Yet above I’ve proved to you that a parent supporting two young children who has £180k gross earnings is significantly worse off than a couple earning minimum wage renting a home in the same area. They will have £3,464 left after housing costs and tax to pay their living expenses such as Council tax, utilities, food etc. They also won’t have to pay for house maintenance of buildings insurance, and will have minimal childcare costs, if any. By contrast, a single parent earning £180k living in the same area who has a mortgage will have only £1,297 left after tax, housing and childcare costs (with me taking the lowest possible estimate for the latter two per the ONS data) for pay for their Council tax, utilities, food, and also the additional costs of insurance and maintenance of a mortgaged home.
I have proved, with numbers, that assertions from you and other on this thread that anybody earning such a salary is “rich”, is “taking the piss”, is “mismanaging their money if they are struggling”, or needs a “tiny violin” are misguided and simply exemplify mathematical illiteracy and a total ignorance of how redistributive the UK tax system is already.
This is why we are losing so many of our most qualified and talented young people to other countries, and why we have huge skilled shortages in many critical areas because people are either retiring early, leaving the country entirely, or cutting their working hours because it’s simply not worth working more or aspiring to promotions if the tax rates will be something between 80% and over 100% (seriously - these cliff-edges mean that at some levels if you earn more and work more hours or take a promotion, your net income goes down).
You can be angry all you want and play along with the politicians’ plans to turn people against each other, hating everyone either richer or poorer than they are personally, if you wish to. However, if you and many others like you continue to do that then UK living standards will continue to be in freefall for the foreseeable future because the only way out of that is increased productivity, and the only way to achieve that is to address the ridiculous cliff-edges in the tax system that I have raised, which exist at various levels of earnings from people claiming UC, to those being denied child benefit, to people who’ve worked to get qualifications and then worked 70 hour weeks for over a decade to work their way up and then found that they have no better living standards than those on minimum wage.
Enjoy the ever-declining living standards. The pointless responses on this thread show precisely what is wrong. The “Four Yorkshiremen” mentality isn’t going to make anybody better off. Having a go at the people who are paying the taxes which provide your services which you are nowhere near funding your own use of (even if you don’t claim benefits) isn’t going to make you better off. People aren’t going to study for years and take on tens of thousands of pounds of debt and work long hours in stressful jobs and sacrifice time with their own families to fund things for everyone else if they can never also achieve a lifestyle above that they could achieve on minimum wage, as a result of that extra effort.
The extreme people on either side of the political spectrum find economic facts unpalatable, but objective reality doesn’t care whether they like it or not. Unless the population of the UK wake up, stop attacking each other, refusing to actually look at the maths and vote for evidence-based policies that will actually work, rather than slogans and political ideology, nothing will change.
I find it so depressing that so many people, on both sides of this debate, are so keen to blame the others rather than look at the clear economic mismanagement which is staring them in the face.