MUCH as the information your report on findings by the Taxpayers’ Alliance (“19 years in work to pay average life’s tax bills”, The Herald, July 31) is welcome, not to say mind-boggling in that it tells us our lifetime tax bill is £734, the curative conclusions arrived at stray from the hard truths of the assembled statistics.

The alliance’s conclusions about ensuring apparently badly needed tax reduction is but a reinforcement argument for austerity. Bad enough it tells us the terrifying amount of total tax we pay in our lifetimes, but to alleviate this awful news it then tells us, in effect, that austerity is the answer: “Every arm of local and central government must redouble its efforts to root out unnecessary spending and inefficiency in everything they do,” without identifying specific areas of wastage.

In a week in which Britain’s Upper Chamber has come under badly-needed fresh scrutiny, it surely isn’t hard to find specific areas of wastage

Packed to the gunnels with people paid £300-per-day attendance money, lolling in their ermine robery (tax-financed no doubt) and funded in their feasting and lavish lifestyle by, guess what, our taxes.

But the alliance’s conclusion is merely that the excessive taxation is due to public service wastage, which sounds a bit like the present Government that also ignores the extravagances at its domestic back door and doesn’t seem to mind lashing out billions updating already sufficiently destructive nuclear weaponry.

What about the discrepancies between rich and poor that the report highlights, showing how the poor are paying proportionately more tax than the rich?

It is one thing to produce reports; curative conclusions are something else.

Ian Johnstone,

84 Forman Drive,

Peterhead.