sympathises and assures the mortgage defaulters that none of it was their fault and to hold their head high.
Are we to believe that the bank brainwashed these poor individuals, forcing them to buy their large house or new cars, multiple yearly holidays and vast quantities of consumer goods, and that we are to stand alongside them outraged at the suggestion that they be held even partially responsible for their own economic downfall?
All of us to a man would love to have all of the above; the difference is that some of us realised that what is bought on credit must be paid for sooner or later. Those who default must bear personal responsibility. – Yours, etc,