AIBU Income Tax rise.

That'll all happen sooner or later anyway. Might as well do it on purpose whilst there's still an NHS to charge for.

Teachers? Yes, they work hard. Do they get paid excessive mega-bucks? No.

They don't get a bad wage particularly in london & the pension is very generous.

This is more true now than ever.

There is apparently a recent paper published with idea on how to cut public spending by 3%. It involves freezing the state pension, abolishing all pensioner benefits, raising the retirement age to 70, imposing a £20 charge for seeing the doctor.......

Anyone prefer that to a tax raise?

The above is coming regardless for younger people

This - alternatively we could do what Labour are doing and just kick the can down the road

That’s my point. You cannot fund the public services the UK public is demanding without lower and middle earners paying far more.

The choice is to have continental European levels of public services and the vast majority of people - who have been carried by our ever-diminishing proportion of higher earners for the last couple of decades - to pay far more, OR for the public to accept that they will have a more US-style model of public services. You can’t have both. Especially with close to zero growth and barely any productivity increases.

It has become a case of dividing up the remaining mouldy cake crumbs while the public fight over them like rats in a sack blaming < insert most recent group of scapegoats > rather than address the fact that the fundamentals of our economic model have been broken for a long time and it has now reached its limit with the credit card maxed out.

So a choice has to be made and no politician wants to articulate this reality to the electorate.

There are policy choices that could be made that would result in UK growth and rising productivity and therefore rising living standards within a couple of electoral cycles but nobody wants to tell the electorate that because everybody is already fed up because of the last few decades of incompetence and failure to take these actions earlier when they should have been taken so the electorate yell “CAKE, NOW!” and the politicians oblige by promising it even though they know they cannot deliver it.

When they don’t deliver it the electorate becomes even more enraged and decides to vote for someone who promises an even bigger and less plausible cake, which again - quite obviously - will not materialise.

We all understand the principle of insurance when it comes to cars but not when it comes to tax.

People complain about the cost of car insurance but it's not usually on the lines of "£400 and I didn't crash my car!! It's a disgrace"

Yet with tax it's always "my child isn't disabled so why am I paying for someone else's child?"

There seems to be a lot of Victorian values on this thread. No need for social care, everyone has to pay their own way & Devil take the hindmost, only have the services (like health, education etc) that you've paid your "share" to, no additional help for the disabled.

Suppose it will be work houses next.

There is apparently a recent paper published with idea on how to cut public spending by 3%. It involves freezing the state pension, abolishing all pensioner benefits, raising the retirement age to 70, imposing a £20 charge for seeing the doctor.......

Anyone prefer that to a tax raise?

https://bsky.app/profile/chrisgiles.ft.com/post/3m4fiusjmc22k

Ah, people who need a wheelchair will find that easy to get it into! Apart from people like me who can't get out of a low car (spinal issues) which most 3 wheelers are. A half decent (sitting position) car is a necessity for me to commute to my full time job.

Yes the weird right-wing obsession with Motability is also pointless and economically illiterate given that even if Motability ceased to exist tomorrow it would not reduce the welfare bill by a single penny.

These threads always descend into people’s hobby horses about bankers or asylum seekers - which are a rounding error in public spending - or things like Motability that they clearly don’t even understand which make no difference to the public finances at all. People are obsessed with irrelevancies and personal grievances. It’s impossible to have a sensible discussion about economics on Mumsnet usually and the things that actually need to change to have any prospect of rising living standards.

We might disagree on taxes etc but please do not think I was targeting you because you mentioned a disabled DC. I know from experience that these things cost a lot and fully understand that PIP is meant to pay for this, ie not a benefit to top up income.

All UK income tax taxpayers pay the basic rate of tax. 1.2% earn enough to pay the top rate. That’s why basic rate rises are needed.

Lots of people work hard and don't get remunerated big-time for it. It all depends how you classify hard work. Teachers? Yes, they work hard. Do they get paid excessive mega-bucks? No.

I dont know any teachers who've gone on much longer than 55 and I know several NHS technical support people who retired very early.

That said, I've just retired from the private sector at 55. It has nothing to do with my occupational pensions.

You clearly don’t understand basic maths. The sheer number of people in each group means that you CANNOT fund the public services being demanded by taxing “the rich” more, even if you taxed them 100% of their income.

Their latest policy is for disabled people to go back to driving little three-wheelers.

Zero of which many of we so-called higher earning professionals saw because we were the ones working 14+ hour days to ensure essential services were maintained and the wheels of education, law, social services and local authority mandates kept turning.

I was working full days & more during Covid, Local Authority mandated roles. Not safely working out of a home office but face to face with the public all day every day thus vastly increasing my chances of catching Covid. I felt I was one of the lucky ones because I wasn't having to work in the Health Service or in a cramped office but mostly in the outdoors so I could get away when I was being verbally abused by people because I was "the government" so lockdown was all my fault. Earning little more than minimum wage at the time.

The majority of those having to work for essential services during the lockdowns, rather than get 80% salary to sit at home, came in the lowest rate tax bracket and would be classed as low income (nurses, administrators, manual council workers, help desks, supermarket staff etc). Very few of the higher earning professionals were to be seen at that time, as the day to day work was mostly done by us minions.

@EasternStandard - well of course 'no-one wants it to be them'. But there's a BIG difference between a teacher on 45k a year facing tax hikes that will mean she will struggle to pay her mortgage, and a banker having a few less hundred grand a year to stick into his own already vast savings pot.

Historically. Although I do know a civil servant planning to retire 10 years early but they are saving for that

However, voters prefer to believe in free cake

True

if they expect the level of services available in continental Europe then our lower and middle earners must pay far more tax than they are doing

But housing costs are prohibitive so you would be paying it back too many in housing benefit. Also even if we did increase tax on these groups is it enough to fund pensions & the NHS for the growing ageing population?

they electorate are served what they demand and they demand incompetent leadership promising them unicorns which will never arrive.

Agree

Do early retirement in the public services still exist? Or are you talking historically?

You are right.
It benefits everyone to have better services. I don't want people around me to be ill, even if I am not ill myself (they may get illnesses and then spread them to me). I want children to be well-educated, even if I do not have children myself (they will be making my life better in so many ways as adults). I want disabled people and old people to be well-looked after, even if at this time I am neither disabled or old.

@Bruisername - well some might (although I don't think Paris anywhere near competes with salaries these days, and Singapore is, bluntly, dull as hell) but lots wouldn't. Most people commanding this level of income have built their lives here and will be at a stage of life where their kids wouldn't want to be uprooted to go live in a different country.

My point is, beyond a certain (enormously high) level of earning, you can very much afford to be taxed more. People can and do get on with it. In my own sector, (much lower) salaries have remained stagnant for YEARS, but the cost of living has rocketed. Everyone has less money. It's very annoying, but I have much less disposable income now than I did several years ago. I'm not selling my house or leaving London or working less to pay less tax - I am just getting on with it. And if your take home pay is STILL hundreds of thousands a year, even after tax, I think people in that position can get on with it too!

@silverbirchjuniper Exactly. The person on minimum wage and the person earning £110k have far more in common than the person earning £110k and the billionaire. But those at the bottom have more anger for the person earning £110k than the billionaire. It's classic divide and conquer we're being subjected to by those in power because whilst we're all knocking seven shades of shit out of each other, the richest continue to get richer.