“vue des champs”

la rue de la petite lande

trinity
5th october 2007
the editor
jep
five oaks
for publication

dear sir,
it appears that our politicians still neither understand, nor wish to
address the public's concerns about how gst will be charged. (not that many of us
think that they should even be going there anyway!)
the experiences of decimalisation, metrication and mainland vat have shown
that any process, where prices get rounded up, leads to inflationary clipping of
the consumer. including the gst in individual prices will repeat this clipping for
every item in the shopping basket, instead of just once at the till.
the easiest way to illustrate this is with some worked examples, something gst's
supporters have been noticeably avoiding the use of.
suppose i buy a jep on the way home from work: i pay 45p and 3% gst - 1.35p.
to get that 0.35p the shop will have to charge me a whole penny, so i actually pay
47p. the 0.65p may go to the taxman or may go to the shop; i do not know if that
has been decided, yet.
but suppose i also buy a litre of milk for 96p + tax, a can of evaporated milk for
85p + tax and a can of cat food for 65p + tax. 96p goes to 98.88p, rounding up to
99p; 85p goes to 87.55p, up to 88p and 65p to 66.95p to 67p. so the total rises
from £2.91 to £3.01. effectively a 3.3% gst already. if the gst on all four items
were applied at the till, £2.91 plus 3% would be £2.99.73, rounding up to £3.00. a
penny on four items is not much, but how many items does a typical consumer
buy in a week? scores or even hundreds for large families. those pennies soon
add up to enough to matter.
by the way, when the constable of trinity put the question about price marking to
a parish meeting, earlier this year, we unanimously favoured a till tax. “just like
shopping at m&s” as deputy pryke remarked. are voters in the other parishes
really less shrewd than us, or are they just not being listened to?

yours faithfully

david rotherham