I'm no longer selling due to Simple Delivery and I am sure that that will affect eBay's revenue from private sellers as well as have a knock-on effect from people buying less due to having less to spend. I should just forget it but the whole thing is starting to feel a bit Big Brother and living rent-free in my head. Likewise, the topic of HMRC demanding eBay sellers' National Insurance Numbers is eating away at me.
If one analyses how often we pay tax and how much, it is both sickening and frightening. When we buy a new item, we have probably already paid VAT on it. If we, as private sellers, want to sell it, we are unlikely to be doing so at a profit and I think that in many cases (more often than not for me), we are doing so in order to upgrade to a newer or better item of the same type, if not to have money to spend on other things. By limiting how much we can sell without paying tax and not taking this into consideration seems unfair.
I'm chewing this over as I'm typing so it may not come across completely rationally but isn't double-dipping tax going to result in a downward consumer spiral. Just as I have a box of stuff which I am unable to list due to Simple Delivery which means that I will have less to spend, if I were to sell stuff, I'd be very careful not to reach the limit for HMRC reporting (monetary or 2½ items per month!). I am sure that there are reasons inspiring the Treasury but a nation's economic health is basically about the movement of money - not how much money the government can suck out of the economy to fund white elephant projects that nobody is interested in. I think that there is an air of misery which may be explained by economic incompetence or even ideology.
I have already started to give some stuff away that I would normally try to sell because it isn't worth the hassle. I'm not saying that to virtue signal, I've often given items away which have been impractical to sell, but when money stops moving, it isn't called stagnation for nothing. Far worse is stagflation when prices also increase and that is where we are heading.
Apologies for rambling but I have never felt so despondent about eBay and I think that eBay may be a litmus test for the bigger picture. I once heard a famous economist say that when a big company removes the plants from the foyer, you know that they are in financial trouble - it's the little things that give it away.
