AIBU to think if you're a net negative in tax you shouldn't be able to vote?

Dh & i earn 6 figures each and pay loads of tax.

DC got really sick as a baby. Loads of time in intensive care. Will have cost tens if not hundreds of thousands of pounds. now on regular medication that costs the nhs thousands a year.

Ive broken a foot & two fingers, had a c section and a complicated "natural" delivery.

Do we lose our vote because Dc and i got sick & used up all our "goodwill"

You are at best naive if you imagine that this thread was occasioned as an intellectual debate. Indeed the OP back-pedalled, claiming it was intended humorously.

No it doesn't.

What it does show is that MN is clearly not the place to have a theoretical intellectual debate as too many posters get triggered or offended and for some reason seem unable to grasp that disenfranchising vast numbers of the UK electorate and turning the electoral system back to the 1700s is quite simply never going to happen.

Not as lazy as your total lack of contribution to the well being of the society you live in beyond paying your taxes. Leeching even.

Don’t be so obtuse. It shows we have people who want to destroy democracy and disenfranchise many people in our society. We need to know about these attitudes and, yes, hatred.

Thatcher started the trick of bribing people with their own money. The problem was it ran out.

You missed a bit.

Labour is bribing voters with the wages of workers (dressed up sticking it to the rich (broadest shoulders)) while leaving the truly wealthy to grow their fortune and increase their influence.

Thatcher started the trick of bribing people with their own money. The problem was it ran out.

I didn’t vote for her in
but here’s what Google says on why people voted for her

Margaret Thatcher was voted in as Prime Minister in 1979 primarily due to widespread dissatisfaction with the incumbent Labour government's handling of the economy and a series of crippling public sector strikes known as the "Winter of Discontent"
. She secured subsequent re-election victories in 1983 and 1987 due to a combination of factors including the "Falklands Factor," an improving economy for some voters, a divided opposition, and her strong, decisive leadership style

• 1979 general election: Margaret Thatcher won a working majority of 43 seats.
• 1983 general election: She increased her majority significantly to 144 seats.
• 1987 general election: She was returned for a third term with a reduced majority of 102 seats

Im no supporter of her
she imprisoned without trial and
sold off council houses and that’s a couple of hed disastrous policies. The later of course is having severe effects on people and council spending budgets today

The point is she made promises of reduced inflation and a better economy. At that point in time after ‘The Winter of Discontent’ people were desperate for change.

She didn’t need to make any promises about the welfare state at that time because there was so much more going wrong

Now, however, the focus has changed

Sorry, I missed this reply before.
Whilst I do not entirely disagree with your point about fiscal collapse, I see the issue a little differently.

One of the problems is the 'squeezed middle'. Successive governments, despite what MN likes to think, still aren't 'taxing the rich'. What they are actually doing is taxing the middle. It is, in fact, part of the problem that governments simply cannot bring themselves to actually properly sort out taxing the actual rich. The difference in income tax to be paid between earning £30k and £125k is substantial. The difference between £125k and £400k is non-existent. There's a whole upper level getting taxed no more than if they earned £125k. That's, frankly, a nonsense.
45% of 125k leaves you a lot less to play with than 45% of £400k.

The graduation is poorly spread. And the fundamental reason for this is, indeed, that governments don't like taxing the rich. Not the middles, the actual rich. I think people have difficulty separating the two.

Governments have set this up into a battle between middle and low, whilst the actual rich skate off into the distance, hiding everything they can, using the legal means available to the actual rich.

Pandering to the rich is still prevalent in governance. UC is, in fact, pandering to the rich. It's absolutely ludicrous that the government is subsidising the big four supermarkets by 'topping up' staff wages with UC so companies can keep expenditure low.

Generations of wealthy individuals and organisations have held governments to ransom. 'You do this and we will leave'. They've got more sway than the £50 - £125k earners who say the same thing.

We are all kicking at the wrong people, and that absolutely suits the government who have, in reality, never really stopped being in the pockets of the very rich, however good some are at pretending to the contrary.

Billions of pounds of this country's money flows into the coffers of the very rich. Billions are lost in legal tax 'avoidance'. Governments focus on scapegoating the benefit fraudsters whilst ignoring the greater sum lost to tax dodging at the upper level, because those at the top are not easy to touch.

The poor buggers in the middle get financially shafted. The poorest in the country are held responsible. The richest hoard. This imbalance creates the fiscal system you've outlined. Too little coming in, too much going out, and a blind spot when it comes to high-level taxation.

I absolutely think we should 'tax the rich'. The problem is that we aren't. We are just falling into the easy trap of thinking £150k pa is 'rich' in today's money. We're taxing those people to the hilt already. The government has not discouraged the ceiling in the average income individual's perception of 'wealth'.

Some people don’t realise how much high tax rate payers pay in tax. I saw a payslip recently, 50K in tax over the last year! Seriously looking to move to the middle east!

Yeah, Thatcher took a hammer to it.

That’s simply not true, do you think Margaret Thatcher increased the welfare state, honestly what you’re saying is obviously untrue.

Which is caused by 3 major factors, all caused deliberately by incompetent - or all too competent, working against the people - British political elites trying deliberately to bring back the Victorian empire of near-slaves:

1. ageing population (ok not deliberately caused but deliberately ignored)
2. privatization, causing public money to be handed out hand over fist to private shareholderS. Of which a large proportion is caused by buy to let and landlords, forcing the impoverishment of working people, destroying home ownership in favour of private tenancies, empowering rising rents and therefore rising housing benefit paid direct to private landlords
3. reduced wages not paying the cost of living and therefore requiring top ups from public money, again allowing more money for shareholders.

Start taxing the rich, make them pay for what they’ve taken out and the world they’ve created.

Plough the money into reversing privatization.

The only people who don’t see the size and direction of travel of the welfare state as excessive or problematic tend to be those who don’t contribute to it (to the op's original point) or those who assume their lifestyle choices should be underwritten by other taxpayers. Higher earners are not the same as the rich.

If your standards are low enough, almost anything looks 'ok' when you compare it to the worst possible alternative.

Most of that was covered in the article I think - my point was more that around half of what the state spends on benefits comes straight back to their coffers anyway.

People kind of forget about indirect taxation so it's an interesting point to highlight.

Or alternatively try being a candidate having a policy of cutting pensioner benefits and let's see if you get elected.

Do you think that national debt at £2.9 trillion and an annual deficit of £153 billion where annual debt interest payments are £126 billion (compared to UK education budget of £119 billion) is sustainable?

Of course you may argue that the public didn't vote for this, but every action by every Government has contributed to it, whether it was £70 billion spent on furlough by the Conservatives or £9 billion in public sector pay increases by Labour.

Or alternatively try being a candidate having a policy of cutting pensioner benefits and let's see if you get elected.

From Chat GPT just because my tea break in only 5 mins.

Here’s an objective assessment of the claim from the Equality Trust press release that “the poorest 10% of households paid on average 48% of their income in tax in 2022/23, while the richest 10% paid just 39%”:
✅ What the numbers actually show
The data quoted in the press release is drawn from the ONS Effects of Taxes and Benefits on UK Household Income and appears to be accurate as a summary of that dataset:

• Poorest 10% households: ~48% of their income goes to tax
• Richest 10% households: ~39% of their income goes to tax

1. Different taxes matter differently
2. Income tax and National Insurance: progressive — higher earners pay more as a share of income.
3. Indirect taxes like VAT and council tax: these hit everyone but take a larger share of income from poorer households because they spend a higher proportion of their income on consumption and property-related taxes.
4. Distribution versus incidence
5. The richest 10% make up a large share of total income tax receipts (around 60% of income tax revenue comes from the top 10% of earners).
6. But when you divide total taxes paid by household income, consumption and other flat-rate taxes shrink the average rate for the top decile relative to a naïve comparison.
7. Households have very different income compositions
8. For example, pensioner or zero-income households may show bizarre ratios if benefits are excluded or counted differently. Economists sometimes adjust for this when comparing tax burden.
9. The Resolution Foundation has previously shown that figures like “the poorest 1% pay 265% of their income in tax” are statistical artefacts due to how income is measured and how tax liabilities are treated.
10. Tax plus benefits versus just taxes
11. If you include benefits (like universal credit, tax credits, state pensions), the net share of income that the poorest keep increases significantly, and the distributional picture changes quite dramatically.

• VAT and consumption taxes — poorer households spend a bigger share of income on consumption.
• Council tax — largely unrelated to income and based on property values that don’t track people’s ability to pay.

• The Equality Trust’s headline figures are factually based on ONS data.
• But taken alone, they don’t prove the UK’s tax system is regressive overall, because they mix very different kinds of taxes and ignore benefits.
• Most expert analyses find income tax itself is progressively structured, but indirect taxes and council tax can make the overall system appear regressive at the bottom end when measured as total tax as a % of income.

The above stats only look at tax paid, not benefits received. Once you factor in benefits such as Universal Credit, housing support, pensions and child benefit, the poorest households usually get more back from the state than they pay in tax, while higher earners are net contributors.

So the headline makes it sound like the poor are being crushed by the tax system, but that’s misleading. What it really shows is that everyday taxes like VAT and council tax are clumsy and hit low incomes harder, not that poorer households end up worse off overall. In reality, benefits significantly offset those taxes, and higher earners still fund most of the system.

The amusing thing is in such regimes, where the rich get richer and the poorer get poorer, people (maybe the OP, who knows ?) who start rich can very quickly end up not rich and out of the voting game.

Obviously the solution to this worry is to ensure that once the system is up and running the rich never lose their votes while the poor never gain any.

We could call it the "Bright and Beautiful" constitution, after the propaganda chant that originally promoted it.

Pp wanted evidence of the effect on how people vote

We see it all around us
The majority of People vote for what affects them the most.

People in the majority have never voted for a reduced welfare state
So
The evidence is all around us

Ok
Unaffordable then

pp wanted evidence of the problem. Im stating it. It’s all around us

Smashing, a system where only the rich can vote.

Belting idea that, can't see a single solitary problem.

I propose that the right to vote is dependent on a cognitive test and a basic intelligence test. Too stupid, fuck off no vote for you.

https://www.statista.com/chart/24050/social-spending-by-country/

https://www.oecd.org/en/data/datasets/social-benefit-recipients-socr-database.html

The fundamental issue in the future is the aging population and how to support it, not sure I’d refer to that as a huge welfare state, unless you are suggesting old people should be left to slide into poverty?

Not at all. How did you reach that conclusion?

What I suggest is that when you start a "theoretical discussion" about policy, or indeed anything, you should be mindful of the effect it may have on others and act accordingly in your initial and subsequent posts. If you genuinely want a discussion, what you certainly should not do is dismiss other people's concerns out of hand by telling them it's not real and was just for the 'lolz'.

The UK does not have a huge welfare state, and if you think it does I suggest you look at the balance sheets of some other countries for comparison.