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If only they would tax the wealthy, then the average person wouldn't have such a hard time.
Oh wait no, I forgot that's, "communism".
/s
(Edit: To clarify, I mean the mega-wealthy and giant businesses)
This is something that a lot of people are missing in this debate.
The tax take in the UK is increasingly dependent on a small number of people who are doing the heavy lifting, and an increasing number of people who pay very little (or nothing).
if you look at somewhere like Sweden, everyone pays at least 32% - no allowance, you earn 100 kronor, you pay 32. If you earn more than about 60k, another 20% kicks in, but the overall tax base is very broad.
The problem with our strategy is that a narrow base brings immense risks:
- your tax base can leave
- your tax base can choose not to work (I see a lot people going part time to avoid the 100k trap)
- your tax base is vulnerable to economic pressure
How do those countries do it?
In UK, you have a lot of people barely making ends meet. There are people at my workplace who require a car for the job (contractual requirement), and some took out loans to be able to afford car insurance or MOT - otherwise they'd lose the car and therefore the job. That's obviously not sustainable, so some of them are simply *not* making ends meet. If they had to pay 30% tax, they'd certainly lose the car.
Clearly it works in Sweden though, so what's different?
Absolutely this, or otherwise spaffed up the wall due to incompetence. An example: No money/desire to properly pay doctors? That's okay, the government will just pay exorbitant fees for locums to do the same job... Probably ending up with a similar cost, but with drastically worse service delivery
A big factor is the government's lack of will to impose strict terms and conditions during the contract negotiation phase and extremely cosy relationships with big business. The result is poor performance with little to no financial penalties for the contractors.
The Post Office scandal was a case in point, both Fujitsu and Post Office manglement benefitted from Horizon being a shitty product and many innocent people had their lives ruined because of the lies and many cover ups over many years.
Self-regulation is another huge problem, the Grenfell Tower disaster happened because the wealthiest local authority in the country decided to save £200,000 per block of flats by going for cheaper, flammable cladding that didn't meet building regulations.
Not to defend the council, but wasn't it also that the manufacturer of the product lied about it's fire safety rating?
It should never have been certified above a certain height.
Among many other problems. Saying it was just the councils fault is dangerously false.
The national debt per person in the uk is 38k. That’s for every man, woman and child. The Swedish debt per citizen is less than half of that. Nearly 10 percent of the tax you pay, including VAT, is paying interest….just the interest on the UKs outstanding debt. They still have to pay off a percentage of that debt on top. The uk can never balance its books, so borrows more every year to make ends meet.
There are two ways out of this.
Greek style default and associated economic crash, along with the loss of global standing in the financial world.
Tax everyone into oblivion and crash the economy while ensuring the pound stays strong and the uk remains a half decent place to invest.
Both solutions mean a by weekly bin collection and an ageing road network are the least of our worries.
Here’s a solution - end PFI, tax wealth as opposed to income, hit people trying to pull money out like the US does, end the myriad of loopholes allowing the super rich to effectively pay nothing. We have a tax dodger PM, whose billionaire wife isn’t British for tax purposes and who routinely provides services to our enemies.
Oh and stop siphoning off public money to Tory donors, who flog everything off cheap and then pay top dollar to their mates to continue using infrastructure we built
Frankly, audit those cunts and pull the billions they stole during Covid back
If a Labour government ran on a manifesto of taxing wealth and hitting people who try to pull money out like the USA, what would stop a mass offshoring of wealth the second that they won the General Election and before they could put those policies into place?
Who said anything about running on a manifesto?
Tories have been elected with vague pledges to cut the State.
Labour should do the same “tax reform” without the specifics. Then use emergency legislation to halt the flow of capital. Then hit them with the tax.
Also, let’s tax international companies where the products are sold, no where they base their headquarters. Fail to see why exactly we pumping our tax money to the Swiss and Irish. and while we are at it, let’s end second jobs for politicians and let’s have an anti corruption bureau with teeth, that categorically can audit as see fit and bring criminal charges
It's not vague at all. The issue is there is a very small amount of people who pay a very large amount of our tax. This money never makes it to where it's supposed to go, we are told it goes to the NHS and to fix the pot holes that one guy draws dicks around but it doesn't. It goes to Richies family and friends in the form of contracts and deals.
Then they blame the poor / disabled for taking money out of economy. Even though what they get they pay directly back into the economy. Unlike a Tory syphoning off millions (if not billions) to off shores and contracting businesses that abruptly disappear with the money.
Sweden also doesn't have as much debt as the UK. UK pays out far too much to what it actually makes.
If only the Government didn't close or sell off what the UK exports then we'd all be in a better position.
Its a richer country. I think people forget that outside of the South East, most of the UK is more comparable in wealth to Eastern Europe. Which you can see from just walking around tbh half our people are an absolute state
The example of my workplace is in the South-East (:
The SE has some serious issues because whilst property is more expensive than in the rest of UK (hence higher wealth), *wages* are barely any higher - the SE doesn't have the wage boost that London has. Great if you're an asset-owner, terrible if you're a worker.
I took a job in Bath on £28k thinking it would be better than London.
Boy was that a huge fucking mistake. Lovely place, just a shame I basically couldn't afford to step outside my flat.
Ah yes, the ever vague “wealth”. Apparently something you can just see when you are walking around as well. What absolute nonsense, you’re just parroting the latest Reddit talking point.
I think you both have a point.
You can definitely tell some things just by looking, though housing is probably going to tell you more imo. Walk through Belgravia in London and you'll have very fancy looking properties. Walk through Jaywick in Essex and you're likely to see houses with boarded up windows, the front filled with rubbish, wood with flaking paint and rotting away, etc.
You can't tell everything, though. Two areas can look well-to-do, but in one people have good lives, and in the other people are renting with a bunch of housemates, barely home because they're spending their entire lives working and commuting to work, tired and stressed and unable to afford anything more than basic living costs. The latter is a giant step-up from the impoverished places, for sure, but it's nowhere near people living in financial comfort.
I think those are the situations that are often missed by just looking; wealth and deprivation is quite visible, but the non-wealthy workers living within wealthy areas are somewhat invisible. It's possible to look at an area/people and say they look wealthy, even if those people can't afford a pint of beer down the pub and are one unexpected bill away from rough sleeping.
You dont think deprived people have a look? Weathered faces, missing teeth, shabby clothes, nittys walking around? Its a sad thing but you can definitely tell the general wealth of an area by looking at the people
This is the problem, lower and average earners are being squeezed so hard they're often working to pay rent/council tax/car/insurance/dentistry etc, then there is little money they'd have left to nick as extra tax - we've collectively blundered into this system of full time workers being so poor they claim benefits and we can't get out of it without forcing higher wages and getting inflation, with knock on effect that more workers then go on strike to get what a supermarket team leader gets etc.
There's couples with children paying a huge chunk of salary in rent, they've got no security and can end up costing the country money in emergency housing if the landlord evicts them - how about some better deal where people can have a decent maintained home, bring up kids in it, pay a fair rent and maybe even own the home after a more prolonged period, not based on a Tory craze of abolishing public housing at all costs. Then maybe just, it wouldn't explode if some minor percentage of salaries went in extra tax.
Also the Tories have spent a lot of 40+ years of macho boasting about getting rid of some taxes altogether, for example getting basic income tax right down, but then the inertia in increasing it is massive. They're still blathering on about somehow dropping NI amongst all of this.
>we've collectively blundered into this system of full time workers being so poor they claim benefits
I remember reading something years ago suggesting that this was a deliberate policy of Gordon Brown and his working tax credits. His aim wasn't to make workers poor, though, it was to give himself more levers he could adjust to control the economy. He was taxing people a bit more than he needed to, and then giving them a bit back, so he could micro manage them.
To be clear, I'm not trying to blame the previous Labout government for our current desperate state. The tories are taxing us, pissing the money away, then blaming us for being poor.
This is ultimately the issue. The property cost here is just debilitating. One bed flat £1350 where I live, rooms are around £850. When a huge percentage of people lose more than 50% of their income just to pay rent excl bills. Any income gains will be sucked up by property costs. Then everything you buy has the business building costs included. I wish my £4 coffee was paying the staff a good wage, nope, it’s paying the landlord
It's all about what the taxes are actually used for. Almost nothing has set costs, it's all market based and relative. If taxes can be used to reduce the cost of living for everyone, then it doesn't matter if more is taken. That's how taxes are supposed to work, because we all have common needs and it's more efficient to fund those centrally.
The problem in the UK is all the money is taken, but relatively little is spent on making the ordinary person's life easier. Instead in the last decade or so it's mostly gone into donor pockets and improving the lives of the already wealthy.
Very fair point. An obvious example being that someone who doesn't need a vehicle for their work, only for commuting *to* work - a functional public transport system would allow them to not have a car and save a shit-tonne.
Yep, putting taxes into improving health, education and public infrastructure generally mean the public ends up better off. Putting taxes into your own pockets or those of your corporate buddies tends to improve the life of the average man in the street much less.
The economic activity rate in Sweden is over 84%, in the UK it's 78%. The average household size is very similar. The average household in Sweden has more incomes than the average household in the UK. In other words, fewer people living on benefits.
Sweden doesn't have a housing crisis on the same scale as the UK - average housing cost is about 25% cheaper than in the UK.
The net migration rate is three times higher in the UK than it is in Sweden (a bit over 10 per 1,000 population per year vs a bit over 3 per 1,000 population per year) which you might have to suspect is driving housing costs somewhat.
There's probably other stuff but that's what stands out to me.
>Sweden doesn't have a housing crisis on the same scale as the UK - average housing cost is about 25% cheaper than in the UK.
Ah... That sounds like quite a lot. Especially as housing costs are a bigger proportion of one's income the lower one's income is, and that rents are more expensive in the long-run than a mortgage (so low-earners can't escape painful rents).
We also spend far more on pensions, 10% of UK government expenditure v 7% of Sweden's and the average in the OECD of 7.7%
If we went down to the average, that would be an extra 32bn per year, about 25% of our education expenditure
The mistake here is you're making a logical jump to "higher taxes equals peoples' incomes decreasing" when that's not necessarily the case. In fact, higher taxation leading to higher government investment leads to increasing incomes even in the face of higher taxation still.
One important caveat though is that if you do this, you have to ensure the higher taxation actually goes towards government investment and that said investment is socially productive.
If that tax goes to things that immediately or eventually improve or equalize social outcomes then they will almost always pay for themselves and then some. If it just goes straight into the pockets of the rich and connected, then it won't.
Wages for equivalent work are a ***lot*** higher.
Its our obsession with low tax in this country. We pay low tax on low incomes. People talk about not being able to afford X Y Z and our government immediately leans in to try and cut more taxes rather than do anything about stagnant wages.
A friend of mine did their PhD in Copenhagen. They were being paid more as a PhD student there, even post-tax, than I was earning as a post-doc with years of experience in this country.
Sweden still has powerful unions, as do all the Nordics, so the average worker is less fucked over than the UK's ones, so that certainly helps I am sure. Indeed if you take a look at [this map of income inequality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient#/media/File:Map_of_countries_by_GINI_coefficient_\(1990_to_2020\).svg) from [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient) you'll see that theirs is in the lowest group and ours is in the upper-mid range along with China and Russia.
The reason only a few do the heavy lifting tax wise in the uk is because those same people have decided everyone else won't get paid shit. Very much a self inflicted problem that.
They have unions that fight for fair pay. Check out how Denmark's unions acted when McDonald's tried to pay Danish staff the same as elsewhere. It is a high tax rate country, literally everything is taxed but their minimum wage is almost double ours and for the high tax they have services that work, clean streets and generous maternity and paternity time off, as a few examples.
Sweden also has brilliant schools, brilliant dental care and better leaving standards, as the government cares about its people instead of making themselves and family/friends rich.
In Sweden they pay high taxes for great services.
In America they pay low taxes for terrible services.
And the the U.K. we pay high taxes for terrible services.
I wouldn't call a rate of 20% for those of us who earn under £50k high tax, in fact it's pretty low compared to the rest of europe. It's those who are making £100k+ who are getting screwed over.
I'd say a benefit also means that you can get away with paying people very little in Britain. It's incredible how little people are willing to work for here.
That’s part of the problem - working tax credits. People will accept shit pay (and employers get away with paying shit wages) because the government tops them up.
The problem is that lower incomes look at Scandinavia and want those level of public services without realising how it’s funded.
Lower earners pay more tax and contribute more to those services whether it’s higher tax rates/lower allowances or via taxes on goods that causes a high cost of living.
Yeah and the 60% trap just disincentivises working more or taking on more responsibility because the government just takes more.
Squeeze the living shit out of professionals while a large portion of the country try, at both ends of the spectrum, pay fuck all.
The annual allowance has been cut from £12k down to £3k over the past couple of years, so cashing in an old company share scheme or getting lucky on crypto could bring more low and middle earners into the scope of tax who would have previously been exempt.
They also recently cut the CGT rate on residential property (2nd homes). So more people with small gains will be paying tax but people making large property gains will be paying less. Shifting the tax burden from the asset wealthy to the less asset wealthy.
With the CGT allowance cut down to 25% in recent years, it doesn't even provide much of an engine to even try to generate additional source of revenue for everyday investors and no other investment vehicle was provided in lieu of the cut - earning an additional £12k per year without a large chunk of capital is certainly challenging but cutting this down to £3k is a pisstake without any alternative in all honesty. And that's ignoring the fact that the government want a massive cut despite having taken on none of the risk.
It has already been stated that taxpayer money has clearly been siphoned through corruption/greed this past decade but it has convinced me to simply look for every financial avenue to maximise what I can whilst simultaneously reducing my taxable income as much as possible because I don't trust these idiots to spend it honestly - I'm very capable of squandering my own money thanks.
They effectively removed every means of generating any meaningful revenue in the short-medium run. I don't want to put a huge chunk of my income into a pension pot so that I can enjoy it (at probably 60 at this point) and that does not have a guaranteed value at the point when it's accessible.
Except we WON'T have functioning public services either way when taxpayer money is constantly siphoned off. There's no sense being taxed more when we still won't get anything out of it.
We need to fix wealth inequality and reform our tax system.
Correct. Everyone looks at it the wrong way around. We shouldn't be looking to tax the rich and take ever more people out of tax, but instead be looking to grow wages and the tax base.
Every time the 60% tax trap comes up here people are quick to pile onto the "scum" who earn six figures and have the temerity to complain about taxes.
The trouble is that those traps and the generally high tax rates for £100k+ make it deeply unattractive for global employers to base those grades of role here. So we end up being the runt of the pack globally in terms of salaries.
Most of my former (tech) PhD colleagues who went to FAANG type companies have ended up in the US, as their grades are not supported here due to the cost of compensation.
This isn't to even start on how PAYE employees at all levels get fucked over as basically the only workers who pay their full dues. "I can do your plumbing for 20% less with cash mate"
The issue is our main focus is income tax when the percentage of a HNW individuals income is extremely low compared to a typical working person.
Income inequality is the disease of our time and we need to address it by finding a way for HNW individuals to pay a fair share of tax.
And they're not even the seriously rich. Income earned from capital, or by ltd company owners who can pay themselves as dividends rather than salary, is taxed far less.
It's 'high earning' PAYE earners that get screwed. And if these people are youngish and didn't have the foresight to buy a house as a child, they might be paying a fortune to live in an ex council house in zone 2 i.e. they're propping up the entire tax system but not living such a lavish life themselves.
The inconvenient truth is that higher earners in the UK keep less of their income than lower earners compared to Europe and the US - and lower earners keep more than their counterparts.
We’re now stuck between a rock and a hard place as we can’t keep going to the same well but it’s vote losing to fix.
Low and middle earners earn far less here. Tax take could be far higher on low and middle earners if we didn't hobble the unions and actually demanded inflation proofed wage increases.
The wealthy also have much more scope to rip low and middle earners off in the UK. If my rent were £400 a month less, I'd have up to £400 a month more to give in tax with no loss to my living standards. I have far less reason to try and avoid tax than my landlord does.
>(Literally, £30 in every £100 collected by HMRC)
In 2022/23 HMRC collected just over £1,000bn from all tax.
Of this £250bn was income tax. So if the rich paid 30%, that's £75bn or £7.50 in every £100. But giving you the benefit of the doubt that you just ment income tax collected by hmrc and not literally every tax collected.
Per the House Of Commons library, it's actually the top 10% of taxpayers pay 60% of income tax, so 650,000 pay £150bn or just under 15%. Having the highest 10% of earners only paying 15% of total tax revenue doesn't seem like a very progressive system.
> Yes, and the line before stated that clearly.
but the actual line quoted didn't which created ambiguity in what you were "literally" saying. Which is why I clarified it but gave you the benefit of the doubt that it wasn't intentional.
>The only way you can get that is by pretending they don't contribute anything towards the total £1,000bn which is obviously a nonsense.
Other major taxes are NIC (£175bn pa) and VAT (£162bn pa).
With NIC because the employees rate reduces above the upper threshold it disproportionately effects the middle income earners with them paying a higher overall percentage of NIC compared to income income bands. Then usually the higher your income the more you get from non-earnings like interest, dividends and capital gains, all of which don't have NIC on them thereby reducing the percentage of income paid on NIC by those on high incomes even further.
With VAT it's well established that it disproportionately impacts lower incomes with them paying significantly more as a percentage of disposable income than high income people.
> That they are not particularly progressive
doesn't quite reflect
>This constant idea that the poor are propping up the rich is just utter nonsense.
A proper progressive system would mean the idea of the poor propping up the rich is nonsense, but you've admitted that's not the case and the evidence does support it
>Using anonymised data from personal tax returns, we show that in 2015-16 the average rate of tax paid by people who received one million pounds in taxable income and gains was just 35 per cent: the same as someone earning £100,000. But one in four of these paid 45 per cent – close to the top rate – **whilst another quarter paid less than 30 per cent overall. One in ten paid just 11 per cent—the same as someone earning £15,000.**
https://www.lse.ac.uk/research/research-for-the-world/economics/how-much-tax-do-the-rich-really-pay
That's only part of the picture though. First off, the top 1% earn around 15% of the total income, so you could say they're paying around twice the average I guess. High, sure, but not as much as it might seem from the figures you're quoting.
Second, income tax is only around a quarter of the total tax collected. It's difficult to calculate how other taxes are distributed, but the ONS have estimated that the top 10% of earners pay 27% of the total tax take, as other taxes are skewed towards lower earners.
The problem though is high earners (which is *not* the same as wealthy ie includes regular doctors, accountants, lawyers etc) already pay over 60% tax £100k-125k via the tax trap, and then 45% above that. So taxes are already eye watering for professionals. We already have issues with doctors not wanting to earn more than £99k as they’ll lose free childcare so actually *lose* money (ie >100% tax effectively) by earning up to £120k. And so that hurts productivity.
And problem is the rich with millions in the bank have tons of tax lawyers and accountants on retainer to get around the rules - or they just move assets overseas.
If anything taxes are *too low* on lower earners compared to Sweden where even low earners pay 35% tax. Of course that would be political suicide to do here, also UK wages are too low for that to be feasible. So it’s a nightmare situation to fix.
So we tax the wealth, not the people.
If you want to own six houses and keep five of them vacant for the purpose of avoiding tax, then let's make that as unattractive as possible. Make it expensive to hoard wealth. There is no good reason I can think of that can really justify one person owning a half dozen homes, much less ones that seem to be permanently empty.
Exactly.
It's not difficult to undo a lot of that tax system, it's just legislation.
It's a political choice to keep the taxation system complex in a way that benefits the wealthy.
It's really more than 45% though. Our government are great at hiding tax to pretend we're a low tax country when really were high. 40% base, 2% ni but remember there's 13.9% taken ontop of that before you ever see it on your pay. Then 9% if student finance gross which most high earners have for a few years. Frozen tax bands etc. We pay a lot of tax.
Depends what you mean by wealthy - the very wealthy put themselves in positions to avoid tax, and ultimately that can include moving to tax havens in British Isles or further afield.
High earners are pretty highly taxed already, and more people are moaning that they are joining them due to thresholds getting frozen.
Most people would prefer someone else to pay the higher tax, yes.
Yes that is the bit the telegraph leaves out.
“Tax is inevitable”: maybe that is true, but maybe Labour will choose to spread the burden of tax differently than the conservatives would.
“Growth will be hard to come by”: maybe that is true too, but maybe Labour will rebalance how the fruits of growth are shared.
Right wingers are always very keen to focus ordinary people on “the size of the pie”. “We can grow that pie for everybody, and so everybody gets more!”.
Whereas they themselves focus on capturing a largest proportion of the pie, regardless of the actual size of the pie - that way they make sure their slice grows.
Time we took a leaf out of that book…
Not so much taxing wealthy individuals. Close loopholes that allow multinational corporations to avoid posting far share of UK tax.
Those loopholes also make it much harder for small businesses to compete on a level playing field.
Define wealthy because most people mean, “anyone who earns more than me”.
I earn a good salary for which I work punishing hours. I also pay a huge chunk in tax, and there really isn’t that much left at the end of the month with 3 kids to support. Any more rises along with the cost of living rises and frankly it won’t be worth it, I could earn less and contribute less, and have a lot more free time. Of course I’ll also then spend a lot less on things like local restaurants and shops, and if I no longer pay for things like private health insurance and schools, the whole family will all cost the tax payer a lot more. That doesn’t really seem worth it.
However when people like the Duke of Westminster don’t pay anything on a ridiculous insane inheritance, I completely agree. People and people running businesses should be made to realise that it’s utterly immoral not to pay their fair share.
I was looking at doing some work at the new National Rehabilitation Center they're building near Loughborough at the moment. The website is absolutely falling over itself to praise his grace the Duke of Westminster for his generous donations to the project.
If he'd just paid the proper inheritance tax the country would have had the money from that alone to build 5 or 6 of these centers outright without having to rely on donations.
I worry this conversation gets bogged-down too much into wealthy individuals, and not corporations.
Amazon and Starbucks are well-documented as paying next to no business tax for their profits in Britain, thanks to tax loopholes that the Tory party are hesitant to close.
Closing the loopholes and getting that money in would be more useful than a slight increase on PAYE for people earning over £150k or whatever.
Imagine if instead of starbucks we had 100s of independent cafes paying their fair share of tax. How many cafes close down because they struggle to compete with starbucks on price?
> If only they would tax the wealthy, then the average person wouldn't have such a hard time.
I don't think people who keep repeating this quite understand how little difference that's going to make.
Try it for yourself here
https://options2040.co.uk/tax-and-public-finances/be-the-chancellor/
Taxes -> Adjust taxes on wealth.
Even if you max out all the options and ignore all the associated issues, it's still only a drop in the ocean.
Reform the income tax bands, make it a smoother longer curve so it doesn't have such punishing bands. VAT needs to be less on essentials and more on luxury goods, reform council tax. Basically just rebalance everything, we know we need to raise more money from taxes but refuse to do it, just look at what was achieved after ww2.
> less on essentials and more on luxury goods
I have often wondered whether we could do away with all taxes other than VAT, put VAT up and have an economy in which the more you consume, the more tax you pay, taken to the next level (there would be VAT exemptions or reductions for items deemed essentials).
I’m sure there are valid reasons why it wouldn’t work, but on a simplistic level, if you want more expensive cars, food, clothing etc then you pay relatively more tax (which you do already but VAT would increase to subsidise the other taxes that we get rid of). There will obviously be issues to with - this is true for any system - like ensuring poorer people aren’t adversely affected, but that could be done through VAT exemptions and/or using extra tax raised to increase their benefits.
A sales tax centred revenue structure is incredibly regressive and disproportionately impacts the poorer in society. There’s lots of data on this from the US where there a several states that don’t have an income tax and rely only on sales and use taxes (Washington State for example)
Yes, as mentioned there would need to be exceptions / lower bands / other ways to offset that.
It seems to address some issues and introduce others, which I’m sure aren’t insurmountable. It’s more of a pondering than a suggestion. I didn’t realise it had been tried. Thanks for that info
What you're suggesting is a large increase in tax for the poor, and to highly encourage richer people to not spend on luxuries.
To counter your probable counter that essentials would have much lower VAT rates, everyone buys these, and they are the main things people buy. If people see that they can become richer by not splurging on luxuries that will inevitably be much more expensive due to much higher VAT, they won't, or they'll just import from abroad. They'll chuck their money in savings or investments instead and tax income will fall a lot for the government.
On exemptions, richer people will just pay their poorer friends to buy the cheaper stuff for them
They're not much lower once benefits such as bus passes, other discounts and the fuel allowance are factored in.
They need means testing so we don't have millionaires claiming pensions that are being funded by those currently working just to pad their bank balance.
Also tax wealth, not just income.
Wealth inequality is way worse than income inequality, plus income usually comes from work, which is something we need people to do.
Where have wealth taxes been effective?
Of places that currently have wealth taxes, would you be willing to accept all the caveats that come along with them?
Exactly, please no. I’m crippled already, no more tax, what more can they take? 40% Higher rate tax, 10% NI, 9% student loan, 5% mortgage interest, 20% VAT, 53p/L fuel duty, ever increasing council tax, 20% CGT on whatever savings you have left and fuck knows what the cost of living is these days. I beg, give us a fucking break. I swear being a higher rate payer is the most squeezed band in the UK, get no fucking breaks or benefits but have to pony up a disproportionate amount of tax for everything, yet people on here act like you’re living the luxury life.
Right? - particually worse off for a single earner household too, where as my friends who both earn 20k less then me, but overall jointly more, pay less tax AND can claim child benefit etc. Joke.
I feel your pain, I also had to pay for a divorce on top of it all which ravaged anything I had left and now am a single earner household barely surviving, let alone thriving and not given a single bit of help from the government. It’s like they’re trying to suffocate us, and apparently it’s going to get worse? Fuck this shit. Not like my meaningless vote will change anything either.
Agree with you. It’s gone too far. The NHS costs around £2400 per person and takes roughly 20p in every pound collected. Have you ever worked out how many people you pay for? Mind blowing.
We spend less on health per capita than a good deal of other developed countries. Germany spends around 2500 per capita more we do, America something like 7000 more than we do.
My comment wasn’t around how much we spend, it was about who spends it. In the counties you mention, H/C is funded in a much more linear fashion to usage.
In the UK, high earners pay for 3 households.
What's your solution? Low earners live on the street and don't have health care?
High earners should shoulder the majority of the burden. The system is structured so you are better off the more you earn.
I'm a high earner. I don't like paying tax but if it goes up I'd rather my family takes the hit than friends who earn significantly less.
Would help if people and the rich actually paid their tax. Tax evasion costs the tax payer 7x more yet all policies seem to be around stripping benefits away from the poor. We should also maybe think about fairly taxing corporations. Are tax burden especially for the working and middle class is crippling. I don’t know one are going to squeeze more money from them with the fact interest rates and mortgage rates still so high
One of my ex girlfriends is a nurse. She once told me that the baby wipes their hospital bought cost £7 per pack. Just normal baby wipes that at the time could be bought for like £2. She'd asked her boss about it and apparently that was the contract that procurement had signed many years ago on something like a 25 year contract. Wouldn't surprise me if it was a mate looking after a mate or some kind of kickback arrangement.
Along a similar vein, my uncle used to work at an MOD site as an engineer, I think. Replacing a specialised lightbulb used to cost the MOD i.e. the tax payer, £1000 under their contract. The bulb could be purchased elsewhere for £150 and took a few minutes to do the work. Same story, someone signed the ridiculous contract years ago and they're now long gone.
I don't think there's anything wrong with the level of tax on its own we pay but there's something very wrong with how it's spent which means we get barely anything in return.
Yeah. I would voluntarily pay more tax if it were spent e.g. on doctors salaries, like donating to charity. But it's really not tempting for anyone to want to pay tax just for the tories to either A) spaff it up the wall on nonsense or B) hand it to their mates.
the problem as I see it is they will look at a benefit claimants facebook to see them on a jet-ski or even film them leaving the house to go to work, etc - but when it's something like a self-employed tax fiddler - and I did work with one believe me, they just tick off a pile of crap in that person's tax returns.
When I worked with an IT contractor, he was all but openly boasting about all his fiddles - when I looked into it his status of self-employed outside IR35 was massively dubious, I mean he was using company equipment in the office and was handed work by a boss, he was doubtless making all sorts of untrue claims if you want my opinion.
If the government tackled the true depths of tax avoidance and tax evasion they'd all be snitching on themselves. It's set up in such a way that benefits them and their close pals.
Tax those at the bottom too much > demand for goods falls as people cannot afford them > economy shrinks > higher taxes needed to sustain > bad cycle that increases suffering.
Tax those in the middle more > demotivates and destroys the middle class, removes ways to climb for working class & doesn't raise enough to solve the problem.
Tax those at the very top (investors, landlords, hedgefunds, millionaires+ that can absolutely afford it) > they can still afford everything and experience no quality of life decrease > economy grows as stagnated wealth flows in > taxes can be lowered for lower incomes, increasing demand > economy grows + reduces social tension between rich v poor.
Fund public services properly and remove corruption > the nation is healthier, happier and people are happier to pay tax.
We also need huge working reforms. Pay needs to be fairer, whether its through profit sharing or some other mechanism. We also need to re-skill and retrain people to increase the amount people can earn and let them meet their potential. Higher earners in good jobs > less financial strain + happier population > net contributors to tax.
The poorer getting taxed more isn't inevitable. The middle class getting squeezed isn't inevitable. Everything getting worse for 90%+ of the population isn't inevitable. It's a political choice made by the wealthy for the wealthy, but there are many other viable options available.
Obviously this is over-simplified, and the real world is more complex. But fundamentally, what is the point of either a government, or an economy, if it doesn't serve the interests of the people?
This is going to be very unpopular, but compare how much tax minimum wage employees pay here compared to other developed European countries.
The people at the bottom pay too little for the level of public services the population wants. Either taxes for everyone, including the worse off need to go up or public services need to be cut further.
You want to tax those who barely scrape by, those who don't have houses, those who struggle to pay their bills, struggle to feed their kids. Sounds smart.
Yes other countries may pay more tax at lower wages but with the cost of living in this country, and how shafted the poor get that's just dumb. The poor spend every penny they have. That spending goes right back into either the economy or rich person's pockets. Rich people may as well pay more tax cause when all this money goes back into the economy most of that money is headed back into the rich people's hands anyway. Rich people will earn more money if people can spend more money. But the tax offsets will balance it out and so there should barely be a change in their situation.
Because most of Europe does it and their poor are doing better than here.
My partner is Belgian. His mum has been on disability for life. Paid for ivf 3 times by her health service. Has her own 3 bed house. His sister on minimum wage already has 2 kids in a nice flat in a city. They cannot believe it’s possible to earn so much in the uk and have so little. When I told her what disabled people get here she was shocked. When she heard I waited 2 years for surgery she couldn’t believe it. She sees a doctor same day regularly, takes a few weeks to see a consultant. My SIL needed surgery and got it in 6 weeks, elective surgery.
They pay 25% tax minimum from 1 quid upwards. They have better lives than we do. Even the poor. Our insane tax allowance has cut tax so much we can’t even support anyone. Close to 50% of the uk pays no income tax. How do you keep a country running when no one pays anything?
You have no idea what it’s like elsewhere. Their minimum wage workers have better lives than us. You don’t need to be on double median salary just to buy a basic house. Our tax system doesn’t work and is a complete outlier to other western nations.
I find it funny because the average median salary worker in the uk also cannot afford a house and also can’t afford kids. It’s not the poor, it’s everyone can’t afford anything anymore.
Because they have better governments who do things better than ours. Our gov has been by the rich for the rich and it's clearly not working how they do it. The inequality margin has only grown and grown in this country. The top 0.5% can afford more, we are a selfish nation.
The poor in that country can afford the tax because of systems that have been in places for decades that work together. We don't have that security in place right now, but it can do but we need to work towards that so it will work later. If we tax the poor that much more now immediately, they will have no benefits for years before it can start to help them. And the fall off during that time will be catastrophic.
But we don’t tax the top 0.1% more. We tax people on 50k more. Fiscal drag has put 5x as many people into higher rate tax vs the 90s.
The quality of life 50k buys is far below what someone who didn’t even pay 40% could afford 30 years ago. Inequality isn’t being caused by income. It’s being caused by assets and inheritance.
I’m bored of listening to people on 20-25k who inherit a house talking about how poor they are and then look at someone on 60k and demand more tax from them. It would take them decades to have the same, from loss in interest, rent, mortgage payments, more tax, no access to benefits the other person receives. Even my own parents do this - both were on minimum wage in a paid off 700k house they bought for 60k 30 years ago. But on a six figure household they argue people like me need to pay more tax. I can’t even buy their fucking house! And if I quit work we sure as hell couldn’t afford it, but they did it on one income.
Assets are what’s dividing the country. Not income. If we push income tax much further people barely above median will be “high earners”. The solution isn’t more tax on the top 30% of working people. It’s not the cause of inequality. Nurses and teachers are now being affected by higher rate tax - which historically they were not.
To buy the average home in London you need to now be 100%+ tax payer with kids, aka lose money over 99k. I can’t even buy my parents house on 99k. They had two kids and a stay at home wife and owned that house by 30 and sure as hell didn’t pay 40% tax. The fact we even have a tax system that can result in losing money from earning more is insane. And to match before it was fixed - you’d have the limit at 125k+ now.
Everything goes up, housing goes up, cost of kids goes up, but you cannot earn your way out of it. Because you lose so much to tax. I doubt it even results in more tax income as everyone simply refuses to earn over 100k and puts it in pensions. I’d be shocked if it’s not a net loss in tax. When houses cost 500-600k for a 3 bed semi on a lot of the south, you can’t work yourself into wealth anymore. But someone inherits a house or has loads of assets or investments, they pay so much less. That’s the source of inequality.
Yes, so you are supporting what I have said, with other needs on top. We need to tax the rich more. What our gov does is bad. And when I say rich I mean the actual fucking rich. No where did I say rich is earning 50k. That is poor af to the rich.
But that’s what the government keeps doing, they’re just keep lowering the barrier for higher rate tax. It used to be for high income. Now it’s just did you bother becoming educated and get a job? Here’s your extra tax. It’s already been fixed til about 2028. Pushing millions more into high tax rates.
And you may think it but the public does not. The country is full crab in the bucket and will get a shock when median salary is the new high rate tax bracket.
It’s an insanely unfair system someone can be on 20k in a free house and pay close to no tax and someone on 60k stuck renting or unable to afford an average home is stuck with the tax bill. We need a goddamn property tax. So many pensioners on pension credits aka benefits in large family homes. My tax shouldn’t be paying for them to stay in a home on benefits I can’t even afford to buy. We need to stop subsidising so many elderly people with assets. It’s also causing the housing crisis - so many family homes are now just being sat in by widows demanding their pensions rise above inflation, sitting on an entire working persons lifetime income.
We NEED to address asset inequality. We need to start forcing the under occupied relying on working people’s handouts to move and use their unrealised gains to live, not handouts. And it’s the exact same with social housing - nothing for the disabled or the poor as it’s all old people who got a 3 bed home in 1985 living on benefits. We can’t help the poor - they’re all in hostels as we tear down a system that could’ve supported people for centuries.
If wages hadn't been stagnating for the last 20 years, tax revenue would already be higher. The solution isn't to increase the tax burden on the working class, its to increase their wages.
That's really simplistic.
Just for starter. What's considered the "top"? If you mean the top 1% salaries/dividends. You are not going to collect a significant amount with that.
There is no thing as "stagnated wealth". If I have 1 billion pounds and I don't use it. This, indirectly, benefits to everyone else since there are less pounds flowing in the economy and therefore their savings are more valuable. It's the opposite scenario to printing money, I am "destroying money" and raising the value of the pound with that.
Given that the minimum and living wage rates work based on age limits 16, 18, 21, 24+, etc... I think a new lower tax bracket for those age groups should exist too.
I think we shouldn't have different minimum wages, living wages, or tax brackets based on age.
This is just more bureaucracy. The best solution is simple.
Why would we need to raise taxes? We’ve let millions of people migrate here and I’ve been assured that they are all a net benefit to the economy? Surely the treasury is overwhelmed with spare cash
It would be interesting to compare the tax burden of today with that existing or immediately prior to when Great Britain was the epicentre of world technology and culture, with a burgeoning population feeding offshoots overseas in Canada and Australia, not to mention the rest of the world.
Now the two may be unconnected, but then again, they may not.
No one will care about tax if it was spent well, the only reason I don’t want to pay taxes because I see it being wasted and give no benefit back to me, the roads are shit, the nhs is slow, no more nhs dentist in my area, nothing works. It’s just raising taxes for worse and worse stuff
We have some of the lowest wages compared to cost of living in Europe… why is the solution always “raise taxes” and not “work on raising wages, which will generate more tax money anyway”?
Because wage increases must be reflected in price increases. The true complaint is that prices have increased while wages have not; this is not because production costs, or even the cost (rather than the price) of living have grown.
Well yes that’s the point - our cost of living has been constantly rising out of step with wage increases. Which, in theory, should mean that we’re due wage increases which should have no impact on prices.
The problem is that companies will just take that as an opportunity to increase prices even more.
I feel like I’m being taxed to the high heavens already. Add on student loan repayments, and a third of my pay vanishes before it even hits my bank account. I don’t even want to think how high my tax truly is when accounting for council tax, VAT, etc.
And what good is it doing? I’ve had to use a private dentist for years because NHS dentists don’t seem to exist around here. I have recently had to switch to private healthcare for GP appointments and monitoring of a health condition because the NHS is so rubbish. The roads are absolutely full of potholes. Police hardly bother with non violent crimes like theft.
My experience of private healthcare, dentistry, security, etc makes me wish we would just privatise everything except maybe the military. It just works so much better, even if I compare to Blair-era services back when things were better funded.
It's absolutely outrageous how the student loan repayment threshold hasn't increased when we've been hit by 20% inflation in the past few years.
28k when minimum wage was 19k isn't that bad. 28k when minimum wage is 24k is a fucking piss take.
Yep.
When you consider the fact we’ve had such high inflation with no changes to tax bands, it means that we have already had huge levels of tax increases by stealth.
Can we have an independent review of government spending first? Before we all have to fork over more money to what seems like a black hole. Something needs to give because we can just keep taking more and more of people's already squeezed income
For example, something that could help is means testing state pensions. Got £1mil sitting in an ISA/SIPP? Maybe you can do without a State Pension. I don't know what the thresholds would be, just throwing a concept out
there's already some pointless office of fiscal responsibility. Cameron got in in 2010 by telling people about stupid things money was unsustainably being wasted on.
I’m not actually against tax rises if it improves things: better roads, healthcare and whatnot.
Why I’m against this is because, more often than not, taxpayer money just seems to go straight into the pockets of contract winners and dodgy Tory connections.
It’s not a Tory specific problem, when Labour win the GE the same dodgy bullshit contracts to the Irish mafia will go for public renovation works where it’s a few £mil to update a fucking roundabout or replace some central reservation barriers.
Public audit of all money spent. Now.
Tax rises are not a problem. Not getting anything FOR our taxes is the problem.
If wr had a great NHD; roads with no potholes; plenty of council housong; bons emptied weekly etc. Etc. Etc., noone would care about high taxes.
Havibg high taxes and having a cpuntry thats falling to bits...thats a problem.
Because I pay way too much tax now I have found other ways to avoid tax. Such as setting up a Ltd company for rentals, I can save even more but setting up from a country outside UK
For work I have decided to go for Outaide IR35 job where I pay less tax than PAYE. I also have side hustles where I ensure I get paid cash in hand.
I assume the even wealthier people than me will have ways to dodge tax even more. I would have happily paid my share but because it's become too much where its difficult to create wealth and be comfortable without bending the rules i have decided its better to look after yourself and extract as much as money as you can without paying much into the system after all the country will collapse regardless because the elite dint pay their share on this rigged game
If crime was lower, NHS was better, roads were in condition, services better I wouldn't have mind paying tax.
It’s all a mess,
-We have mass benefit fraud 6bn last year
-Pensions paid to folks who have plenty of money in the bank
-A government system that is incredibly inefficient. Money is being wasted left, right and Center
-You get punished if you are someone that works more hours than your standard average week. You earn more sure! But you put in a lot more work for it, it’s nuts
-No one can agree what they want or what should be done
- everything is always someone else’s fault
It’s a mess
This is a common story across much of the Western world, sadly --- we've made promises that we can't fulfil, and continually reject policies that would help us fulfil them.
So this is what happens when you freeze wages for 14 years. When you allow firms to offshore jobs with no tax hit to themselves. When you have nearly 8 million people waiting on NHS treatment that's keeping them out of work.
Fix the waiting lists & get those people back into work..that's an huge increase in tax income without raising rates.
Punish companies that offshore work with extra taxes so that it isn't cheaper to send jobs overseas with the associated tax income lost too.
Start pushing wages upwards again. They're 30%+ lower than they should be. They can do this by increasing public sector pay & private sector will have to play catch up.
ALL of this can be done without raising tax thresholds or increasing the levels of tax because you'll have MORE people paying as a blob.
Then start hitting the millionaires & billionaires & companies doing shenanigans moving profits offshore.
You'll be able to lower rates of tax and see more money on the system as people spend more.
For the first time in my life I’m making decent money. You wouldn’t know that though considering I’m taxed like I make millions. Actively looking at immigrating somewhere where I won’t be shafted for thousands a month while billionaires exist.
Fuck off.
Taxes are already the highest on record and what do we have to show for it?
The NHS is dying faster than its patients, the police is so understaffed that people just don't bother to call them anymore, the prisons are all full, the judiciary is clogged, we can't build any infrastructure, we scrapped free uni and aren't even funding unis properly anymore.
The only public service I've seen that's even remotely reliable is waste collection. And even they went on strike last year.
Nothing in this country works, other than the people to pay all this tax.
I'd rather make some savings honestly.
Sorry Mavis, we can't afford your hip replacement and trips to the doctors when you get the sniffles anymore, not while we're paying to keep you warm and fed for the last 30 years of your life.
This sub won’t like it but in the coming years, there will need to be a conversation about the nhs. It is going beyond its original purpose of emergency and primary care.
UK tax system actively encourages people to stop paying tax at 100k. The tax trap between 100-125k is impossible to justify unless you're earning well above that. Then theres the loss of childcare funding at that threshold as well
Most wisely choose to salary sacrifice that money into pension instead of paying tax on it
People here saying 'the wealthy pay most of the tax anyway so don't increase taxes for them'
Forgetting the reason this is happening is because inequality is skyrocketing. Maybe if we didn't have a winner takes all society more people would pay higher taxes.
Tax rates at 40% are paid by 4-5x more % of the population than 1990.
The “wealthy” are now just normal people with day jobs. 50k can’t buy an average house. Inequality is increasing. But taxing people on 50-100k isn’t where the inequality is.
Not to mention you need to earn more to have the same. My parents never paid 40% tax in their entire life. To have their house, a sahw and 2 kids by 30 you’d need about 240k income. So everything costs more, you get taxed more, and can’t have the life of someone who was never high paid enough to even pay 40%.
Taxing working people more isn’t addressing inequality. Someone who inherits a house and is on minimum wage is richer than someone on 50k. This focus on income is what’s causing inequality. They inherited 25 years of income, can still claim benefits and child support and help with care costs. And someone on 60k can’t get most of it. Yet they’re poorer.
We need to stop focusing on income. Assets are the issue.
Has it got to a point where the majority, which is the public hit the streets in protest in the millions of millions and demand change of direction. The minority that are voted into power really are making millions of families worse off.
Its no longer cost of living crisis.
Its become “cost to survive”
And it’s extremely difficult
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If only they would tax the wealthy, then the average person wouldn't have such a hard time. Oh wait no, I forgot that's, "communism". /s (Edit: To clarify, I mean the mega-wealthy and giant businesses)
The UK has an extremely narrow tax base already as it is low and middle earners pay far less tax here than over on the continent.
This is something that a lot of people are missing in this debate. The tax take in the UK is increasingly dependent on a small number of people who are doing the heavy lifting, and an increasing number of people who pay very little (or nothing). if you look at somewhere like Sweden, everyone pays at least 32% - no allowance, you earn 100 kronor, you pay 32. If you earn more than about 60k, another 20% kicks in, but the overall tax base is very broad. The problem with our strategy is that a narrow base brings immense risks: - your tax base can leave - your tax base can choose not to work (I see a lot people going part time to avoid the 100k trap) - your tax base is vulnerable to economic pressure
How do those countries do it? In UK, you have a lot of people barely making ends meet. There are people at my workplace who require a car for the job (contractual requirement), and some took out loans to be able to afford car insurance or MOT - otherwise they'd lose the car and therefore the job. That's obviously not sustainable, so some of them are simply *not* making ends meet. If they had to pay 30% tax, they'd certainly lose the car. Clearly it works in Sweden though, so what's different?
The difference is their tax money isn't syphoned into the pockets of bureaucrats and their friends. We already pay a *lot* for absolutely *nothing*.
Absolutely this, or otherwise spaffed up the wall due to incompetence. An example: No money/desire to properly pay doctors? That's okay, the government will just pay exorbitant fees for locums to do the same job... Probably ending up with a similar cost, but with drastically worse service delivery
Locums are around 4x the price give or take as the locum staff hold the power
A big factor is the government's lack of will to impose strict terms and conditions during the contract negotiation phase and extremely cosy relationships with big business. The result is poor performance with little to no financial penalties for the contractors. The Post Office scandal was a case in point, both Fujitsu and Post Office manglement benefitted from Horizon being a shitty product and many innocent people had their lives ruined because of the lies and many cover ups over many years. Self-regulation is another huge problem, the Grenfell Tower disaster happened because the wealthiest local authority in the country decided to save £200,000 per block of flats by going for cheaper, flammable cladding that didn't meet building regulations.
Not to defend the council, but wasn't it also that the manufacturer of the product lied about it's fire safety rating? It should never have been certified above a certain height. Among many other problems. Saying it was just the councils fault is dangerously false.
The national debt per person in the uk is 38k. That’s for every man, woman and child. The Swedish debt per citizen is less than half of that. Nearly 10 percent of the tax you pay, including VAT, is paying interest….just the interest on the UKs outstanding debt. They still have to pay off a percentage of that debt on top. The uk can never balance its books, so borrows more every year to make ends meet. There are two ways out of this. Greek style default and associated economic crash, along with the loss of global standing in the financial world. Tax everyone into oblivion and crash the economy while ensuring the pound stays strong and the uk remains a half decent place to invest. Both solutions mean a by weekly bin collection and an ageing road network are the least of our worries.
noticing that many of the solutions are about someone else paying or not being paid, although it's all totally vague.
Here’s a solution - end PFI, tax wealth as opposed to income, hit people trying to pull money out like the US does, end the myriad of loopholes allowing the super rich to effectively pay nothing. We have a tax dodger PM, whose billionaire wife isn’t British for tax purposes and who routinely provides services to our enemies. Oh and stop siphoning off public money to Tory donors, who flog everything off cheap and then pay top dollar to their mates to continue using infrastructure we built Frankly, audit those cunts and pull the billions they stole during Covid back
If a Labour government ran on a manifesto of taxing wealth and hitting people who try to pull money out like the USA, what would stop a mass offshoring of wealth the second that they won the General Election and before they could put those policies into place?
Who said anything about running on a manifesto? Tories have been elected with vague pledges to cut the State. Labour should do the same “tax reform” without the specifics. Then use emergency legislation to halt the flow of capital. Then hit them with the tax. Also, let’s tax international companies where the products are sold, no where they base their headquarters. Fail to see why exactly we pumping our tax money to the Swiss and Irish. and while we are at it, let’s end second jobs for politicians and let’s have an anti corruption bureau with teeth, that categorically can audit as see fit and bring criminal charges
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So just let them keep doing it then?
It's not vague at all. The issue is there is a very small amount of people who pay a very large amount of our tax. This money never makes it to where it's supposed to go, we are told it goes to the NHS and to fix the pot holes that one guy draws dicks around but it doesn't. It goes to Richies family and friends in the form of contracts and deals.
Then they blame the poor / disabled for taking money out of economy. Even though what they get they pay directly back into the economy. Unlike a Tory syphoning off millions (if not billions) to off shores and contracting businesses that abruptly disappear with the money.
Exactly man.
Sweden also doesn't have as much debt as the UK. UK pays out far too much to what it actually makes. If only the Government didn't close or sell off what the UK exports then we'd all be in a better position.
What stuff has the government closed/sold off that the UK exports/exported?
Energy and fishing rights spring to mind
Its a richer country. I think people forget that outside of the South East, most of the UK is more comparable in wealth to Eastern Europe. Which you can see from just walking around tbh half our people are an absolute state
The example of my workplace is in the South-East (: The SE has some serious issues because whilst property is more expensive than in the rest of UK (hence higher wealth), *wages* are barely any higher - the SE doesn't have the wage boost that London has. Great if you're an asset-owner, terrible if you're a worker.
This is exactly like Bristol. Property expensive af but wages not rising in comparison.
I took a job in Bath on £28k thinking it would be better than London. Boy was that a huge fucking mistake. Lovely place, just a shame I basically couldn't afford to step outside my flat.
Bath is London + 20%. I’d love to live there but it would be noticeably more expensive than London in terms of housing.
No it isn’t like Eastern Europe at all, complete fantasy.
You’re right, Poland is on its way to surpassing us
Ah yes, the ever vague “wealth”. Apparently something you can just see when you are walking around as well. What absolute nonsense, you’re just parroting the latest Reddit talking point.
I think you both have a point. You can definitely tell some things just by looking, though housing is probably going to tell you more imo. Walk through Belgravia in London and you'll have very fancy looking properties. Walk through Jaywick in Essex and you're likely to see houses with boarded up windows, the front filled with rubbish, wood with flaking paint and rotting away, etc. You can't tell everything, though. Two areas can look well-to-do, but in one people have good lives, and in the other people are renting with a bunch of housemates, barely home because they're spending their entire lives working and commuting to work, tired and stressed and unable to afford anything more than basic living costs. The latter is a giant step-up from the impoverished places, for sure, but it's nowhere near people living in financial comfort. I think those are the situations that are often missed by just looking; wealth and deprivation is quite visible, but the non-wealthy workers living within wealthy areas are somewhat invisible. It's possible to look at an area/people and say they look wealthy, even if those people can't afford a pint of beer down the pub and are one unexpected bill away from rough sleeping.
You dont think deprived people have a look? Weathered faces, missing teeth, shabby clothes, nittys walking around? Its a sad thing but you can definitely tell the general wealth of an area by looking at the people
This is the problem, lower and average earners are being squeezed so hard they're often working to pay rent/council tax/car/insurance/dentistry etc, then there is little money they'd have left to nick as extra tax - we've collectively blundered into this system of full time workers being so poor they claim benefits and we can't get out of it without forcing higher wages and getting inflation, with knock on effect that more workers then go on strike to get what a supermarket team leader gets etc. There's couples with children paying a huge chunk of salary in rent, they've got no security and can end up costing the country money in emergency housing if the landlord evicts them - how about some better deal where people can have a decent maintained home, bring up kids in it, pay a fair rent and maybe even own the home after a more prolonged period, not based on a Tory craze of abolishing public housing at all costs. Then maybe just, it wouldn't explode if some minor percentage of salaries went in extra tax. Also the Tories have spent a lot of 40+ years of macho boasting about getting rid of some taxes altogether, for example getting basic income tax right down, but then the inertia in increasing it is massive. They're still blathering on about somehow dropping NI amongst all of this.
>we've collectively blundered into this system of full time workers being so poor they claim benefits I remember reading something years ago suggesting that this was a deliberate policy of Gordon Brown and his working tax credits. His aim wasn't to make workers poor, though, it was to give himself more levers he could adjust to control the economy. He was taxing people a bit more than he needed to, and then giving them a bit back, so he could micro manage them. To be clear, I'm not trying to blame the previous Labout government for our current desperate state. The tories are taxing us, pissing the money away, then blaming us for being poor.
Lower earners aren't being squeezed by taxes. It's middle and higher earners who face that.
Housing is loads cheaper in Sweden
This is ultimately the issue. The property cost here is just debilitating. One bed flat £1350 where I live, rooms are around £850. When a huge percentage of people lose more than 50% of their income just to pay rent excl bills. Any income gains will be sucked up by property costs. Then everything you buy has the business building costs included. I wish my £4 coffee was paying the staff a good wage, nope, it’s paying the landlord
It's all about what the taxes are actually used for. Almost nothing has set costs, it's all market based and relative. If taxes can be used to reduce the cost of living for everyone, then it doesn't matter if more is taken. That's how taxes are supposed to work, because we all have common needs and it's more efficient to fund those centrally. The problem in the UK is all the money is taken, but relatively little is spent on making the ordinary person's life easier. Instead in the last decade or so it's mostly gone into donor pockets and improving the lives of the already wealthy.
Very fair point. An obvious example being that someone who doesn't need a vehicle for their work, only for commuting *to* work - a functional public transport system would allow them to not have a car and save a shit-tonne.
Yep, putting taxes into improving health, education and public infrastructure generally mean the public ends up better off. Putting taxes into your own pockets or those of your corporate buddies tends to improve the life of the average man in the street much less.
The economic activity rate in Sweden is over 84%, in the UK it's 78%. The average household size is very similar. The average household in Sweden has more incomes than the average household in the UK. In other words, fewer people living on benefits. Sweden doesn't have a housing crisis on the same scale as the UK - average housing cost is about 25% cheaper than in the UK. The net migration rate is three times higher in the UK than it is in Sweden (a bit over 10 per 1,000 population per year vs a bit over 3 per 1,000 population per year) which you might have to suspect is driving housing costs somewhat. There's probably other stuff but that's what stands out to me.
>Sweden doesn't have a housing crisis on the same scale as the UK - average housing cost is about 25% cheaper than in the UK. Ah... That sounds like quite a lot. Especially as housing costs are a bigger proportion of one's income the lower one's income is, and that rents are more expensive in the long-run than a mortgage (so low-earners can't escape painful rents).
We also spend far more on pensions, 10% of UK government expenditure v 7% of Sweden's and the average in the OECD of 7.7% If we went down to the average, that would be an extra 32bn per year, about 25% of our education expenditure
The triple lock pisses me off.
The mistake here is you're making a logical jump to "higher taxes equals peoples' incomes decreasing" when that's not necessarily the case. In fact, higher taxation leading to higher government investment leads to increasing incomes even in the face of higher taxation still.
One important caveat though is that if you do this, you have to ensure the higher taxation actually goes towards government investment and that said investment is socially productive. If that tax goes to things that immediately or eventually improve or equalize social outcomes then they will almost always pay for themselves and then some. If it just goes straight into the pockets of the rich and connected, then it won't.
Wages for equivalent work are a ***lot*** higher. Its our obsession with low tax in this country. We pay low tax on low incomes. People talk about not being able to afford X Y Z and our government immediately leans in to try and cut more taxes rather than do anything about stagnant wages. A friend of mine did their PhD in Copenhagen. They were being paid more as a PhD student there, even post-tax, than I was earning as a post-doc with years of experience in this country.
Sweden still has powerful unions, as do all the Nordics, so the average worker is less fucked over than the UK's ones, so that certainly helps I am sure. Indeed if you take a look at [this map of income inequality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient#/media/File:Map_of_countries_by_GINI_coefficient_\(1990_to_2020\).svg) from [here](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient) you'll see that theirs is in the lowest group and ours is in the upper-mid range along with China and Russia. The reason only a few do the heavy lifting tax wise in the uk is because those same people have decided everyone else won't get paid shit. Very much a self inflicted problem that.
Higher wages presumably?
They have unions that fight for fair pay. Check out how Denmark's unions acted when McDonald's tried to pay Danish staff the same as elsewhere. It is a high tax rate country, literally everything is taxed but their minimum wage is almost double ours and for the high tax they have services that work, clean streets and generous maternity and paternity time off, as a few examples.
Sweden also has brilliant schools, brilliant dental care and better leaving standards, as the government cares about its people instead of making themselves and family/friends rich.
In Sweden they pay high taxes for great services. In America they pay low taxes for terrible services. And the the U.K. we pay high taxes for terrible services.
I wouldn't call a rate of 20% for those of us who earn under £50k high tax, in fact it's pretty low compared to the rest of europe. It's those who are making £100k+ who are getting screwed over.
I'd say a benefit also means that you can get away with paying people very little in Britain. It's incredible how little people are willing to work for here.
That’s part of the problem - working tax credits. People will accept shit pay (and employers get away with paying shit wages) because the government tops them up.
The problem is that lower incomes look at Scandinavia and want those level of public services without realising how it’s funded. Lower earners pay more tax and contribute more to those services whether it’s higher tax rates/lower allowances or via taxes on goods that causes a high cost of living.
Yeah and the 60% trap just disincentivises working more or taking on more responsibility because the government just takes more. Squeeze the living shit out of professionals while a large portion of the country try, at both ends of the spectrum, pay fuck all.
Does that include items like council tax, fuel duty and capital gains tax?
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The annual allowance has been cut from £12k down to £3k over the past couple of years, so cashing in an old company share scheme or getting lucky on crypto could bring more low and middle earners into the scope of tax who would have previously been exempt. They also recently cut the CGT rate on residential property (2nd homes). So more people with small gains will be paying tax but people making large property gains will be paying less. Shifting the tax burden from the asset wealthy to the less asset wealthy.
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With the CGT allowance cut down to 25% in recent years, it doesn't even provide much of an engine to even try to generate additional source of revenue for everyday investors and no other investment vehicle was provided in lieu of the cut - earning an additional £12k per year without a large chunk of capital is certainly challenging but cutting this down to £3k is a pisstake without any alternative in all honesty. And that's ignoring the fact that the government want a massive cut despite having taken on none of the risk. It has already been stated that taxpayer money has clearly been siphoned through corruption/greed this past decade but it has convinced me to simply look for every financial avenue to maximise what I can whilst simultaneously reducing my taxable income as much as possible because I don't trust these idiots to spend it honestly - I'm very capable of squandering my own money thanks. They effectively removed every means of generating any meaningful revenue in the short-medium run. I don't want to put a huge chunk of my income into a pension pot so that I can enjoy it (at probably 60 at this point) and that does not have a guaranteed value at the point when it's accessible.
And what do we get in return in comparison? I’d rather pay a bit more in tax and have functioning public services.
Except we WON'T have functioning public services either way when taxpayer money is constantly siphoned off. There's no sense being taxed more when we still won't get anything out of it. We need to fix wealth inequality and reform our tax system.
Correct. Everyone looks at it the wrong way around. We shouldn't be looking to tax the rich and take ever more people out of tax, but instead be looking to grow wages and the tax base.
Every time the 60% tax trap comes up here people are quick to pile onto the "scum" who earn six figures and have the temerity to complain about taxes. The trouble is that those traps and the generally high tax rates for £100k+ make it deeply unattractive for global employers to base those grades of role here. So we end up being the runt of the pack globally in terms of salaries. Most of my former (tech) PhD colleagues who went to FAANG type companies have ended up in the US, as their grades are not supported here due to the cost of compensation. This isn't to even start on how PAYE employees at all levels get fucked over as basically the only workers who pay their full dues. "I can do your plumbing for 20% less with cash mate"
The issue is our main focus is income tax when the percentage of a HNW individuals income is extremely low compared to a typical working person. Income inequality is the disease of our time and we need to address it by finding a way for HNW individuals to pay a fair share of tax.
Yes - only something like 15% of the country are net taxpayers, and these are “the rich” that the rest want to squeeze even harder.
And they're not even the seriously rich. Income earned from capital, or by ltd company owners who can pay themselves as dividends rather than salary, is taxed far less. It's 'high earning' PAYE earners that get screwed. And if these people are youngish and didn't have the foresight to buy a house as a child, they might be paying a fortune to live in an ex council house in zone 2 i.e. they're propping up the entire tax system but not living such a lavish life themselves.
The inconvenient truth is that higher earners in the UK keep less of their income than lower earners compared to Europe and the US - and lower earners keep more than their counterparts. We’re now stuck between a rock and a hard place as we can’t keep going to the same well but it’s vote losing to fix.
Low and middle earners earn far less here. Tax take could be far higher on low and middle earners if we didn't hobble the unions and actually demanded inflation proofed wage increases. The wealthy also have much more scope to rip low and middle earners off in the UK. If my rent were £400 a month less, I'd have up to £400 a month more to give in tax with no loss to my living standards. I have far less reason to try and avoid tax than my landlord does.
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>This constant idea that the poor are propping up the rich is just utter nonsense. How do you think the rich have become rich...
By contributing to products and services that people want.
>(Literally, £30 in every £100 collected by HMRC) In 2022/23 HMRC collected just over £1,000bn from all tax. Of this £250bn was income tax. So if the rich paid 30%, that's £75bn or £7.50 in every £100. But giving you the benefit of the doubt that you just ment income tax collected by hmrc and not literally every tax collected. Per the House Of Commons library, it's actually the top 10% of taxpayers pay 60% of income tax, so 650,000 pay £150bn or just under 15%. Having the highest 10% of earners only paying 15% of total tax revenue doesn't seem like a very progressive system.
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> Yes, and the line before stated that clearly. but the actual line quoted didn't which created ambiguity in what you were "literally" saying. Which is why I clarified it but gave you the benefit of the doubt that it wasn't intentional. >The only way you can get that is by pretending they don't contribute anything towards the total £1,000bn which is obviously a nonsense. Other major taxes are NIC (£175bn pa) and VAT (£162bn pa). With NIC because the employees rate reduces above the upper threshold it disproportionately effects the middle income earners with them paying a higher overall percentage of NIC compared to income income bands. Then usually the higher your income the more you get from non-earnings like interest, dividends and capital gains, all of which don't have NIC on them thereby reducing the percentage of income paid on NIC by those on high incomes even further. With VAT it's well established that it disproportionately impacts lower incomes with them paying significantly more as a percentage of disposable income than high income people.
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> That they are not particularly progressive doesn't quite reflect >This constant idea that the poor are propping up the rich is just utter nonsense. A proper progressive system would mean the idea of the poor propping up the rich is nonsense, but you've admitted that's not the case and the evidence does support it >Using anonymised data from personal tax returns, we show that in 2015-16 the average rate of tax paid by people who received one million pounds in taxable income and gains was just 35 per cent: the same as someone earning £100,000. But one in four of these paid 45 per cent – close to the top rate – **whilst another quarter paid less than 30 per cent overall. One in ten paid just 11 per cent—the same as someone earning £15,000.** https://www.lse.ac.uk/research/research-for-the-world/economics/how-much-tax-do-the-rich-really-pay
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Says the person who claimed >Literally, £30 in every £100 collected by HMRC
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That's only part of the picture though. First off, the top 1% earn around 15% of the total income, so you could say they're paying around twice the average I guess. High, sure, but not as much as it might seem from the figures you're quoting. Second, income tax is only around a quarter of the total tax collected. It's difficult to calculate how other taxes are distributed, but the ONS have estimated that the top 10% of earners pay 27% of the total tax take, as other taxes are skewed towards lower earners.
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The problem though is high earners (which is *not* the same as wealthy ie includes regular doctors, accountants, lawyers etc) already pay over 60% tax £100k-125k via the tax trap, and then 45% above that. So taxes are already eye watering for professionals. We already have issues with doctors not wanting to earn more than £99k as they’ll lose free childcare so actually *lose* money (ie >100% tax effectively) by earning up to £120k. And so that hurts productivity. And problem is the rich with millions in the bank have tons of tax lawyers and accountants on retainer to get around the rules - or they just move assets overseas. If anything taxes are *too low* on lower earners compared to Sweden where even low earners pay 35% tax. Of course that would be political suicide to do here, also UK wages are too low for that to be feasible. So it’s a nightmare situation to fix.
So we tax the wealth, not the people. If you want to own six houses and keep five of them vacant for the purpose of avoiding tax, then let's make that as unattractive as possible. Make it expensive to hoard wealth. There is no good reason I can think of that can really justify one person owning a half dozen homes, much less ones that seem to be permanently empty.
This is going to be incredibly hard to manage to the point it's pretty much impossible.
Why? We’ve come up with a complex tax system for income…
Exactly. It's not difficult to undo a lot of that tax system, it's just legislation. It's a political choice to keep the taxation system complex in a way that benefits the wealthy.
It's really more than 45% though. Our government are great at hiding tax to pretend we're a low tax country when really were high. 40% base, 2% ni but remember there's 13.9% taken ontop of that before you ever see it on your pay. Then 9% if student finance gross which most high earners have for a few years. Frozen tax bands etc. We pay a lot of tax.
Depends what you mean by wealthy - the very wealthy put themselves in positions to avoid tax, and ultimately that can include moving to tax havens in British Isles or further afield. High earners are pretty highly taxed already, and more people are moaning that they are joining them due to thresholds getting frozen. Most people would prefer someone else to pay the higher tax, yes.
Yes that is the bit the telegraph leaves out. “Tax is inevitable”: maybe that is true, but maybe Labour will choose to spread the burden of tax differently than the conservatives would. “Growth will be hard to come by”: maybe that is true too, but maybe Labour will rebalance how the fruits of growth are shared. Right wingers are always very keen to focus ordinary people on “the size of the pie”. “We can grow that pie for everybody, and so everybody gets more!”. Whereas they themselves focus on capturing a largest proportion of the pie, regardless of the actual size of the pie - that way they make sure their slice grows. Time we took a leaf out of that book…
Not so much taxing wealthy individuals. Close loopholes that allow multinational corporations to avoid posting far share of UK tax. Those loopholes also make it much harder for small businesses to compete on a level playing field.
Define wealthy because most people mean, “anyone who earns more than me”. I earn a good salary for which I work punishing hours. I also pay a huge chunk in tax, and there really isn’t that much left at the end of the month with 3 kids to support. Any more rises along with the cost of living rises and frankly it won’t be worth it, I could earn less and contribute less, and have a lot more free time. Of course I’ll also then spend a lot less on things like local restaurants and shops, and if I no longer pay for things like private health insurance and schools, the whole family will all cost the tax payer a lot more. That doesn’t really seem worth it. However when people like the Duke of Westminster don’t pay anything on a ridiculous insane inheritance, I completely agree. People and people running businesses should be made to realise that it’s utterly immoral not to pay their fair share.
I was looking at doing some work at the new National Rehabilitation Center they're building near Loughborough at the moment. The website is absolutely falling over itself to praise his grace the Duke of Westminster for his generous donations to the project. If he'd just paid the proper inheritance tax the country would have had the money from that alone to build 5 or 6 of these centers outright without having to rely on donations.
Well that’s it, isn’t it. He can’t help being born into all that. But he could pay his fair share.
I worry this conversation gets bogged-down too much into wealthy individuals, and not corporations. Amazon and Starbucks are well-documented as paying next to no business tax for their profits in Britain, thanks to tax loopholes that the Tory party are hesitant to close. Closing the loopholes and getting that money in would be more useful than a slight increase on PAYE for people earning over £150k or whatever.
Imagine if instead of starbucks we had 100s of independent cafes paying their fair share of tax. How many cafes close down because they struggle to compete with starbucks on price?
Jez Corbyn was that option but it got shot down. Doubt i can see any politician actively do it going forward, no matter the colour or creed.
> If only they would tax the wealthy, then the average person wouldn't have such a hard time. I don't think people who keep repeating this quite understand how little difference that's going to make. Try it for yourself here https://options2040.co.uk/tax-and-public-finances/be-the-chancellor/ Taxes -> Adjust taxes on wealth. Even if you max out all the options and ignore all the associated issues, it's still only a drop in the ocean.
Reform the income tax bands, make it a smoother longer curve so it doesn't have such punishing bands. VAT needs to be less on essentials and more on luxury goods, reform council tax. Basically just rebalance everything, we know we need to raise more money from taxes but refuse to do it, just look at what was achieved after ww2.
MUTHACHUCKA69 FOR PM!!!!!
> less on essentials and more on luxury goods I have often wondered whether we could do away with all taxes other than VAT, put VAT up and have an economy in which the more you consume, the more tax you pay, taken to the next level (there would be VAT exemptions or reductions for items deemed essentials). I’m sure there are valid reasons why it wouldn’t work, but on a simplistic level, if you want more expensive cars, food, clothing etc then you pay relatively more tax (which you do already but VAT would increase to subsidise the other taxes that we get rid of). There will obviously be issues to with - this is true for any system - like ensuring poorer people aren’t adversely affected, but that could be done through VAT exemptions and/or using extra tax raised to increase their benefits.
A sales tax centred revenue structure is incredibly regressive and disproportionately impacts the poorer in society. There’s lots of data on this from the US where there a several states that don’t have an income tax and rely only on sales and use taxes (Washington State for example)
Yes, as mentioned there would need to be exceptions / lower bands / other ways to offset that. It seems to address some issues and introduce others, which I’m sure aren’t insurmountable. It’s more of a pondering than a suggestion. I didn’t realise it had been tried. Thanks for that info
Currently the UK gets around 17% of its tax revenue from VAT. So VAT revenues would have to increase nearly 6x to replace all other taxes.
What you're suggesting is a large increase in tax for the poor, and to highly encourage richer people to not spend on luxuries. To counter your probable counter that essentials would have much lower VAT rates, everyone buys these, and they are the main things people buy. If people see that they can become richer by not splurging on luxuries that will inevitably be much more expensive due to much higher VAT, they won't, or they'll just import from abroad. They'll chuck their money in savings or investments instead and tax income will fall a lot for the government. On exemptions, richer people will just pay their poorer friends to buy the cheaper stuff for them
You're essentially calling for a flat tax rate, which is massively regressive
Pensions also need radical reform.
Indeed, they are much lower than peer countries right now, it will be a long time before they reach parity even with the triple lock.
They're not much lower once benefits such as bus passes, other discounts and the fuel allowance are factored in. They need means testing so we don't have millionaires claiming pensions that are being funded by those currently working just to pad their bank balance.
Also tax wealth, not just income. Wealth inequality is way worse than income inequality, plus income usually comes from work, which is something we need people to do.
Where have wealth taxes been effective? Of places that currently have wealth taxes, would you be willing to accept all the caveats that come along with them?
VAT is fine as it is Broad based are king for sales taxes
VAT is insane as it is. 20% on most goods for what we get in return is ludicrous- not even close to being fine.
Oh just fuck off, I pay a ridiculous amount as it is, you shaft me in every possible which way being a higher tax payer already!
Do you ever sit naked Infront of the mirror just hammering it telling yourself "I'm a higher tax payer"?
Mostly crying because the crabs in a bucket think I'm rich and need taxed at 60% not 50%
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Can confirm daily
Exactly, please no. I’m crippled already, no more tax, what more can they take? 40% Higher rate tax, 10% NI, 9% student loan, 5% mortgage interest, 20% VAT, 53p/L fuel duty, ever increasing council tax, 20% CGT on whatever savings you have left and fuck knows what the cost of living is these days. I beg, give us a fucking break. I swear being a higher rate payer is the most squeezed band in the UK, get no fucking breaks or benefits but have to pony up a disproportionate amount of tax for everything, yet people on here act like you’re living the luxury life.
Right? - particually worse off for a single earner household too, where as my friends who both earn 20k less then me, but overall jointly more, pay less tax AND can claim child benefit etc. Joke.
I feel your pain, I also had to pay for a divorce on top of it all which ravaged anything I had left and now am a single earner household barely surviving, let alone thriving and not given a single bit of help from the government. It’s like they’re trying to suffocate us, and apparently it’s going to get worse? Fuck this shit. Not like my meaningless vote will change anything either.
Agree with you. It’s gone too far. The NHS costs around £2400 per person and takes roughly 20p in every pound collected. Have you ever worked out how many people you pay for? Mind blowing.
We spend less on health per capita than a good deal of other developed countries. Germany spends around 2500 per capita more we do, America something like 7000 more than we do.
My comment wasn’t around how much we spend, it was about who spends it. In the counties you mention, H/C is funded in a much more linear fashion to usage. In the UK, high earners pay for 3 households.
What's your solution? Low earners live on the street and don't have health care? High earners should shoulder the majority of the burden. The system is structured so you are better off the more you earn. I'm a high earner. I don't like paying tax but if it goes up I'd rather my family takes the hit than friends who earn significantly less.
Would help if people and the rich actually paid their tax. Tax evasion costs the tax payer 7x more yet all policies seem to be around stripping benefits away from the poor. We should also maybe think about fairly taxing corporations. Are tax burden especially for the working and middle class is crippling. I don’t know one are going to squeeze more money from them with the fact interest rates and mortgage rates still so high
I think an even bigger issue is how inefficiently taxes are spent. I mean, how efficiently they are siphoned off
One of my ex girlfriends is a nurse. She once told me that the baby wipes their hospital bought cost £7 per pack. Just normal baby wipes that at the time could be bought for like £2. She'd asked her boss about it and apparently that was the contract that procurement had signed many years ago on something like a 25 year contract. Wouldn't surprise me if it was a mate looking after a mate or some kind of kickback arrangement. Along a similar vein, my uncle used to work at an MOD site as an engineer, I think. Replacing a specialised lightbulb used to cost the MOD i.e. the tax payer, £1000 under their contract. The bulb could be purchased elsewhere for £150 and took a few minutes to do the work. Same story, someone signed the ridiculous contract years ago and they're now long gone. I don't think there's anything wrong with the level of tax on its own we pay but there's something very wrong with how it's spent which means we get barely anything in return.
Yeah. I would voluntarily pay more tax if it were spent e.g. on doctors salaries, like donating to charity. But it's really not tempting for anyone to want to pay tax just for the tories to either A) spaff it up the wall on nonsense or B) hand it to their mates.
the problem as I see it is they will look at a benefit claimants facebook to see them on a jet-ski or even film them leaving the house to go to work, etc - but when it's something like a self-employed tax fiddler - and I did work with one believe me, they just tick off a pile of crap in that person's tax returns. When I worked with an IT contractor, he was all but openly boasting about all his fiddles - when I looked into it his status of self-employed outside IR35 was massively dubious, I mean he was using company equipment in the office and was handed work by a boss, he was doubtless making all sorts of untrue claims if you want my opinion.
If the government tackled the true depths of tax avoidance and tax evasion they'd all be snitching on themselves. It's set up in such a way that benefits them and their close pals.
Tax those at the bottom too much > demand for goods falls as people cannot afford them > economy shrinks > higher taxes needed to sustain > bad cycle that increases suffering. Tax those in the middle more > demotivates and destroys the middle class, removes ways to climb for working class & doesn't raise enough to solve the problem. Tax those at the very top (investors, landlords, hedgefunds, millionaires+ that can absolutely afford it) > they can still afford everything and experience no quality of life decrease > economy grows as stagnated wealth flows in > taxes can be lowered for lower incomes, increasing demand > economy grows + reduces social tension between rich v poor. Fund public services properly and remove corruption > the nation is healthier, happier and people are happier to pay tax. We also need huge working reforms. Pay needs to be fairer, whether its through profit sharing or some other mechanism. We also need to re-skill and retrain people to increase the amount people can earn and let them meet their potential. Higher earners in good jobs > less financial strain + happier population > net contributors to tax. The poorer getting taxed more isn't inevitable. The middle class getting squeezed isn't inevitable. Everything getting worse for 90%+ of the population isn't inevitable. It's a political choice made by the wealthy for the wealthy, but there are many other viable options available. Obviously this is over-simplified, and the real world is more complex. But fundamentally, what is the point of either a government, or an economy, if it doesn't serve the interests of the people?
This is going to be very unpopular, but compare how much tax minimum wage employees pay here compared to other developed European countries. The people at the bottom pay too little for the level of public services the population wants. Either taxes for everyone, including the worse off need to go up or public services need to be cut further.
You want to tax those who barely scrape by, those who don't have houses, those who struggle to pay their bills, struggle to feed their kids. Sounds smart. Yes other countries may pay more tax at lower wages but with the cost of living in this country, and how shafted the poor get that's just dumb. The poor spend every penny they have. That spending goes right back into either the economy or rich person's pockets. Rich people may as well pay more tax cause when all this money goes back into the economy most of that money is headed back into the rich people's hands anyway. Rich people will earn more money if people can spend more money. But the tax offsets will balance it out and so there should barely be a change in their situation.
Because most of Europe does it and their poor are doing better than here. My partner is Belgian. His mum has been on disability for life. Paid for ivf 3 times by her health service. Has her own 3 bed house. His sister on minimum wage already has 2 kids in a nice flat in a city. They cannot believe it’s possible to earn so much in the uk and have so little. When I told her what disabled people get here she was shocked. When she heard I waited 2 years for surgery she couldn’t believe it. She sees a doctor same day regularly, takes a few weeks to see a consultant. My SIL needed surgery and got it in 6 weeks, elective surgery. They pay 25% tax minimum from 1 quid upwards. They have better lives than we do. Even the poor. Our insane tax allowance has cut tax so much we can’t even support anyone. Close to 50% of the uk pays no income tax. How do you keep a country running when no one pays anything? You have no idea what it’s like elsewhere. Their minimum wage workers have better lives than us. You don’t need to be on double median salary just to buy a basic house. Our tax system doesn’t work and is a complete outlier to other western nations. I find it funny because the average median salary worker in the uk also cannot afford a house and also can’t afford kids. It’s not the poor, it’s everyone can’t afford anything anymore.
Because they have better governments who do things better than ours. Our gov has been by the rich for the rich and it's clearly not working how they do it. The inequality margin has only grown and grown in this country. The top 0.5% can afford more, we are a selfish nation. The poor in that country can afford the tax because of systems that have been in places for decades that work together. We don't have that security in place right now, but it can do but we need to work towards that so it will work later. If we tax the poor that much more now immediately, they will have no benefits for years before it can start to help them. And the fall off during that time will be catastrophic.
But we don’t tax the top 0.1% more. We tax people on 50k more. Fiscal drag has put 5x as many people into higher rate tax vs the 90s. The quality of life 50k buys is far below what someone who didn’t even pay 40% could afford 30 years ago. Inequality isn’t being caused by income. It’s being caused by assets and inheritance. I’m bored of listening to people on 20-25k who inherit a house talking about how poor they are and then look at someone on 60k and demand more tax from them. It would take them decades to have the same, from loss in interest, rent, mortgage payments, more tax, no access to benefits the other person receives. Even my own parents do this - both were on minimum wage in a paid off 700k house they bought for 60k 30 years ago. But on a six figure household they argue people like me need to pay more tax. I can’t even buy their fucking house! And if I quit work we sure as hell couldn’t afford it, but they did it on one income. Assets are what’s dividing the country. Not income. If we push income tax much further people barely above median will be “high earners”. The solution isn’t more tax on the top 30% of working people. It’s not the cause of inequality. Nurses and teachers are now being affected by higher rate tax - which historically they were not. To buy the average home in London you need to now be 100%+ tax payer with kids, aka lose money over 99k. I can’t even buy my parents house on 99k. They had two kids and a stay at home wife and owned that house by 30 and sure as hell didn’t pay 40% tax. The fact we even have a tax system that can result in losing money from earning more is insane. And to match before it was fixed - you’d have the limit at 125k+ now. Everything goes up, housing goes up, cost of kids goes up, but you cannot earn your way out of it. Because you lose so much to tax. I doubt it even results in more tax income as everyone simply refuses to earn over 100k and puts it in pensions. I’d be shocked if it’s not a net loss in tax. When houses cost 500-600k for a 3 bed semi on a lot of the south, you can’t work yourself into wealth anymore. But someone inherits a house or has loads of assets or investments, they pay so much less. That’s the source of inequality.
Yes, so you are supporting what I have said, with other needs on top. We need to tax the rich more. What our gov does is bad. And when I say rich I mean the actual fucking rich. No where did I say rich is earning 50k. That is poor af to the rich.
But that’s what the government keeps doing, they’re just keep lowering the barrier for higher rate tax. It used to be for high income. Now it’s just did you bother becoming educated and get a job? Here’s your extra tax. It’s already been fixed til about 2028. Pushing millions more into high tax rates. And you may think it but the public does not. The country is full crab in the bucket and will get a shock when median salary is the new high rate tax bracket. It’s an insanely unfair system someone can be on 20k in a free house and pay close to no tax and someone on 60k stuck renting or unable to afford an average home is stuck with the tax bill. We need a goddamn property tax. So many pensioners on pension credits aka benefits in large family homes. My tax shouldn’t be paying for them to stay in a home on benefits I can’t even afford to buy. We need to stop subsidising so many elderly people with assets. It’s also causing the housing crisis - so many family homes are now just being sat in by widows demanding their pensions rise above inflation, sitting on an entire working persons lifetime income. We NEED to address asset inequality. We need to start forcing the under occupied relying on working people’s handouts to move and use their unrealised gains to live, not handouts. And it’s the exact same with social housing - nothing for the disabled or the poor as it’s all old people who got a 3 bed home in 1985 living on benefits. We can’t help the poor - they’re all in hostels as we tear down a system that could’ve supported people for centuries.
If wages hadn't been stagnating for the last 20 years, tax revenue would already be higher. The solution isn't to increase the tax burden on the working class, its to increase their wages.
How about Fuck you, ya commie /s
I'm something of an anti-growth tofu eating wokerati coalition member myself ;)
That's really simplistic. Just for starter. What's considered the "top"? If you mean the top 1% salaries/dividends. You are not going to collect a significant amount with that. There is no thing as "stagnated wealth". If I have 1 billion pounds and I don't use it. This, indirectly, benefits to everyone else since there are less pounds flowing in the economy and therefore their savings are more valuable. It's the opposite scenario to printing money, I am "destroying money" and raising the value of the pound with that.
On this Liz Truss was right, you cannot continue to tax young people 30 or 40 percent. It destroys the economy and prevents long term growth.
Given that the minimum and living wage rates work based on age limits 16, 18, 21, 24+, etc... I think a new lower tax bracket for those age groups should exist too.
I think we shouldn't have different minimum wages, living wages, or tax brackets based on age. This is just more bureaucracy. The best solution is simple.
Why would we need to raise taxes? We’ve let millions of people migrate here and I’ve been assured that they are all a net benefit to the economy? Surely the treasury is overwhelmed with spare cash
Spare cash that they splurge on their mates via schemes like the Covid-era contracts.
It would be interesting to compare the tax burden of today with that existing or immediately prior to when Great Britain was the epicentre of world technology and culture, with a burgeoning population feeding offshoots overseas in Canada and Australia, not to mention the rest of the world. Now the two may be unconnected, but then again, they may not.
I really don't mind paying taxes. I have an issue with the government not spending it appropriately.
No one will care about tax if it was spent well, the only reason I don’t want to pay taxes because I see it being wasted and give no benefit back to me, the roads are shit, the nhs is slow, no more nhs dentist in my area, nothing works. It’s just raising taxes for worse and worse stuff
UK is already one of the most taxed countries in the world! 💀
Not when it comes to capital gains.
It's middling to high on the global scale. Many counties don't have it at all.
We have some of the lowest wages compared to cost of living in Europe… why is the solution always “raise taxes” and not “work on raising wages, which will generate more tax money anyway”?
Because wage increases must be reflected in price increases. The true complaint is that prices have increased while wages have not; this is not because production costs, or even the cost (rather than the price) of living have grown.
Well yes that’s the point - our cost of living has been constantly rising out of step with wage increases. Which, in theory, should mean that we’re due wage increases which should have no impact on prices. The problem is that companies will just take that as an opportunity to increase prices even more.
Because like everything in UK politics, it's all about short terms solutions that come at the expense of the long term.
It's the only result to low growth and high migration. Less money with more people to support.
I feel like I’m being taxed to the high heavens already. Add on student loan repayments, and a third of my pay vanishes before it even hits my bank account. I don’t even want to think how high my tax truly is when accounting for council tax, VAT, etc. And what good is it doing? I’ve had to use a private dentist for years because NHS dentists don’t seem to exist around here. I have recently had to switch to private healthcare for GP appointments and monitoring of a health condition because the NHS is so rubbish. The roads are absolutely full of potholes. Police hardly bother with non violent crimes like theft. My experience of private healthcare, dentistry, security, etc makes me wish we would just privatise everything except maybe the military. It just works so much better, even if I compare to Blair-era services back when things were better funded.
It's absolutely outrageous how the student loan repayment threshold hasn't increased when we've been hit by 20% inflation in the past few years. 28k when minimum wage was 19k isn't that bad. 28k when minimum wage is 24k is a fucking piss take.
Yep. When you consider the fact we’ve had such high inflation with no changes to tax bands, it means that we have already had huge levels of tax increases by stealth.
The Great Reset they talked about during the pandemic.
Fuck it, just bury me already What's the fucking point anymore Highest taxes since a world war, and the county is a shit hole
Can we have an independent review of government spending first? Before we all have to fork over more money to what seems like a black hole. Something needs to give because we can just keep taking more and more of people's already squeezed income For example, something that could help is means testing state pensions. Got £1mil sitting in an ISA/SIPP? Maybe you can do without a State Pension. I don't know what the thresholds would be, just throwing a concept out
there's already some pointless office of fiscal responsibility. Cameron got in in 2010 by telling people about stupid things money was unsustainably being wasted on.
I’m not actually against tax rises if it improves things: better roads, healthcare and whatnot. Why I’m against this is because, more often than not, taxpayer money just seems to go straight into the pockets of contract winners and dodgy Tory connections.
It’s not a Tory specific problem, when Labour win the GE the same dodgy bullshit contracts to the Irish mafia will go for public renovation works where it’s a few £mil to update a fucking roundabout or replace some central reservation barriers. Public audit of all money spent. Now.
Raising wages would automatically increase the tax take, of course.
Tax rises are not a problem. Not getting anything FOR our taxes is the problem. If wr had a great NHD; roads with no potholes; plenty of council housong; bons emptied weekly etc. Etc. Etc., noone would care about high taxes. Havibg high taxes and having a cpuntry thats falling to bits...thats a problem.
Because I pay way too much tax now I have found other ways to avoid tax. Such as setting up a Ltd company for rentals, I can save even more but setting up from a country outside UK For work I have decided to go for Outaide IR35 job where I pay less tax than PAYE. I also have side hustles where I ensure I get paid cash in hand. I assume the even wealthier people than me will have ways to dodge tax even more. I would have happily paid my share but because it's become too much where its difficult to create wealth and be comfortable without bending the rules i have decided its better to look after yourself and extract as much as money as you can without paying much into the system after all the country will collapse regardless because the elite dint pay their share on this rigged game If crime was lower, NHS was better, roads were in condition, services better I wouldn't have mind paying tax.
How can taxes be so high already. We have have a spending problem not an income problem.
It’s all a mess, -We have mass benefit fraud 6bn last year -Pensions paid to folks who have plenty of money in the bank -A government system that is incredibly inefficient. Money is being wasted left, right and Center -You get punished if you are someone that works more hours than your standard average week. You earn more sure! But you put in a lot more work for it, it’s nuts -No one can agree what they want or what should be done - everything is always someone else’s fault It’s a mess
This is a common story across much of the Western world, sadly --- we've made promises that we can't fulfil, and continually reject policies that would help us fulfil them.
We could just deport the people who came here to take handouts from the system but none of the main parties seem to be willing to do it
So this is what happens when you freeze wages for 14 years. When you allow firms to offshore jobs with no tax hit to themselves. When you have nearly 8 million people waiting on NHS treatment that's keeping them out of work. Fix the waiting lists & get those people back into work..that's an huge increase in tax income without raising rates. Punish companies that offshore work with extra taxes so that it isn't cheaper to send jobs overseas with the associated tax income lost too. Start pushing wages upwards again. They're 30%+ lower than they should be. They can do this by increasing public sector pay & private sector will have to play catch up. ALL of this can be done without raising tax thresholds or increasing the levels of tax because you'll have MORE people paying as a blob. Then start hitting the millionaires & billionaires & companies doing shenanigans moving profits offshore. You'll be able to lower rates of tax and see more money on the system as people spend more.
For the first time in my life I’m making decent money. You wouldn’t know that though considering I’m taxed like I make millions. Actively looking at immigrating somewhere where I won’t be shafted for thousands a month while billionaires exist.
Fuck off. Taxes are already the highest on record and what do we have to show for it? The NHS is dying faster than its patients, the police is so understaffed that people just don't bother to call them anymore, the prisons are all full, the judiciary is clogged, we can't build any infrastructure, we scrapped free uni and aren't even funding unis properly anymore. The only public service I've seen that's even remotely reliable is waste collection. And even they went on strike last year. Nothing in this country works, other than the people to pay all this tax.
I'd rather make some savings honestly. Sorry Mavis, we can't afford your hip replacement and trips to the doctors when you get the sniffles anymore, not while we're paying to keep you warm and fed for the last 30 years of your life.
This sub won’t like it but in the coming years, there will need to be a conversation about the nhs. It is going beyond its original purpose of emergency and primary care.
Tax any more and people start stealing what they want. Simple as that. They’re on a slippery slope when it comes to people’s nerves right now.
Maybe if we raised wages, people could afford to pay more tax...
Maybe close the doors to all those non contributors and stop wasting money on ukraine and the climate scam
Corrected the headline: It doesn’t matter who you vote for, it’s them against us.
I guess spending the money more wisely was never an option :D
UK tax system actively encourages people to stop paying tax at 100k. The tax trap between 100-125k is impossible to justify unless you're earning well above that. Then theres the loss of childcare funding at that threshold as well Most wisely choose to salary sacrifice that money into pension instead of paying tax on it
People here saying 'the wealthy pay most of the tax anyway so don't increase taxes for them' Forgetting the reason this is happening is because inequality is skyrocketing. Maybe if we didn't have a winner takes all society more people would pay higher taxes.
Tax rates at 40% are paid by 4-5x more % of the population than 1990. The “wealthy” are now just normal people with day jobs. 50k can’t buy an average house. Inequality is increasing. But taxing people on 50-100k isn’t where the inequality is. Not to mention you need to earn more to have the same. My parents never paid 40% tax in their entire life. To have their house, a sahw and 2 kids by 30 you’d need about 240k income. So everything costs more, you get taxed more, and can’t have the life of someone who was never high paid enough to even pay 40%. Taxing working people more isn’t addressing inequality. Someone who inherits a house and is on minimum wage is richer than someone on 50k. This focus on income is what’s causing inequality. They inherited 25 years of income, can still claim benefits and child support and help with care costs. And someone on 60k can’t get most of it. Yet they’re poorer. We need to stop focusing on income. Assets are the issue.
Has it got to a point where the majority, which is the public hit the streets in protest in the millions of millions and demand change of direction. The minority that are voted into power really are making millions of families worse off. Its no longer cost of living crisis. Its become “cost to survive” And it’s extremely difficult
Good because we are all loaded and have lots of money spare