From City AM:
The bank levy and bank surcharge, both introduced by Tory former chancellor George Osborne, raised nearly £17bn in the six years up to 2016-17 (enough to fund the starting salaries of around 60,000 nurses and 60,000 police officers for each of those years).
I ought to do more posts on this, people use this tiresome analogy all the time.
The calculation looks about right. £3 billion a year ÷ 120,000 nurses/coppers = £25,000, but what it actually highlights is the dwindingly small amount of money which the UK government actually spends on police and nurse's salaries (about half a million in total @ £30,000 each = £18 bn a year, less than 3% of total government spending.
It'd be much more fun if they left the poor old nurses and coppers alone and compared receipts from a randomly selected tax like the bank levy/bank surcharge with a less wholesome spending line, for example "enough to fund the UK's annual subsidies to agricultural landowners like James Dyson", "enough to buy over a hundred F-35B Lightning II Joint Strike Fighters" or "enough to pay for 100 miles of high speed railway".
Debate Magazine
