Why basic rate taxpayers are paying 40% tax

Updated

You may think you know how much tax you pay. If you're a basic rate taxpayer, you may be confident that your income tax rate is 20%, which means you fork over a fifth of everything to the government. This would be bad enough, but in reality it's just the start. A report shows that the real picture is that we hand over almost double that on everything we earn. And higher rate taxpayers on a 40% rate give almost half of everything they earn to the government.

So what's going on?

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