Would Grammy Winner Adele Be a Ron Paul Supporter?

Would pop star and Grammy winner Adele vote for Ron Paul?

In the past few years, Adele has benefited enormously from her music. Her most famous album, 21 has gone platinum 14 times and today her net worth is about $8 million dollars. However, Adele has complained about how much of her income goes to the government.

In an interview with Q magazine in 2011, she said, “I’m mortified to have to pay 50 percent! [While] I use the NHS, I can’t use public transport any more. Trains are always late, most state schools are shit, and I’ve gotta give you, like, four million quid – are you having a laugh? When I got my tax bill in from [the album] 19, I was ready to go and buy a gun and randomly open fire.” The U.K. raised the top rate for income tax to 50% in 2010 to raise revenues.

Adele's situation, though, is better than that of other famous British pop stars. For example, the Beatles paid a 95% super tax that was instituted under PM Harold Wilson's labour government. They too complained by writing “Taxman” which bemoaned the confiscation of such a high percentage of their income.

Even today, a 50% top rate is high. In the European portion of her 2011 Live tour, a vast majority of the countries she sang in had lower tax rates on income for the highest earners.

In the U.S., the top income tax rate is 35%, which makes one think that Adele would be happier, at least from a tax perspective, to be a U.S. citizen. But it's not clear from her statement whether she thinks taxes are too high or that they just don't go to creating high quality services. Would Adele prefer that taxes were lowered, or that the taxes taken in were made to be used more effectively so that the trains worked? Some people used her quote as evidence that she was against the U.K.'s National Health Service, but she merely says that she uses the service. In fact, the NHS is a comparatively effectiveuse of government money, because it achieve roughly equal health outcomes to the U.S. while using much less money. 

Depending on how Adele's politics comes down, she might be interested in making commmon cause with Ron Paul, who has frequently argued that the income tax should be abolished altogther.