Poor life planning..

You'll have to pay tax to have an opinion soon, 50p a time.

Dividends for a start… and his business relies on other small businesses which may or may not survive given minimum wage increases, ergo, he could lose his income. The little graph below explains a lot. But it’s typical of a socialist government so not surprising really!

Everyone is a taxpayer!

But our high ACCUMULATORS often pay a lower effective tax rate than the folk who clean their offices & homes...

There's no shortage of money in this country - go hang around the shopping malls of Canary Wharf or Mayfair over the next month if you don't believe me! But for decades we (as a country) have facilitated the hoovering of vast quantities of money offshore without being properly taxed for the UK Treasury.

The EU was working quite effectively towards finally closing the net on this, which is one of the main reasons (along with it suiting Putin) that we have ended up with Brexit.

Which is the single largest factor in cost of living increases (followed by Putin's war on Ukraine energy costs and Liz Truss's disastrous 'borrow from the world to cut UK taxes' budget) we are all paying for now.

I don't think Labour have been brave enough!

One big problem is that people tend to compare themselves with people with more money. If we started looking at how the vast majority of the world's population lives, we might realise that we are mostly very well off and have a high standard of living in a first world country. And one reason for that is that we pay taxes which benefit society as a whole.

I know, and have known, quite a lot of people that would not work more than 12-16 hours a week as it would mean they’d effectively be working more for the same pay. Why would anyone work full time for the same money, or only ever so slightly more, that they get in benefits and can have a nice life sitting about and seeing mates. That is what is massively wrong with our benefit system.

I'm not sure we do live in a civilised society, that might be what some object to.

This might amuse someone here, if you're already familiar with the meme https://nicksimulator.com/

£60-80k IS a high earner, not a middle ground earner.

@pocketpairs With the upcoming budget seen many "poor me" posts, particularly from high/middle earners.

I agree with you in that regard, but the issue is that she did not just hit higher earners.

She hit people on average and below-average salaries with the £2000 a year pension cap.

£2000 a year into a pension pot by salary sacrifice is an extremely low sum of money to be paying into a pension. That's equivalent to just a 5% salary sacrifice for someone who earns £40,000 a year.

If she's seriously expecting people to save for their pensions by saving £2000 a year or less, then she is psychotic.

Pay more than £2000 a year and get taxed. And where does that money go to? People who made poor life choices and who think they are entitled to having a large family.

I think it’s fair to expect people to live within their means at a given point in time but as we’ve seen over the last few years, things can rapidly change (Covid, energy and food bills, mortgage rates and rent etc). I am by no means smug and accept we all have free will to spend our money as we see fit, but when the going was good in the years of such low interest rates, we focussed on overpaying our mortgage like crazy. Things don’t last forever, that’s both the good and bad times so things will improve but for us we’ve weathered the storm by our actions.

That's very goady. It's their fault they are poor? That's a complete nonsense and you know it

You could also say the same for low earners then? They're to blame for their poor life choices and bad planning which is why they're 'poor'?

The problem is that these are the people who then blame poor/poorer people who say they’re struggling because MW is too low with ‘you should have planned better’

id have no issue with being supportive because they have to pay more (whilst, for a change, actually approving that increase) if they were people who happy to support those on lower income struggling (let’s say when they introduce the 2 children limit etc….)

You can’t tell people to get their acts together and then expect to be told ‘oh poor you’ when it actually happens to you.

Here we go again with this dreadful divisiveness. Those who are well off expressing resentment at "having to pay for" those who are more vulnerable and less fortunate and those who are not so well off expressing resentment at those who earn more than most of us can even imagine.

Maybe I've got something missing, but I hardly ever pay attention to other people's wealth. I don't care about it, am not impressed by it and don't resent it, but I do care that those who are less well off receive the help they need. Otherwise we are barbarians.

But when they bought the houses they could afford it. Changes in policy mean that they now can't?

I am like you I have a very small mortgage, but I really don't begrudge someone who lives in a million pound house. It wouldn't be for me even if I could afford to buy one because the upkeep of such a property is huge both financially and timewise, and I cba.

What is wrong with people who work bloody hard feeling fed up and pissed off that they are supporting those who aren’t willing (and I’m not including those who genuinely can’t for various reasons) to work? My husband was born to a single teenage mum, lived in council housing and went to a crap secondary school but through hard work and determination he went to uni and now owns a small business which employs a healthy number of people. However, his aspirations are now his downfall as it is exactly people like him (us) who are being shafted by the government. I’ve said it before on another thread - why don’t we too put our feet up and take the benefits rather than working 60/70 hour weeks?

You aren't losing a tax payer though, that person's role will still exist and someone else will step into it.

No-one is indispensable.

And that state education indirectly benefits them by producing an educated populace. Obviously.

If you choose the luxury of private education, then you get to pay VAT.

You can choose not to use it.

This conversation has been done so many times that I'm bored just typing this out.

A bit rude. And it is a loss when we lose taxpayers, as we need their taxes to help pay for those that don't or can't pay any or much tax.

I have no sympathy for these people at all.
No doubt they have voted right wing and watched the country going to ruin for years.
They didn't give a toss when the tories crapped on the poor.