My wife made a spreadsheet that calculated the family finances for various scenarios including differing lengths of unpaid maternity leave. “What your spreadsheet fails to take into account,” I said, “is that if you earn less over the course of the year then you will pay proportionally less tax.”
Debate ensued about how to calculate this. We would need a column for net pay. We would need to look up my wife’s tax allowance, and the various rates, and earnings levels at which they cut in. And then there is National Insurance which is another set of rules. In the end the spreadsheet would have encoded in its formulae the entire tax code. And if you work for half the year and not the other half, exactly when do you get the overpaid tax back?
This is my longstanding gripe: that not only do they take your money, they also use up valuable brain cycles thinking about all this, and valuable neurons storing knowlege about it.
In the end we decided that it wasn’t worth the effort, and I went off to play Eve Online, the intricacies of which are a much better use of brain space.