To be fed up with all the threads about high earners feeling poor

Rather than trying to tax higher earners more, the government should start being creative with ways to raise more money from taxes.

Starting firstly with reforming inheritance tax, and then look at ways of taxing the super-rich, not increasing tax for higher earners on PAYE(!), and extracting more money from corporates.

Jacking in your career to go on benefits for years absolutely would destroy many types of careers, including mine. You must have a very sheltered existence

You don’t understand my life or have any empathy for me. Stop with the sneering and just recognize you don’t understand other peoples problems. That’s ok - you can just not comment on any threads where you don’t understand the situation.

We need to look after high earners or the talent leaves, we have so many people emigrate to Dubai and other places because we over tax the high earners

I am not a high earner

However, I do not see the point to crippling the high earners with tax on income.

Work should always pay and there needs to be salaries to aspire to

All of this makes sense to me.

There may be no net loss to the Treasury as a result of removing the cap on who can benefit from free childcare. At the moment there is a cliff edge where you can be worse off earning over £100k than under it because you lose the childcare subsidy and lose your tax free allowance.

People, particularly women, with young children are very likely to go part time or avoid moving to higher paying (often more demanding) job if it would push them over £100k. So the government loses tax revenue from those taxpayers being disincentivised to increase their income. Cliff edges in a tax system are never a good thing.

I’m in a position where working an extra day or getting a promotion would lose me a significant amount of money for this reason. If I did work the extra day I’d pay an extra £10k tax. And whilst I’m not complaining I’m only left with £2k a month after childcare costs as a single parent so not really filthy rich at the moment.

You need to understand the difference between gross and net income, which would reduce £50k substantially.

I'm pretty sure someone on £50k will receive very little, if anything, from the government in terms of support.

Living somewhere commutable where you can get £50k jobs most likely means significant housing costs, and if and DC, money spent on paying someone to look after them.

So yes, I do believe someone on £50k will be feeling the COL increases, and has every right to rant on MN about it.

Don’t look down , look up.

we are encouraged ( newspapers, media etc) to blame people who claim benefits… even those who really can’t work

we subside our mps at the bar in London, we pay for London houses for them to commute… they don’t mention this every day.

m the media puts forth an agenda paid for by the rich …. Look at the direction

I find it useful to bear this in mind:

1. Things are worse for most people, so even the well off are feeling the pinch.

1. A lot of well off people believe that 'poverty' (or not being able to spend what you like how you like) is something that only happens to other people and it is ultimately their fault. They have this belief because it means they can tell themselves they are entirely deserving of their good fortune and don't have to check their privileges.

1. People that come from a background with some degree of money and power always get their voice heard with more traction. The current situation is no exception. They are used to being, and know how to get, heard.

1. If the noisy middle classes are moaning, certain ears might be more inclined to listen. It's not ideal, but can be leveraged for change.

People on low incomes and the working poor, have been demonised and stigmatised for years in this country. We need to fi d a way to get ourselves heard

I think people in lower income also work hard but they maybe choose wrong choices or simply not lucky.

for example A worked hard in her school, study soo hard and get into top uni. Meanwhile B not working too hard in school, choose not to go to uni and get pregnant. A have a good career and B only have minimum wage job. Both work hard in their own field. But B made a wrong turn in life.

a single parent on £51k has less than a two parent family in full time minimum wage jobs. And she will get no help with rent, childcare, etc. in many parts of the country £50k wouldn’t be enough to pay rent and childcare never mind everything else.

check your privilege

Someone on a gross salary of £101,000 per year will take home about £5,700 per month, or £68k per year. That's before any deductions for student loan repayments or pension contributions.

If you assume they contribute 5% to the pension and are paying a few hundred in student loan repayments, they could easily receive £5,000 per month in take home pay.

This group of taxpayers receives no child benefit, 15 hours maximum childcare and personal allowance starts tapering off once you hit £100k.

Childcare, mortgage and utilities can easily come to £4k/5k and more in loads of areas of the UK, and if you don't have two incomes, you can see why they would find it tight, despite their headline salary appearing to be large.

To be honest there are many people on this thread who claim to be low earners that are sneering and judging. So if some high earners do that, they are clearly not alone

The problem is that you’re judging all high earners as people who sneer and judge and looked the other way when others were struggling. My partner, as a high earner, has never done any of those things and neither have I. Would you judge all people in a certain group as the same? I try to take people as individuals and can sympathise with people for lots of reasons.

Summed up so well.

Because I didn’t want to throw away my career and live on uc. But I did think about it- that period of my life was insanely stressful.

I do earn less now but have much lower costs and better quality of life. Stop sneering at others- you don’t know their lives.

I think a lot of this is driven by the fact most high earners are in the South East and money doesn't go as far:

1. The South East housing is really expensive. £500k in Wolverhampton buys an absolutely lovely house in a great road but £500k in London gets a two bed flat in the arse end of nowhere.
2. Nursery care in London is stupidly expensive. It can be £2000 a child - try doing that with no free childcare hours and pay your mortgage on a shitty overpriced 2 flat (whilst paying a fortune in tax for people who live in bigger houses to have free child care).
3. Try paying for a train season to commute to London (if you don't want to live in a tiny flat) that costs £600+ a month and then spent 2-3 hours a day commuting so you can pay more tax for people outside the South East to have free childcare and live in bigger houses than you.
4. Despite paying a fucking fortune in tax and being absolutely fucked financially by mega expensive housing, expensive childcare, expensive train season tickets everyone here seems to think we should pay even more tax and be grateful for it.
5. On top of all that, many "high earners" have moved away from family to progress their career, worked like dogs with longer hours (at least in the early part of their career if not still) in stressful jobs, had mountains of university debt, whilst often the people complaining about high earners not paying enough tax still live close to their family, get free childcare, bigger houses, benefits/tax credits, shorter working hours and less stress.

Can you see why some of us are monumentally fucked off about people telling us how lucky we are and should be grateful to pay more tax?

Actually, I believe you are missing the point, the problem is that if even those earning that kind of money, with those good jobs are struggling then we're all fucked

My salary increases incrementally and with promotion (public sector) and inflation has meant I have not seen any benefit to a 10k pay rise in 5 years, that's poor.
However I thank my stars I got the pay rise so I can still keep my head above water

I also think that the more you earn the more you pay out - in general. It's all relative

No because £100k is about £55k - 60k take home. So two kids at private school leaves them with £15-20k to live on.

Lower earners don't seem to appreciate how much higher earners pay in tax!

@trekking1

Give over. If they were so better off than you on UC and had more leisure time why didn't you quit and go on UC

Because in a few years when the dc are of school age the posters will still have a career. Not everyone lives for the here and now. But that doesn't mean she can't bitch and moan whilst it's shit and hard.

YABU, as I find having a diverse spectrum of voices on MN interesting. COL has affected everyone differently, and discussion of that is topical.

I enjoy reading about all aspects of high earners, as although I am in that group, and have friends similar, no-one really talks about this kind of stuff in real-life. I also like contributing where I can as a single parent with ND DC, and balancing that with an exec level job.

An anonymous forum is exactly the right place to be having this type of conversation.

This is it for me too.

People arguing up thread that the 'squeezed middle' or higher earners aren't allowed to complain - well for many a thread on here it was middle earners who told lower paid earners that it was their own fault and they were lazy, uninspired, feckless with money, poor choices etc etc when the lower earners complained.

Now it's got to the point that the middle is being squeezed suddenly it's not about personal choices but the system being broken and wages not keeping up and things being too expensive - unless you're a lower earner when it's still your fault, and some go as far as it's the lower earners fault the middle are so squeezed as well.

Yet the reasons just about every income are feeling the pinch are the same - wages staying lower than they should be across the board and life getting more expensive across the board. Yet if you're earning little and struggling to afford the basics it's about choices, but if you earn more and struggling to afford the lifestyle you want it's about anything but choices it's about what you deserve because of all that hard work.

I think some are starting to realise that working hard only gets you so far, and does not isolate you against hardship and that's an uncomfortable place to be when you've convinced yourself that you have achieved what you have by graft alone, and those who haven't achieved it don't work hard enough, and suddenly it's not paying off anymore - something those hard working lower earners have known for a long time.

I don't doubt some people are struggling on higher wages than mine with commitments they have made etc, and for some I do sympathise, but in general if the feeling is that if I want a wage that affords me a standard of living other than bare essential survival then I need to work harder for it and make better choices, why doesn't that also apply to someone on more money than me? The real reasons we're both struggling are essentially the same - wage stagnation and high cost of living, but so many are ready to jump on people in my position while defending their own.

You do they say, reap what you sew, because that attitude is being directed back at these people and they do not like it.

Honestly, I think you should find it promising for the future (politically). It is a fact that the squeezed middle is becoming more so. It is a fact that the tax system means that if you earn more than £100k you actually take home less money, and if you have children you need to earn over £130k to be back to even. It is a fact that nursery fees are out of control and house prices have been propped up at the expense of almost anything else.

But guess what. The more people who are absolutely fucked off with the current system, the more likely it is to change. The more middle (and higher) income earners who are feeling the CoL pinch, the more likely they are to turn their backs on over a decade of Tory voting.

And also - to be quite honest - it is OK to be struggling as a high earner right now. That doesn't mean low earners aren't struggling more. It just means the economy is fucked.

People are allowed to be stressed and worried, and they are allowed to be panicking that even an amazing salary is hard to
live on in e.g. London these days. We should ALL be worried about that because it's inflation and house prices and political fuckwittery