Wednesday, April 22, 2009
I was all prepared to mock the UK government after reading this BBC article, entitled Tax rise as UK debt hits record :
The chancellor tore up a key New Labour election pledge by unveiling a new 50p tax rate for earnings over £150,000
I was under the impression that p stood for pence, which would amount to the government trying to dig their way out of a record debt by asking the country's well-to-do to check between the cushions for loose change.
Instead, I will be mocking the BBC for using the amazingly ambiguous p as a stand in for the universally understood '%' sign. Maybe it's a keyboard thing. We don't have the £ symbol on our keyboards, so they probably don't have the $ symbol on theirs. Perhaps the online copy editors just took it too far and assumed that, in addition to missing the symbol for pounds sterling, we might not also have access to some of these other key glyphs. Except maybe the ones used to spam about \/!@GR@ and (!@L!$ -- those must be pretty much universal.
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2 comments:
or it could in fact mean 50 pence, as in the tax on each £ of earnings over £150,000 would be 50p - which would also happen to be 50% (marginal tax rate). If you are wondering, here it is somewhere between 46 and 47%.
Interesting interpretation. That may be what they meant, though I'd argue that you can't call something a rate unless you include 'per' and indicate the unit -- anything else is ambiguous.
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