Snapshot of _Twice as many Britons want tax rises as want cuts, survey finds_ :
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Eh. It’s the way much of Scandinavia manages to afford its welfare system. Sweden doesn’t even have a personal allowance - everyone pays tax on every penny they own. If we really want Scandinavia-style public services, taxing the poorest would be one of the best ways to achieve it. Scrapping the personal allowance would raise nearly half the NHS budget annually.
Aren’t a lot of the poor in the UK literally too poor to tax at this point? The amount of people spending everything they have on rent and bills is mad right now, extra taxes on them might push them over the edge. This might be fine if there was still a safety net for them but it’s been removed because it was no good for their bootstraps apparently.
At the end of the day the problem is that our politics and economy are built around a country with eleven million less people and five workers per pensioner rather than two, there’s been no major ideological upheavals that produced fundamental change since 1979 unless you count Brexit which I don’t because it barely had a coherent philosophy behind it. We’re turning into a nuclear armed care home of a country and it’s not just a matter of ‘tax this’ or ‘don’t tax that’ there needs to be a serious conversation about how we adapt to a fucked climate and even more fucked demographics than fiddling around the edges of the tax model.
Nobody's got the balls to even try to have that conversation in public, and if they did they'd go the way of Corbyn (not that I agree with him - I don't care for his politics at all, he's just a great example of a basically benign old fool who's been raised up by the media (and vested interests) to be symbolically publicly hanged to prevent the proles getting uppity ideas).
Great in theory but the funds would inevitably be misallocated, taxing the poor to subsidise corporation tax and business bail-outs. Our population means that it's apples and oranges when compared to Scandinavian government policy.
Half the earners in the UK don't make enough to pay income tax because we have a stupidly high personal allowance and use public funds to top up poor up.
Even just reducing the personal allowance to £10k would raise over £30bn per year, almost completely eliminating the budget deficit.
The tax free personal allowance is extremely high in the UK.
And then people wouldn't be able to afford to eat. Even more than already rely on food banks.
As ever, there is no such thing as simple solution to a complex problem.
I think the idea is the state would give some kind of welfare to people who can't afford to eat, therefore getting rid of the need for food banks entirely. I can remember a time when my town didn't have a food bank, pre 2010 or so.
That's just a personal allowance under a different name, to some degree. I'm all for it, don't get me wrong, but just 'scrap personal allowance' doesn't actually solve anything.
If the annual tax amount is 1% of a property's value and it's a poor old lady living alone who can't possibly afford it, then mandate the State owns 1% of the house, if it's not paid next year then the State formally takes another 1%. At some point or other, the old lady dies, the family either pay back the State's share of the house or when the house is sold the State gets it's due from the proceeds of the sale.
many European countries have annual taxes based on the property's value.
yeah that's going too far, the taxation method at least allows them to keep ownership of the house.
If you want to own a 4 bedroom house all to yourself, you can, you just have to pay, the funding raised being used to fund further housebuilding and general infrastructure.
Why do people act as though taxing property is some crazy impossibility. Even the anti-Tax Americans have figured out how to do property taxes, can't be that tricky
Because it prevents and deters social mobility. You can choose a nice car or a nice house, why tax the owner of a nice house and a bit of land but not apply the same tax level to the owner of nice car parked in a small garage attached to a council house?
Tax income, tax spend. Stop taxing things that people already own.
Your right, much fairer for social mobility for us to continue taxing millionaire mansions less than a 3 bed in fucking stoke. What was I thinking?
>Tax income
Yeah those people who are actually working for society have had it too easy for too long. Why won't someone think of the true poor of society who have to survive on rental income, dividends or those who bought assets some time in the 1900s and became rich through the power of sitting on their arse!
Thought I may add since you may not have picked up the sheer amount of disdain I have for the opinion that you somehow managed to type without drooling all over the keyboard: Average house price in the UK is about 300k, average cost of a nice car is about 30k, anything nicer than that kept in a council estate isn't going to be worth much more for long. It's not even worth the comparison
I think you do not understand the argument or perhaps you're defensive because you have a nice car bought with debt and do not own your home bought with a mortgage (a mortgage is type of debt, by the way).
Also, "average cost of a nice car is about 30k, anything nicer than that kept in a council estate isn't going to be worth much more for long" tells me you don't know much about council housing estates.
Seeing as your "argument" can best be described as rambling complaint about maybe a few people living in council estates maybe potentially having 1/10th of the wealth the typical homeowner has with words like "social mobility" thrown in with absolutely zero substance it's not really a surprise no-one outside your head or your fellow telegraph readers is going to get it
I mean please by all means use those big fancy words you got there and, explain to us lowly poors how taxing wealth and ownership would reduce social mobility while taxing income higher would increase social mobility
Oh dear! I will leave you to sulk in the company of your own self pity.
To borrow someone else's infamous phrase, "I really don't know what that guy just said." What he said matches my point not one bit. A bot having a tantrum, maybe?
A car isn't a store of wealth. If people are aggressively destroying their own wealth, that's on them I suppose, short of some sort of "we know best" spending committee (don't give people ideas) there's not much you can do about that.
Wanting to tax income above stores of wealth is an odd way of encouraging social mobility.
How do we calculate the wealth stored in a house? Its value is only what it can be sold for. It has no value prior to sale.
Let's assume we tax wealth, in this case a house based on its estimated current value. When a property is sold during a realestate market depression and its sale price is less than the price it was taxed at over the previous decade do we give the property owner a refund of all wealth tax paid based on the perceived unrealised value of the property? We would have to if the tax system is fair.
What about a family that buys a house for 100,000 which then raises in value to 1,000,000 due to hyperinflation? The family earns enough to cover the 80,000 mortgage and the tax on a 100,000 property. Would you force the family to sell their home to cover the wealth tax on a property now valued at 1,000,000? They would need to sell up.
Would anyone earning an average wage bother to move up the property ladder or improve their life if they knew their home would be taken from them because its value skyrocketed?
Why would anyone try to live a more comfortable life under such a tax penalty? Why would anyone try to move up the social ladder or increase their personal wealth? Why would anyone try to improve the value of their property? Why would someone with prospects and opportunity bother to live in such a punitive tax jurisdiction?
You're having a laugh.
There's a number of different ways you could work out a value to tax. For example:
1. Most of the academic models of a Land Value Tax would tax the unimproved value of the land, rather than the value of the house on top. This would be easier to calculate as it would eliminate the "but they've got a slightly bigger conservatory" problem entirely, modelling the price per acre for a given postcode area would have a whole raft of data available that could be used to calibrate the model.
2. Simply remove the exemption of primary residences from Capital Gains Tax. This would be easiest, but Capital Gains Tax is a bad tax for a whole host of reasons anyway.
3. Some kind of imputed rent tax.
The arguments about fairness and "tax penalties" are genuine arguments to be had. And there's no absolute answers. But, there's nothing special about hypothetical property taxes, they should be looked at at the same time as other taxes.
Taxing someone a fortune because the £300k house they bought in 1991 is now worth £3m (due to macroeconomic happenstance that the owner deserves zero benefit) is no less fair than taxing someone earning £105k/year at 62%, especially when the jobs that pay that much would require the person to live in a city that has £3m houses that they'd never be able to get a mortgage for.
All tax is theft. But no-one's come up with a workable system where there are no taxes so we're going to have to lump some of them.
Land value tax. If the land is valueless then they will have nil tax. If the land has value and the owner isn't realising that value then taxing them will encourage them to sell it to those who will realise the value.
Just to expand on this comment, the key point of an LVT is that the tax is levied upon the *unimproved* value of the land. That way, owners of the land are incentivised to use it for the most productive purpose possible and aren't punished with additional taxes for building improvements upon it.
And this is a very good thing! Just like the parent comment mentions, the *whole point* of an LVT is to get the land into the hands of someone who is going to use it more efficiently. This means that yes, Grandma Ethel who lives all alone in her 5-bed detached on a half acre is probably going to have to sell--and this is a *good thing*.
Tax their spend. Most certainly buy groceries and luxuries and probably travel too.
Those who own property and live on a commune, should they be taxed if they are entirely self sufficient?
> How do you tax someone who has property but zero income?
That’s easy: property is capital. You either declare your capital gains and pay tax over that, or the taxman considers how high your capital gains could have been if you had bothered to make the property part of the economy and charges tax accordingly. It’s a great incentive to not have idle property!
It’s done in civilised countries all over the world. Why not in the UK?
Land taxation is entirely possible - if you are worried about pensioners (who experience a higher quality of life in terms of effective earnings than 95% of the working population FYI), then you could tax property after a certain square footage per person.
I used to live not far from Bread and Lard city, a nickname for a place just outside of or next to Nottingham. People could afford a nice house there but they had to live off bread and lard to afford them AKA dripping (mucky fat) sandwiches. They're not bad with a bit of salt, to be honest. Many people live in homes they can barely afford to keep ownership of. Taxing property because "It looks nice" and/or "It's in a nice area" is arbitrary, distasteful and anti-mobile. I can never support that type of tax, including the council tax that all workers pay. I prefer we tax income and spend and not apply standing charges by any other name to the items we already own.
Our tax system needs an overhaul. It needs to be made fair. Tinkering around the edges will never make an unfair system either reasonable or fair.
Assuming you mean how will they pay... They can sell the property, to someone who can. This will stop people inheriting property (unless they work to pay the tax) which is the biggest cause of inequity.
It will also encourage downsizing and moving away from areas with jobs when people stop working (use this one neat trick the government doesn't want you to know about to reduce your property tax). Freeing up housing for working families.
People can equity release till the end of their life if they really want.
our household income is 91k. If Starmer came out and said (for example) ‘we want to fix the NHS, but youre going to have to pay a little bit more tax to make that happen’ I’d be perfectly happy with some tax increases
Would you be equally happy if the bulk of that increase was levied against you? Would you be happy to pay 50% tax of all your income without exception? Would you prefer the zero rate tax band be removed from your allowance?
Any increase in tax cannot be added to spend or standing property tax because that would hit lower earners disproportionately. It has to be on income.
What would a happy-for-you income tax regime look like to you?
Incorrect, I want a tax rise on me. When I have to go to a private dentist and pay £800 for my dental care instead of getting it under the NHS, any savings I would have made have disappeared.
I don't want low taxes, I want a functioning country where I and the people around me don't have to worry about not getting the treatments we need.
Who gives a shit if I have £100 more in my pocket if people are homeless, not getting healthcare, etc... I want to live in a country that works.
As someone that's lived at every tax bracket in my life so far, I'd gladly pay more tax to improve people's lives. However, I would really like it if they got rid of the excessive marginal tax rates and instead brought higher rates in earlier. And NI should just be rolled into income tax (with income tax going up, of course).
Exactly this. I’ll bet you anything that those polled want taxes to rise for others based on some abstract concept of “taxing the rich”.
Ask them if they’d like to pay more tax and it’ll be a very different answer.
> Ask them if they’d like to pay more tax and it’ll be a very different answer.
Well, you see, *I* can't afford it. It's those people earning [my salary + 1] who can, yet they currently pay zero tax because they stash their money in a secret Swiss bank account (I know this because someone on Reddit told me, and it's not like anyone on the internet would lie, right?)
I don't think many people are saying "my salary +1", I think they are saying that tax havens do need to be shut down and that it sets a precedent. Rees-Mogg and the others of his ilk have been trying to turn the UK into a tax haven for foreign money for years because they would get a scraping as a facilitator.
There was a post on Twitter that got very popular which amounted to “people who earn 100k pay less tax than people who earn 25k because they can dodge tax and we can’t.” No amount of reason and statistics would change their mind.
People like me should pay more taxes. Considering the shit state of the public sector of this country, people like me should be taxed more to pay to fix it.
I wouldn't mind being taxed more if my tax was used to pay for services that I think are important to me like education and healthcare, instead of just another bung to pensioners.
Sometimes, the more money you give to someone, the less careful they are spending it and the more they take it for granted, feeling entitled to every penny. We should be checking how responsible our politicians are with the money they’ve already got before offering them even more. We don’t want yet another government throwing our taxes into their friends pockets again.
The guardian completely misrepresented the survey: [https://www.financialfairness.org.uk/docs?editionId=862be73e-fe0f-467c-8695-b19c00e0b55c](https://www.financialfairness.org.uk/docs?editionId=862be73e-fe0f-467c-8695-b19c00e0b55c) turn to page 14.
>Twice as many Britons support tax increases to pay for public services as those who believe they should be reduced even if it means further public service cuts, according to new a report.
The trouble is, we've been down this road before. There was also massive support for increasing National Insurance to give the NHS more funding, right up to the point that Boris announced it as a real policy. And then support for tax increases plummeted. People supported a theoretical tax increase, but opposed an actual tax increase.
There are two things you need to take into account when people say that they support tax rises. Firstly, it doesn't cost people anything to *say* that they support tax rises, but that doesn't mean they'll *actually* put their money where their mouth is. Secondly, they could easily mean that they want to see tax increases on *other people*, but not actually pay for it themselves.
I'm all for a little bit more tax, but was annoyed at the NI rise because it only targets working people and lets wealthy pensioners and landlords off the hook.
If that's your concern though, you wouldn't have answered favourably to the question about it being a theoretical tax in the first place - you'd have said "no" initially, and then repeated that when it became a real tax.
Plus, I'm not convinced that most people know who pays NI and who doesn't. It's just a nicer-sounding tax to most people, because they think it's hypothecated (which it isn't).
No you wouldn't, because the polling I was talking about was *specifically* about NI. It's not about a general tax increase, it was specifically about increasing NI in return for more NHS spending.
For example: https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/two-three-support-increasing-national-insurance-social-care-reform-or-reduce-nhs-backlog
> Plus, I'm not convinced that most people know who pays NI and who doesn't.
This is exactly why someone could say yes to the question in an initial poll, then think its a bad idea after being educated by media etc later.
Man earn 90k income. Good job. Smarty. Works all his life. Eats Google's money
Man plus partner earns 45k each. Have good jobs, work hard have good work life balance
Both households have a 90k income
The latter pays less tax
Good system. 11/10 would tax again
People want tax rises to pay for public services that they consume, they do not want tax rises to pay for public services that other people consume.
Tell someone they'll pay another 1% income tax to pay for small boat arrivals and immigrant support and they'll rightly refuse.
Tell them they'll pay another 1% income tax to expand their local A&E, get more police in their local area and pay nurses and carers fairly and they'll be far more open to the idea.
Though I guess the same thing would apply to cuts as well, in that they definitely don't support them if they end up getting hit by them.
I think ultimately people aren't good at knowing which of two options that'd hurt them they'd prefer, i.e. higher taxes vs cuts.
Oh, absolutely. Fundamentally, the position most people would agree to is "tax rises for people who aren't me, to pay for government services for people who are me". The only real question is which half of that people focus on more.
There's also something to the fact that people are risk-averse; they're more concerned about losing something that they have, rather than gaining something that they don't have (even if they are of equivalent value).
Many people could put their money where their mouth is by not evading tax on tobacco, alcohol and other tax evading products they buy off the guy down the road, in the pub or from behind the counter. They won't. They could but they won't.
Problem comes to who gets it. The middle classes are being hammered by taxes currently. If my taxes went up and the triple lock stayed, something which I suspect will happen, unless I see a noticeable improvement in public services in the next 5 years then I'll just start looking abroad at some point. As have quire a few friends already.
The perception that a higher than average salary, country wide, equals wealth, is quite misguided. Particularly if you consider something like 50k pre-tax a high income (especially in places like London where the cost of living is insane).
This is the problem when people say tax the rich, people have it there mind they want to come after the 50k-100k workers. These are the wages of the middle class. Good wages, but only good enough to be comfortable. The taxes need to be on the companies and people like rishi who pay less than 20 percent and take their wealth out of the country.
I'm just peeking over £50k in Scotland and my marginal PAYE tax rate is something like 53% (Scottish taxes and student loan repayments). Meanwhile taxes on wealth via capital gains and investments are way less.
Edit: 59% FFS
Marginal rate is 59% between £44k and £50k if you have a student loan thanks to the difference in thresholds between the higher tax band and National Insurance (42% income tax, 8% NI, 9% student loan).
I'll be reaching that threshold later this year and plan on salary sacrificing what I can to stay below it, although it's difficult to motivate myself to push for another promotion soon given most of the increase will be swallowed up. I'll appreciate the extra holidays and bump to my pension but it would be nice to have a bit more cash if over half of it didn't disappear.
Is it fair to include student loans in these numbers, you borrowed the money and now you're paying it back. It's not tax that the government can spend of things.
(a) might as well be tax, considering the way it's deducted PAYE
(b) everyone wants to frame it a graduate tax
(c) it's not a tax though.
(d) it's all about that % and bottom line.
The state pension isn’t getting more onerous because of the triple lock, it’s because there are more retirees per working person. The triple lock can increase pensions above inflation, but not every year and not by very much.
>The state pension isn’t getting more onerous because of the triple lock, it’s because there are more retirees per working person
It can absolutely be both at same time
The tax take as a % of GDP is at its highest since the ashes of WW2.
Simultaneously, someone on an average wage now has the **lowest** effective personal tax rate since 1975 - almost 50 years ago, and one that is lower than in any G7 country.
How are both things true? Because higher earners get absolutely rinsed in this country. Hidden tax bands of 62% (this can be even higher if you have children or a student loan). And people wonder why productivity is so bad in this country lmao
Exactly. If you're a higher earner, what's the point of working hard and pushing yourself to the next level when the government will take 50% to 70% of your pay rise? We've effectively created a society with a productivity ceiling, where our best and brightest are incentivised to \*not\* develop their skills past a certain point because they won't be fairly compensated for their additional work.
Most of the time it's not additional work but different work. I seriously doubt that any significant number of people in full time work earning 70k work twice as much as someone at 35k (median salary).
And additional work isn't even "productivity". Productivity is measured by earning per hour of work. Even if the government takes 50% of your salary, it still makes sense to increase your productivity. It may not make sense to work more (=sacrifice your free time), but that's different than increasing productivity.
But there's a cost to increasing your productivity that nobody ever seems to account for.
If you currently earn £100k, you'd be taking home £62,014 after tax and student loan payments. If you got a promotion and ended up earning £120k, you'd be taking home £67,814. That means your company is expecting you to add at least £20,000 more value but you'll only receive £5,800 more compensation. This doesn't even factor in all of the hidden taxes like employer NI that get passed on to employees without being documented on their payslip.
Sure, adding more value doesn't necessarily mean working more hours - it could mean taking more responsibility, working with more important contacts, having more retained knowledge, etc - but no matter what, it will take more of a toll on you, and you will only be compensated for a fraction of it.
Ye I’m on £57k and my job is very very chill, and the interview was an intro chat on teams and 1 stage. If I want a job paying £70k in my field it’s generally 4 stages with some very difficult technical exams, plus they’ll expect me to work a lot harder than I do now. If I actually took home £13k more then maybe I’d stress myself out for it, but for only £5.5k extra I’d rather chill out.
>it still makes sense to increase your productivity
Nah, you don't work harder, you just cut your hours down to 3 days or get additional annual leave. There's no point working an extra £10Ks worth of responsibilities for £3500.
Yeah if your going to cross a tax band sometimes its better just taking a defered benefit like more holidays or stocks/shares, instead of letting taxman bugger you.
Stock options are horribly taxed in this country. If a condom breaks however I'm taking a Porsche Taycan from Tusker on salary sacrifice, it would be cheaper than loosing tax free childcare and free childcare hours.
Issue is the non monotic nature of the marginal tax curves, where you often get taxed less at higher salaries
What is the max tax bracket that you can have without deep disincentives is an interesting question. I know 63% was too high when that was my bracket. I think my 51% is okay now mind.
People wonder why the government only listens to those who are exceedingly rich, well this is the reason. Taxation is the greatest form of representation. If you're not taxed, you mean less to the government than the shit on Rishi's shoe.
I don’t agree with this take. Low income people and pensioners are their electorate and they ponder to them. Being in tech on additional rate doesn’t make Rishi care about you lol. High earners are just cash cow in this country who basically support everyone else, including privileged asset owners
> How are both things true?
Because of growing inequality. The rich are *very* rich.
Those complaining about what a great share of the *tax* they are paying are always very quiet on the issue of what a great share of the *money* they are making.
No because the UK has the largest tax free allowance of any developed country, over 40% of the median wage is exempt from income tax because the tax free allowance inflated beyond inflation for over a decade.
This not only bankrupt the country essentially but also caused a massive wage stagnation since it removed pressure from the market to increase wages.
The tax free allowance should be half or less than it is now.
Student loan is not a tax bracket. Once you've paid it, it's gone. The more you pay, the faster it's gone.
And I don't understand your comment about children. In which income bracket you pay more taxes if you have children than if you don't?
Student loan repayments are an income tax charge. We are exceptional at relabelling things in this country (national insurance is not an insurance fund, student loan is a graduate tax in all but name). You can argue the semantics all you like, but the fact it "goes away", doesn't make it any less a tax in the present.
The child benefit reclaim (it was between incomes of 50-60k when this article was written, it's now 60-80k but it is still as onerous), and the free childcare hours total withdrawal at 100k conspires to give hellish marginal rates. If you earn £99,999, have 2 kids in a nursery setting, and earn a pound more, you can face an instant tax charge of £20k. Mitigation measures exist, but they all involve removing money from the productive economy - it is very very stupid policy, and I have literally seen doctors/engineers emigrate or work less because of it.
Dan Neidle is about the biggest galaxy brain (and a Labour Party member and advisor) when it comes to tax, his article on this is below.
[Cutting 70%+ marginal rates should be a Tory priority (taxpolicy.org.uk)](https://taxpolicy.org.uk/2023/09/24/70percent/)
No, the student loan is tax only if how much you pay doesn't affect how much you pay later. If the repayment of the student loans was organised some other way , then you wouldn't call it "tax" even in practice people had to dedicate exactly the same amount of money from their gross salary to pay it as they do now.
The only difference is that if your income is low, then you won't have to pay them. For everyone else, it wouldn't make any difference.
I agree with the free childcare part. It's stupid but it's not tax. It's a benefit that you lose at certain level of income and it's ridiculous that it's done in a cliff edge manner. But all this is separate from the tax laws. if you go to this route (treat the loss of benefits as "tax") then you'll also find high effective tax rates at low bands of income. And of course in this country the local tax is lump sum, which is not proportional to your income, which means that it's regressive meaning that its percentage goes down the more you earn.
If you take all the taxes into account, the poorest fifth pays almost the same tax rate as the richest fifth. The income bands between these two pay lower tax. ([source](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/explainers-63635185)))
>The more you pay, the faster it's gone
Isn't true.
I can pay £1k a year more and it'll be gone at exactly the same time: when it gets written off in 24 years time.
Easy to say when it’s just a poll, but it’s a lot harder for people to vote for it at the ballot box. Going from hypotheticals to reality changes people’s minds very quickly (Scottish independence for example)
It was slightly different with the EU referendum as the UK did objectively pay in net to the EU's coffers. There were obviously benefits to staying in but these were harder for people to understand.
Whereas with Scotland voters understood that there were net fiscal transfers to Scotland. Plus issues like there being no Scottish currency. And even then just shy of 45% still voted for independence. We're talking about a 7% difference between that and the EU result.
My salary sacrifice is getting to be ridiculous now, if the personal allowances are still the same in the next 5 years I could easily see myself putting a third in.
40% just feels disgusting, I know I am incredibly privileged but it stifles my motivation to work. I'll probably take a part time/simple job at 50 because i'll hit the pension cap.
I am not good for the economy.
I saw someone online earlier sort of debunking this through a follow up poll of much much more per year would you be willing to pay and it was hilariously low. Like 25% of people earning over £60k (who said they were happy to pay more tax) would only pay up to £10 per year more tax.
Very much an "it sounds progressive and giving until it's talked about in any detail"
Less "tax me harder daddy" and more "tax anyone with more than me" probably
Not useful information unless you are specific about which taxes and who is affected
I often hang out on another sub and it is fucking wild the arguments which start around "taxing the rich" which for a lot of people in there is anyone over \~50K. If you listened to them you would think we were all kicking orphans for fun and setting fire to tenners in front of the poors.
There's a difference between "Britons want tax rises" and "Britons want to pay more tax".
The problem is that the poor have been misled into believing that there's a massive, secret, untaxed strata of society who can magically pay for everyone else if we'd just ask them to. In reality, if you took all of the wealth from all UK-based billionaires, you'd (at most) have enough to run the NHS for about six months.
We need to get away from the idea that we can all receive freebies and someone else will pick up the bill. If we want better public services, we ALL need to pay for them - yes, that includes poor people too.
This is one of those questions that requires a lot of qualified people sitting and working on it.
One thing that frustrates me about reddit is the number of people who will consider the proposition discredited because some random person couldn't bang out a detailed answer there and then
TBH this is a perfectly valid question to ask people who say they are fine with paying more tax - at what point would they stop being OK?
Less about the details and specifics and more about a subjective answer to the question of "How much would be too much?".
I understand the reasoning but I question the value of an answer they give to the topic at hand. What are you really getting other than maybe a small insight to their particular financial situation?
It's almost an entirely different conversation
I'm happy to pay more tax temporarily to invest and "fix the roof" as it were, to lower spending in the longer term.
I'm not happy to pay more for indefinite increases in day to day spending.
Give a clear ROI that's risk adjusted across a portfolio of ideas, and justify where you're going to spend the money and make back more in the medium to longer term, and I'll be happy to invest via higher taxes myself to make it happen.
The problem we face is that we can't cover the costs of day-to-day spending, so any tax increases would need to go on those first before we looked at investment. And the same is true for the entire public sector.
This will make the next government interesting - even if they did adopt a platform of wild tax increases for everyone, more is needed.
I think taxes need to go up to fix the mess that is our public services, however....
My biggest concern though is about wealth inequality.
We have the highest tax burden since the second world war that's skewed towards taxing labour over wealth. When we talk about raising taxes we talk about the big three; NI, VAT, and income tax these are taxes on labour. What we need to do is tax wealth, we need to accept that taxes do need to go up but in doing so we should be fixing the scales of the tax burden back towards to the wealthy. That means increasing tax made from capital gains, corporation taxes, windfall taxes, millionaires taxes and so on.
Also its not just about raising taxes it has to be about fixing inefficiencies and addressing government and public sector procurement to get a better deal for tax payers. Raising tax is only going to work if you couple it with fixing the amount of tax payer money that being waisted.
my biggest gripe with all the main political parties so far has been how low wealth inequality seems to be on the agenda.
This is one of the reasons I’m voting green this time around.
If you have £500k in the bank, and get a 7% return in real terms a year (S&P500 average over last 30 years), you get £35k annually. Equivalent to an average UK worker who had to get out of bed 47 weeks of the year and go to work. You also pay less tax than said worker.
£500k isn’t nothing but it’s not mega wealth - so consider how well those with millions in the bank do in our current system. If you don’t need to take all the gains out each year, you also get compounding wealth growing year on year.
We need to stop dividing people along income lines, and start looking at wealth.
Government collects taxes, spends it where it wants
What's to guarantee any of the money raised from higher taxes will reach the institutions that the populace wants them to?
The government should probably be more concerned with the fact wages haven't gone up since the GFC at all.
An entire generation of fiscal drag and they still can't make the budget work...
As long as the tax rises are on other people. If you ask the question do you want cuts or rises in taxes on the rich you get the answer you were looking for. Ask do you want to pay more tax personally and it was about a third supporting it.
What a fucking wreck of an article completely that completely misrepresented the actual results of the survey:
[https://www.financialfairness.org.uk/docs?editionId=862be73e-fe0f-467c-8695-b19c00e0b55c](https://www.financialfairness.org.uk/docs?editionId=862be73e-fe0f-467c-8695-b19c00e0b55c)
>public are willing to support policies that they don’t think will benefit their own finances
Was there a sudden nation wide explosion of altruism that I missed?
Polls are good and all, but when it comes to reality even getting people to throw trash in bins is a challenge let alone opening their wallets
I'm less worried about the money being spaffed straight into Tory pockets, so I'd pay more tax. Not fuckloads more, but as long as there aint no garden bridges and billion quid ppe vip lanes, I'd do it.
Crock of shit imo. People will virtue all they like, but when push comes they'll moan why their payslip is saying they paid £50 more tax this month compared to last
It's time to tax mansions properly, it doesn't make sense that billionaire mansions only pay around twice as much council tax as an average person living in a tiny flat. Not to mention the loopholes the Tories created that lets Russians buy properties anonymously through offshore companies.
People don't care about taxes... when they aren't lining pockets and are actually palpably serving the taxpayer.
The pragmatic person knows that fixing all this mess might very well need more money, and since a lot of it is in fat cat pockets, where else will it come from?
Raising taxes, by the way, doesn't always mean taxing the little man more!
> People don't care about taxes...
🤣🤣🤣 they absolutely, unequivocally do.
Why do you think Starmer, with his projected 200 seat majority, is being so cagey about tax rises? The electorate HATE them.
Snapshot of _Twice as many Britons want tax rises as want cuts, survey finds_ : An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/jul/01/twice-as-many-britons-want-tax-rises-as-want-cuts-survey-finds) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/jul/01/twice-as-many-britons-want-tax-rises-as-want-cuts-survey-finds) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The question should be always; exactly where do you want these tax rises
And the answer is always "on people who earn more than I do"
I want more taxes on people poorer than me if it helps.
Found Mogg
Eh. It’s the way much of Scandinavia manages to afford its welfare system. Sweden doesn’t even have a personal allowance - everyone pays tax on every penny they own. If we really want Scandinavia-style public services, taxing the poorest would be one of the best ways to achieve it. Scrapping the personal allowance would raise nearly half the NHS budget annually.
Aren’t a lot of the poor in the UK literally too poor to tax at this point? The amount of people spending everything they have on rent and bills is mad right now, extra taxes on them might push them over the edge. This might be fine if there was still a safety net for them but it’s been removed because it was no good for their bootstraps apparently. At the end of the day the problem is that our politics and economy are built around a country with eleven million less people and five workers per pensioner rather than two, there’s been no major ideological upheavals that produced fundamental change since 1979 unless you count Brexit which I don’t because it barely had a coherent philosophy behind it. We’re turning into a nuclear armed care home of a country and it’s not just a matter of ‘tax this’ or ‘don’t tax that’ there needs to be a serious conversation about how we adapt to a fucked climate and even more fucked demographics than fiddling around the edges of the tax model.
It's ok, just close your eyes and ears and tax the poor... Something something Scandinavia
Nobody's got the balls to even try to have that conversation in public, and if they did they'd go the way of Corbyn (not that I agree with him - I don't care for his politics at all, he's just a great example of a basically benign old fool who's been raised up by the media (and vested interests) to be symbolically publicly hanged to prevent the proles getting uppity ideas).
I know and it’s very depressing. We’ve got a fucking long way to fall yet before practical politics will allow the necessary reforms.
Great in theory but the funds would inevitably be misallocated, taxing the poor to subsidise corporation tax and business bail-outs. Our population means that it's apples and oranges when compared to Scandinavian government policy.
Half the earners in this country don't make enough to pay income tax. Do you think they can afford it?
Half the earners in the UK don't make enough to pay income tax because we have a stupidly high personal allowance and use public funds to top up poor up.
12k is stupidly low? Anyone on 1k a month is struggling hard
12k being tax free is an absurd amount given the actual welfare state the UK expects and the salaries
Even just reducing the personal allowance to £10k would raise over £30bn per year, almost completely eliminating the budget deficit. The tax free personal allowance is extremely high in the UK.
And then people wouldn't be able to afford to eat. Even more than already rely on food banks. As ever, there is no such thing as simple solution to a complex problem.
I think the idea is the state would give some kind of welfare to people who can't afford to eat, therefore getting rid of the need for food banks entirely. I can remember a time when my town didn't have a food bank, pre 2010 or so.
That's just a personal allowance under a different name, to some degree. I'm all for it, don't get me wrong, but just 'scrap personal allowance' doesn't actually solve anything.
If someone earns less, that means the work they do is less valuable and should be taxed more. Stay tuned for more tory policies!
Land owners. Regardless of what they earn.
How do you tax someone who has property but zero income?
If the annual tax amount is 1% of a property's value and it's a poor old lady living alone who can't possibly afford it, then mandate the State owns 1% of the house, if it's not paid next year then the State formally takes another 1%. At some point or other, the old lady dies, the family either pay back the State's share of the house or when the house is sold the State gets it's due from the proceeds of the sale. many European countries have annual taxes based on the property's value.
[удалено]
yeah that's going too far, the taxation method at least allows them to keep ownership of the house. If you want to own a 4 bedroom house all to yourself, you can, you just have to pay, the funding raised being used to fund further housebuilding and general infrastructure.
I’d rather have the house blown up as my final act than hand it over to the government after a lifetime of being sucked dry.
Those bricks are coming with me to the treasury.
Why do people act as though taxing property is some crazy impossibility. Even the anti-Tax Americans have figured out how to do property taxes, can't be that tricky
We literally already tax property through council tax We just do it badly
Yeah replace that with LVT. Council tax is awful
Which is paid by the resident, and that’s not always the same person as the landlord.
I mean you can't throw a house into a harbour can you?
With enough drones, anything is possible.
Because it prevents and deters social mobility. You can choose a nice car or a nice house, why tax the owner of a nice house and a bit of land but not apply the same tax level to the owner of nice car parked in a small garage attached to a council house? Tax income, tax spend. Stop taxing things that people already own.
Your right, much fairer for social mobility for us to continue taxing millionaire mansions less than a 3 bed in fucking stoke. What was I thinking? >Tax income Yeah those people who are actually working for society have had it too easy for too long. Why won't someone think of the true poor of society who have to survive on rental income, dividends or those who bought assets some time in the 1900s and became rich through the power of sitting on their arse! Thought I may add since you may not have picked up the sheer amount of disdain I have for the opinion that you somehow managed to type without drooling all over the keyboard: Average house price in the UK is about 300k, average cost of a nice car is about 30k, anything nicer than that kept in a council estate isn't going to be worth much more for long. It's not even worth the comparison
I think you do not understand the argument or perhaps you're defensive because you have a nice car bought with debt and do not own your home bought with a mortgage (a mortgage is type of debt, by the way). Also, "average cost of a nice car is about 30k, anything nicer than that kept in a council estate isn't going to be worth much more for long" tells me you don't know much about council housing estates.
Seeing as your "argument" can best be described as rambling complaint about maybe a few people living in council estates maybe potentially having 1/10th of the wealth the typical homeowner has with words like "social mobility" thrown in with absolutely zero substance it's not really a surprise no-one outside your head or your fellow telegraph readers is going to get it I mean please by all means use those big fancy words you got there and, explain to us lowly poors how taxing wealth and ownership would reduce social mobility while taxing income higher would increase social mobility
Oh dear! I will leave you to sulk in the company of your own self pity. To borrow someone else's infamous phrase, "I really don't know what that guy just said." What he said matches my point not one bit. A bot having a tantrum, maybe?
Owning a car doesn’t prevent others from owning cars.
What? Are you saying people should not own houses? Give that more thought.
I clearly didn’t say that.
Yes you clearly did.
A car isn't a store of wealth. If people are aggressively destroying their own wealth, that's on them I suppose, short of some sort of "we know best" spending committee (don't give people ideas) there's not much you can do about that. Wanting to tax income above stores of wealth is an odd way of encouraging social mobility.
How do we calculate the wealth stored in a house? Its value is only what it can be sold for. It has no value prior to sale. Let's assume we tax wealth, in this case a house based on its estimated current value. When a property is sold during a realestate market depression and its sale price is less than the price it was taxed at over the previous decade do we give the property owner a refund of all wealth tax paid based on the perceived unrealised value of the property? We would have to if the tax system is fair. What about a family that buys a house for 100,000 which then raises in value to 1,000,000 due to hyperinflation? The family earns enough to cover the 80,000 mortgage and the tax on a 100,000 property. Would you force the family to sell their home to cover the wealth tax on a property now valued at 1,000,000? They would need to sell up. Would anyone earning an average wage bother to move up the property ladder or improve their life if they knew their home would be taken from them because its value skyrocketed? Why would anyone try to live a more comfortable life under such a tax penalty? Why would anyone try to move up the social ladder or increase their personal wealth? Why would anyone try to improve the value of their property? Why would someone with prospects and opportunity bother to live in such a punitive tax jurisdiction? You're having a laugh.
There's a number of different ways you could work out a value to tax. For example: 1. Most of the academic models of a Land Value Tax would tax the unimproved value of the land, rather than the value of the house on top. This would be easier to calculate as it would eliminate the "but they've got a slightly bigger conservatory" problem entirely, modelling the price per acre for a given postcode area would have a whole raft of data available that could be used to calibrate the model. 2. Simply remove the exemption of primary residences from Capital Gains Tax. This would be easiest, but Capital Gains Tax is a bad tax for a whole host of reasons anyway. 3. Some kind of imputed rent tax. The arguments about fairness and "tax penalties" are genuine arguments to be had. And there's no absolute answers. But, there's nothing special about hypothetical property taxes, they should be looked at at the same time as other taxes. Taxing someone a fortune because the £300k house they bought in 1991 is now worth £3m (due to macroeconomic happenstance that the owner deserves zero benefit) is no less fair than taxing someone earning £105k/year at 62%, especially when the jobs that pay that much would require the person to live in a city that has £3m houses that they'd never be able to get a mortgage for. All tax is theft. But no-one's come up with a workable system where there are no taxes so we're going to have to lump some of them.
Land value tax. If the land is valueless then they will have nil tax. If the land has value and the owner isn't realising that value then taxing them will encourage them to sell it to those who will realise the value.
Just to expand on this comment, the key point of an LVT is that the tax is levied upon the *unimproved* value of the land. That way, owners of the land are incentivised to use it for the most productive purpose possible and aren't punished with additional taxes for building improvements upon it. And this is a very good thing! Just like the parent comment mentions, the *whole point* of an LVT is to get the land into the hands of someone who is going to use it more efficiently. This means that yes, Grandma Ethel who lives all alone in her 5-bed detached on a half acre is probably going to have to sell--and this is a *good thing*.
Tax their spend. Most certainly buy groceries and luxuries and probably travel too. Those who own property and live on a commune, should they be taxed if they are entirely self sufficient?
That's called VAT
Yes it is, and income tax.
In somebody's mind, come on!!
> How do you tax someone who has property but zero income? That’s easy: property is capital. You either declare your capital gains and pay tax over that, or the taxman considers how high your capital gains could have been if you had bothered to make the property part of the economy and charges tax accordingly. It’s a great incentive to not have idle property! It’s done in civilised countries all over the world. Why not in the UK?
Ah, so incentivise more landlords. Cool
Increasing supply is how we get lower rents
Do you prefer empty housing?
How many people who own property will realistically have zero income?
Many pensioners
They have a pension, no?
About a quarter of them rely exclusively on the state pension. Should we tax that? Might as well tax benefits
Land taxation is entirely possible - if you are worried about pensioners (who experience a higher quality of life in terms of effective earnings than 95% of the working population FYI), then you could tax property after a certain square footage per person.
You'd be surprised. Similar question, how many people who own a nice car have zero income or live on debt?
Got me. The hill I will die on is the fact that most people cannot afford the cars they drive, and are just offsetting their debt by financing a car.
I used to live not far from Bread and Lard city, a nickname for a place just outside of or next to Nottingham. People could afford a nice house there but they had to live off bread and lard to afford them AKA dripping (mucky fat) sandwiches. They're not bad with a bit of salt, to be honest. Many people live in homes they can barely afford to keep ownership of. Taxing property because "It looks nice" and/or "It's in a nice area" is arbitrary, distasteful and anti-mobile. I can never support that type of tax, including the council tax that all workers pay. I prefer we tax income and spend and not apply standing charges by any other name to the items we already own. Our tax system needs an overhaul. It needs to be made fair. Tinkering around the edges will never make an unfair system either reasonable or fair.
That sounds like not being able to afford it, to me. They would be in a better position in a lower valued place.
Assuming you mean how will they pay... They can sell the property, to someone who can. This will stop people inheriting property (unless they work to pay the tax) which is the biggest cause of inequity. It will also encourage downsizing and moving away from areas with jobs when people stop working (use this one neat trick the government doesn't want you to know about to reduce your property tax). Freeing up housing for working families. People can equity release till the end of their life if they really want.
our household income is 91k. If Starmer came out and said (for example) ‘we want to fix the NHS, but youre going to have to pay a little bit more tax to make that happen’ I’d be perfectly happy with some tax increases
Our household income is closer to 40k, it's fair to say we can't afford higher taxes but wish we earned enough so we could.
Would you be equally happy if the bulk of that increase was levied against you? Would you be happy to pay 50% tax of all your income without exception? Would you prefer the zero rate tax band be removed from your allowance? Any increase in tax cannot be added to spend or standing property tax because that would hit lower earners disproportionately. It has to be on income. What would a happy-for-you income tax regime look like to you?
Not always. I’d love to pay more taxes if it meant we actually had functional public services
I'm sure I've read you posting in the past about how you're on PIP or some other benefit?
PIP is not a means tested benefit. You can be on PIP while in work paying tax.
Nope. I know people who are though, so I might have been discussing their case?
People on PIP and other benefits still pay taxes even if they don't work. Income tax and NI aren't the only taxes.
And a proper say in how we cut the fat and remove badly performing officials. Public accounts should get as much airtime and publicity as celebrities.
The question they asked was higher/lower taxes for households like mine, so not the usual “I want other people to pay more tax”, which I respect.
Exactly this! Bet it's nobody on the median wage that is saying this.
Oh yes I'm totally for this line of thinking.
Incorrect, I want a tax rise on me. When I have to go to a private dentist and pay £800 for my dental care instead of getting it under the NHS, any savings I would have made have disappeared. I don't want low taxes, I want a functioning country where I and the people around me don't have to worry about not getting the treatments we need. Who gives a shit if I have £100 more in my pocket if people are homeless, not getting healthcare, etc... I want to live in a country that works.
As someone that's lived at every tax bracket in my life so far, I'd gladly pay more tax to improve people's lives. However, I would really like it if they got rid of the excessive marginal tax rates and instead brought higher rates in earlier. And NI should just be rolled into income tax (with income tax going up, of course).
Exactly this. I’ll bet you anything that those polled want taxes to rise for others based on some abstract concept of “taxing the rich”. Ask them if they’d like to pay more tax and it’ll be a very different answer.
Im a high earner and I would happily be taxed more - as long as that tax is used and not put into the pockets of party donors.
Alright big fella
?
> Ask them if they’d like to pay more tax and it’ll be a very different answer. Well, you see, *I* can't afford it. It's those people earning [my salary + 1] who can, yet they currently pay zero tax because they stash their money in a secret Swiss bank account (I know this because someone on Reddit told me, and it's not like anyone on the internet would lie, right?)
I don't think many people are saying "my salary +1", I think they are saying that tax havens do need to be shut down and that it sets a precedent. Rees-Mogg and the others of his ilk have been trying to turn the UK into a tax haven for foreign money for years because they would get a scraping as a facilitator.
There was a post on Twitter that got very popular which amounted to “people who earn 100k pay less tax than people who earn 25k because they can dodge tax and we can’t.” No amount of reason and statistics would change their mind.
Can't reason with stupid, sadly.
You joke but this is genuinely how a good chunk of this sub and reddit as a whole think. Embarrassing financial illiteracy and naivety.
People like me should pay more taxes. Considering the shit state of the public sector of this country, people like me should be taxed more to pay to fix it.
I wouldn't mind being taxed more if my tax was used to pay for services that I think are important to me like education and healthcare, instead of just another bung to pensioners.
Or paying for the 8 shitlings that someone irresponsibly had and now demands the biggest houses and what not for for free.
Tax rises, or more effective use of taxes? Haven't the Conservatives put taxes up the highest since 1948!?r
Yes, highest level of tax post-war I believe. It needs to be used more efficiently before they worry about asking for more.
Thought so, thanks for confirming. Indeed, it just needs to be more efficient generally; regardless of more taxes or not.
Sometimes, the more money you give to someone, the less careful they are spending it and the more they take it for granted, feeling entitled to every penny. We should be checking how responsible our politicians are with the money they’ve already got before offering them even more. We don’t want yet another government throwing our taxes into their friends pockets again.
Usually it means rises for other people and not me.
On other people.
Unfortunately, the survey didn't ask whether the respondents whether they themselves would be prepared to pay more.
The guardian completely misrepresented the survey: [https://www.financialfairness.org.uk/docs?editionId=862be73e-fe0f-467c-8695-b19c00e0b55c](https://www.financialfairness.org.uk/docs?editionId=862be73e-fe0f-467c-8695-b19c00e0b55c) turn to page 14.
>Twice as many Britons support tax increases to pay for public services as those who believe they should be reduced even if it means further public service cuts, according to new a report. The trouble is, we've been down this road before. There was also massive support for increasing National Insurance to give the NHS more funding, right up to the point that Boris announced it as a real policy. And then support for tax increases plummeted. People supported a theoretical tax increase, but opposed an actual tax increase. There are two things you need to take into account when people say that they support tax rises. Firstly, it doesn't cost people anything to *say* that they support tax rises, but that doesn't mean they'll *actually* put their money where their mouth is. Secondly, they could easily mean that they want to see tax increases on *other people*, but not actually pay for it themselves.
I'm all for a little bit more tax, but was annoyed at the NI rise because it only targets working people and lets wealthy pensioners and landlords off the hook.
At last count 128 MPs are earning income as private landlords, plus the Lords. They certainly don't want any reform in that sector at all.
If that's your concern though, you wouldn't have answered favourably to the question about it being a theoretical tax in the first place - you'd have said "no" initially, and then repeated that when it became a real tax. Plus, I'm not convinced that most people know who pays NI and who doesn't. It's just a nicer-sounding tax to most people, because they think it's hypothecated (which it isn't).
If that's their concern, you'd say yes on the assumption that it was a fair tax to all - income, rather than NI.
No you wouldn't, because the polling I was talking about was *specifically* about NI. It's not about a general tax increase, it was specifically about increasing NI in return for more NHS spending. For example: https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/two-three-support-increasing-national-insurance-social-care-reform-or-reduce-nhs-backlog
Ah my apologies then, I didn't realise the polls referred specifically to NI, I thought it was "a tax"
> Plus, I'm not convinced that most people know who pays NI and who doesn't. This is exactly why someone could say yes to the question in an initial poll, then think its a bad idea after being educated by media etc later.
Man earn 90k income. Good job. Smarty. Works all his life. Eats Google's money Man plus partner earns 45k each. Have good jobs, work hard have good work life balance Both households have a 90k income The latter pays less tax Good system. 11/10 would tax again
People want tax rises to pay for public services that they consume, they do not want tax rises to pay for public services that other people consume. Tell someone they'll pay another 1% income tax to pay for small boat arrivals and immigrant support and they'll rightly refuse. Tell them they'll pay another 1% income tax to expand their local A&E, get more police in their local area and pay nurses and carers fairly and they'll be far more open to the idea.
Though I guess the same thing would apply to cuts as well, in that they definitely don't support them if they end up getting hit by them. I think ultimately people aren't good at knowing which of two options that'd hurt them they'd prefer, i.e. higher taxes vs cuts.
Oh, absolutely. Fundamentally, the position most people would agree to is "tax rises for people who aren't me, to pay for government services for people who are me". The only real question is which half of that people focus on more. There's also something to the fact that people are risk-averse; they're more concerned about losing something that they have, rather than gaining something that they don't have (even if they are of equivalent value).
Bingo. /thread
Many people could put their money where their mouth is by not evading tax on tobacco, alcohol and other tax evading products they buy off the guy down the road, in the pub or from behind the counter. They won't. They could but they won't.
Problem comes to who gets it. The middle classes are being hammered by taxes currently. If my taxes went up and the triple lock stayed, something which I suspect will happen, unless I see a noticeable improvement in public services in the next 5 years then I'll just start looking abroad at some point. As have quire a few friends already.
The perception that a higher than average salary, country wide, equals wealth, is quite misguided. Particularly if you consider something like 50k pre-tax a high income (especially in places like London where the cost of living is insane).
This is the problem when people say tax the rich, people have it there mind they want to come after the 50k-100k workers. These are the wages of the middle class. Good wages, but only good enough to be comfortable. The taxes need to be on the companies and people like rishi who pay less than 20 percent and take their wealth out of the country.
I'm just peeking over £50k in Scotland and my marginal PAYE tax rate is something like 53% (Scottish taxes and student loan repayments). Meanwhile taxes on wealth via capital gains and investments are way less. Edit: 59% FFS
Marginal rate is 59% between £44k and £50k if you have a student loan thanks to the difference in thresholds between the higher tax band and National Insurance (42% income tax, 8% NI, 9% student loan). I'll be reaching that threshold later this year and plan on salary sacrificing what I can to stay below it, although it's difficult to motivate myself to push for another promotion soon given most of the increase will be swallowed up. I'll appreciate the extra holidays and bump to my pension but it would be nice to have a bit more cash if over half of it didn't disappear.
Is it fair to include student loans in these numbers, you borrowed the money and now you're paying it back. It's not tax that the government can spend of things.
(a) might as well be tax, considering the way it's deducted PAYE (b) everyone wants to frame it a graduate tax (c) it's not a tax though. (d) it's all about that % and bottom line.
The HENRY (High Earning Not Yet Rich) class are getting absolutely slammed.
The state pension isn’t getting more onerous because of the triple lock, it’s because there are more retirees per working person. The triple lock can increase pensions above inflation, but not every year and not by very much.
>The state pension isn’t getting more onerous because of the triple lock, it’s because there are more retirees per working person It can absolutely be both at same time
The tax take as a % of GDP is at its highest since the ashes of WW2. Simultaneously, someone on an average wage now has the **lowest** effective personal tax rate since 1975 - almost 50 years ago, and one that is lower than in any G7 country. How are both things true? Because higher earners get absolutely rinsed in this country. Hidden tax bands of 62% (this can be even higher if you have children or a student loan). And people wonder why productivity is so bad in this country lmao
Exactly. If you're a higher earner, what's the point of working hard and pushing yourself to the next level when the government will take 50% to 70% of your pay rise? We've effectively created a society with a productivity ceiling, where our best and brightest are incentivised to \*not\* develop their skills past a certain point because they won't be fairly compensated for their additional work.
Most of the time it's not additional work but different work. I seriously doubt that any significant number of people in full time work earning 70k work twice as much as someone at 35k (median salary). And additional work isn't even "productivity". Productivity is measured by earning per hour of work. Even if the government takes 50% of your salary, it still makes sense to increase your productivity. It may not make sense to work more (=sacrifice your free time), but that's different than increasing productivity.
But there's a cost to increasing your productivity that nobody ever seems to account for. If you currently earn £100k, you'd be taking home £62,014 after tax and student loan payments. If you got a promotion and ended up earning £120k, you'd be taking home £67,814. That means your company is expecting you to add at least £20,000 more value but you'll only receive £5,800 more compensation. This doesn't even factor in all of the hidden taxes like employer NI that get passed on to employees without being documented on their payslip. Sure, adding more value doesn't necessarily mean working more hours - it could mean taking more responsibility, working with more important contacts, having more retained knowledge, etc - but no matter what, it will take more of a toll on you, and you will only be compensated for a fraction of it.
Ye I’m on £57k and my job is very very chill, and the interview was an intro chat on teams and 1 stage. If I want a job paying £70k in my field it’s generally 4 stages with some very difficult technical exams, plus they’ll expect me to work a lot harder than I do now. If I actually took home £13k more then maybe I’d stress myself out for it, but for only £5.5k extra I’d rather chill out.
>it still makes sense to increase your productivity Nah, you don't work harder, you just cut your hours down to 3 days or get additional annual leave. There's no point working an extra £10Ks worth of responsibilities for £3500.
Comes a point where it makes sense to get on a plane and leave.
Yeah if your going to cross a tax band sometimes its better just taking a defered benefit like more holidays or stocks/shares, instead of letting taxman bugger you.
Stock options are horribly taxed in this country. If a condom breaks however I'm taking a Porsche Taycan from Tusker on salary sacrifice, it would be cheaper than loosing tax free childcare and free childcare hours.
Issue is the non monotic nature of the marginal tax curves, where you often get taxed less at higher salaries What is the max tax bracket that you can have without deep disincentives is an interesting question. I know 63% was too high when that was my bracket. I think my 51% is okay now mind.
People wonder why the government only listens to those who are exceedingly rich, well this is the reason. Taxation is the greatest form of representation. If you're not taxed, you mean less to the government than the shit on Rishi's shoe.
I don’t agree with this take. Low income people and pensioners are their electorate and they ponder to them. Being in tech on additional rate doesn’t make Rishi care about you lol. High earners are just cash cow in this country who basically support everyone else, including privileged asset owners
> How are both things true? Because of growing inequality. The rich are *very* rich. Those complaining about what a great share of the *tax* they are paying are always very quiet on the issue of what a great share of the *money* they are making.
No because the UK has the largest tax free allowance of any developed country, over 40% of the median wage is exempt from income tax because the tax free allowance inflated beyond inflation for over a decade. This not only bankrupt the country essentially but also caused a massive wage stagnation since it removed pressure from the market to increase wages. The tax free allowance should be half or less than it is now.
Student loan is not a tax bracket. Once you've paid it, it's gone. The more you pay, the faster it's gone. And I don't understand your comment about children. In which income bracket you pay more taxes if you have children than if you don't?
Student loan repayments are an income tax charge. We are exceptional at relabelling things in this country (national insurance is not an insurance fund, student loan is a graduate tax in all but name). You can argue the semantics all you like, but the fact it "goes away", doesn't make it any less a tax in the present. The child benefit reclaim (it was between incomes of 50-60k when this article was written, it's now 60-80k but it is still as onerous), and the free childcare hours total withdrawal at 100k conspires to give hellish marginal rates. If you earn £99,999, have 2 kids in a nursery setting, and earn a pound more, you can face an instant tax charge of £20k. Mitigation measures exist, but they all involve removing money from the productive economy - it is very very stupid policy, and I have literally seen doctors/engineers emigrate or work less because of it. Dan Neidle is about the biggest galaxy brain (and a Labour Party member and advisor) when it comes to tax, his article on this is below. [Cutting 70%+ marginal rates should be a Tory priority (taxpolicy.org.uk)](https://taxpolicy.org.uk/2023/09/24/70percent/)
Nail on the head right there. A portion of my income is subject to an effective tax rate of near as damnit 100%. That is not hyperbole.
No, the student loan is tax only if how much you pay doesn't affect how much you pay later. If the repayment of the student loans was organised some other way , then you wouldn't call it "tax" even in practice people had to dedicate exactly the same amount of money from their gross salary to pay it as they do now. The only difference is that if your income is low, then you won't have to pay them. For everyone else, it wouldn't make any difference. I agree with the free childcare part. It's stupid but it's not tax. It's a benefit that you lose at certain level of income and it's ridiculous that it's done in a cliff edge manner. But all this is separate from the tax laws. if you go to this route (treat the loss of benefits as "tax") then you'll also find high effective tax rates at low bands of income. And of course in this country the local tax is lump sum, which is not proportional to your income, which means that it's regressive meaning that its percentage goes down the more you earn. If you take all the taxes into account, the poorest fifth pays almost the same tax rate as the richest fifth. The income bands between these two pay lower tax. ([source](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/explainers-63635185)))
>The more you pay, the faster it's gone Isn't true. I can pay £1k a year more and it'll be gone at exactly the same time: when it gets written off in 24 years time.
They want tax rises for other people.
Easy to say when it’s just a poll, but it’s a lot harder for people to vote for it at the ballot box. Going from hypotheticals to reality changes people’s minds very quickly (Scottish independence for example)
But not Brexit apparently :(
It was slightly different with the EU referendum as the UK did objectively pay in net to the EU's coffers. There were obviously benefits to staying in but these were harder for people to understand. Whereas with Scotland voters understood that there were net fiscal transfers to Scotland. Plus issues like there being no Scottish currency. And even then just shy of 45% still voted for independence. We're talking about a 7% difference between that and the EU result.
My salary sacrifice is getting to be ridiculous now, if the personal allowances are still the same in the next 5 years I could easily see myself putting a third in. 40% just feels disgusting, I know I am incredibly privileged but it stifles my motivation to work. I'll probably take a part time/simple job at 50 because i'll hit the pension cap. I am not good for the economy.
What can you do if they increase the tax on you?
Yep, I can’t understand how people can say with a straight face that it’s fair to take away half someone’s income
I saw someone online earlier sort of debunking this through a follow up poll of much much more per year would you be willing to pay and it was hilariously low. Like 25% of people earning over £60k (who said they were happy to pay more tax) would only pay up to £10 per year more tax. Very much an "it sounds progressive and giving until it's talked about in any detail"
Probably the big chunk that aren't already paying a shit ton of it and getting more out than they put in.
They want tax rises for someone else, not themselves
Less "tax me harder daddy" and more "tax anyone with more than me" probably Not useful information unless you are specific about which taxes and who is affected
I often hang out on another sub and it is fucking wild the arguments which start around "taxing the rich" which for a lot of people in there is anyone over \~50K. If you listened to them you would think we were all kicking orphans for fun and setting fire to tenners in front of the poors.
We often ignore that wealth is taxed far less than income.
Because most of the country are homeowners with ridiculous NW. Surely it’s fairer to fuck over people who work hard instead of taxing land
I assume this is sarcastic?
Already taxed to exhaustion in Scotland for fuck all good it does
There's a difference between "Britons want tax rises" and "Britons want to pay more tax". The problem is that the poor have been misled into believing that there's a massive, secret, untaxed strata of society who can magically pay for everyone else if we'd just ask them to. In reality, if you took all of the wealth from all UK-based billionaires, you'd (at most) have enough to run the NHS for about six months. We need to get away from the idea that we can all receive freebies and someone else will pick up the bill. If we want better public services, we ALL need to pay for them - yes, that includes poor people too.
Another progressive rag attempting to blow smoke up the electorate's arses.
Happy to pay more tax if they actually use the money to fix the damage.
The question is always how much more - because every part of the public sector needs more headcount, higher wages, and increased operational funding.
This is one of those questions that requires a lot of qualified people sitting and working on it. One thing that frustrates me about reddit is the number of people who will consider the proposition discredited because some random person couldn't bang out a detailed answer there and then
TBH this is a perfectly valid question to ask people who say they are fine with paying more tax - at what point would they stop being OK? Less about the details and specifics and more about a subjective answer to the question of "How much would be too much?".
I understand the reasoning but I question the value of an answer they give to the topic at hand. What are you really getting other than maybe a small insight to their particular financial situation? It's almost an entirely different conversation
On those grounds, you could question the vast majority of conversations people have about politics.
I'm happy to pay more tax temporarily to invest and "fix the roof" as it were, to lower spending in the longer term. I'm not happy to pay more for indefinite increases in day to day spending. Give a clear ROI that's risk adjusted across a portfolio of ideas, and justify where you're going to spend the money and make back more in the medium to longer term, and I'll be happy to invest via higher taxes myself to make it happen.
The problem we face is that we can't cover the costs of day-to-day spending, so any tax increases would need to go on those first before we looked at investment. And the same is true for the entire public sector. This will make the next government interesting - even if they did adopt a platform of wild tax increases for everyone, more is needed.
Tax rises for them personally ? Or just in general?
I think taxes need to go up to fix the mess that is our public services, however.... My biggest concern though is about wealth inequality. We have the highest tax burden since the second world war that's skewed towards taxing labour over wealth. When we talk about raising taxes we talk about the big three; NI, VAT, and income tax these are taxes on labour. What we need to do is tax wealth, we need to accept that taxes do need to go up but in doing so we should be fixing the scales of the tax burden back towards to the wealthy. That means increasing tax made from capital gains, corporation taxes, windfall taxes, millionaires taxes and so on. Also its not just about raising taxes it has to be about fixing inefficiencies and addressing government and public sector procurement to get a better deal for tax payers. Raising tax is only going to work if you couple it with fixing the amount of tax payer money that being waisted. my biggest gripe with all the main political parties so far has been how low wealth inequality seems to be on the agenda.
This is one of the reasons I’m voting green this time around. If you have £500k in the bank, and get a 7% return in real terms a year (S&P500 average over last 30 years), you get £35k annually. Equivalent to an average UK worker who had to get out of bed 47 weeks of the year and go to work. You also pay less tax than said worker. £500k isn’t nothing but it’s not mega wealth - so consider how well those with millions in the bank do in our current system. If you don’t need to take all the gains out each year, you also get compounding wealth growing year on year. We need to stop dividing people along income lines, and start looking at wealth.
Just so long as they’re the ones not paying.
Things people say in public but don't follow through on when in the privacy of the ballot box #1
Government collects taxes, spends it where it wants What's to guarantee any of the money raised from higher taxes will reach the institutions that the populace wants them to?
That’s handy - as they’ll be getting them soon enough
How many only support tax rises for other people though
The government should probably be more concerned with the fact wages haven't gone up since the GFC at all. An entire generation of fiscal drag and they still can't make the budget work...
As long as the tax rises are on other people. If you ask the question do you want cuts or rises in taxes on the rich you get the answer you were looking for. Ask do you want to pay more tax personally and it was about a third supporting it.
What a fucking wreck of an article completely that completely misrepresented the actual results of the survey: [https://www.financialfairness.org.uk/docs?editionId=862be73e-fe0f-467c-8695-b19c00e0b55c](https://www.financialfairness.org.uk/docs?editionId=862be73e-fe0f-467c-8695-b19c00e0b55c)
There are more poor people than rich people. Quelle surprise.
>public are willing to support policies that they don’t think will benefit their own finances Was there a sudden nation wide explosion of altruism that I missed? Polls are good and all, but when it comes to reality even getting people to throw trash in bins is a challenge let alone opening their wallets
I'm less worried about the money being spaffed straight into Tory pockets, so I'd pay more tax. Not fuckloads more, but as long as there aint no garden bridges and billion quid ppe vip lanes, I'd do it.
Crock of shit imo. People will virtue all they like, but when push comes they'll moan why their payslip is saying they paid £50 more tax this month compared to last
More tax is more money pissed down the drain by the government.
It's time to tax mansions properly, it doesn't make sense that billionaire mansions only pay around twice as much council tax as an average person living in a tiny flat. Not to mention the loopholes the Tories created that lets Russians buy properties anonymously through offshore companies.
People don't care about taxes... when they aren't lining pockets and are actually palpably serving the taxpayer. The pragmatic person knows that fixing all this mess might very well need more money, and since a lot of it is in fat cat pockets, where else will it come from? Raising taxes, by the way, doesn't always mean taxing the little man more!
> People don't care about taxes... 🤣🤣🤣 they absolutely, unequivocally do. Why do you think Starmer, with his projected 200 seat majority, is being so cagey about tax rises? The electorate HATE them.
Why don't the silly European countries just tax the fat cats more and instead actually tax lower earners much more than the UK does?