From Mike Pitman
UNLIKE many people, I have never really resented paying my income tax, treating it as a necessary evil, although as a young man with an active social life in the pre-ITIS days, I sometimes found it hard to raise the wherewithal to pay it.

Of course in those days, business contributed most of the Treasury’s income and we all enjoyed a genuine personal low tax regime. Happy days.

Now each month however, I pine for those days and gaze longingly at my pay slip and the substantial ITIS deduction from my very average salary which is always shorter than the month, knowing that a tranche of the money taken from my pocket is actually going to provide benefits which give certain people a far higher standard of living than I can myself afford. Something wrong, surely?

I read in the JEP that the benefits system is based on the UK one. Why cannot the States grasp the inescapable fact that anything we slavishly import from the UK is bound to end in tears?

Policing and especially its leadership, and education spring readily to mind. Now we are creating a benefits-dependent sector which I truly cannot remember voting for.