Whilst some find it fun to bash Simon Cowell and the whole X-factor thing and there is some interesting stuff here about the whole spectacle, I was wondering about how much tax Simon Cowell pays. It’s been an exciting morning already, you can tell, right?

Taking figures from government websites about funding percentages in 2007/2008 and taking Cowell’s tax bill as £27.1 million in 2006 (just think what it would be now!) we can see that per week Simon contributes:

£93,808 to the NHS
£53,679 for schools
£121,429 for the OAP’s
£111,006 for those on benefits
£26,058 on the public debt interest
£31,269 for the Army, Navy and Airforce
£15,635 for the roads and rail
£26,058 for Scotland
£13,029 for Wales
£5,212 for Northern Ireland
£18,762 for Universities
£15,635 for tax credits
£5,212 storing nuclear waste
£2,606 the Iraq/Afghanistan wars
£5,212 for the police

I know he does this because he has to (though he could move his country of residence and pay his tax elsewhere) and I know that there’s a lot to gripe about (the vacuity of the celebrity culture he is helping to fuel, blah, blah, blah) but today the university that I go to is being funded by some of his money.

So I want to pause from the moaning and very legitimate issues about how he has made his money and the kind of world he is involved in making and say, “thank you, Simon Cowell and other super rich people out there for paying tax”.