The top 10% of taxpayers contribute 60% of income tax...

[MsPinkMarshmallow]

I'm fed up of hearing that "high earners" will be targeted by the next budget.

The top 10% of taxpayers pay 60% of income tax.

Don't piss them off. They'll just leave the UK or work less so they're taxed less.

Some more stats: in 2024-25, the top 1% of income tax payers earned 13.3 per cent of total income and paid 28.2 per cent of income tax

35% of adults in the UK pay no tax at all

More from the Taxpayers Alliance here:

https://www.taxpayersalliance.com/briefing_share_of_income_tax_paid_by_percentile

<stands back and awaits kicking>

I’m not sure that someone on £100k can ‘afford’ to dump £40k into a pension each year. Not if they are raising a family, paying a mortgage and just generally living a life.

Gary Stevenson explains why we need to tax billionaires and address wealth inequality. It’s not about the top 10% it’s about the top 1%.

My link seems to have failed. I recommend Gary’s Economics channel on YouTube

1 billionaire leaving the country would need 10,000 people to stop taking benefits and start working to compensate for the tax income. If you're dependant on benefits you should be sending these people a Christmas card not hounding them out the county.

I’m not sure why some people view the existence of billionaires as a good thing for society.

Paying a higher percentage of tax at £40k is also easily mitigated. Get a £60k job.

Not the point of the thread but wow she's memorised that speech well !! In all seriousness if our borrowing is 93% of GDP that is a serious issue (think I heard that right ?)

It's really irrelevant if their existence is a good thing or not. They do exist, so it's better for us that they spend some of that money here.

When they leave how would you cover that?

Have you ever met a billionaire?

Because they generally own businesses that employ people, that they generally seek to grow their businesses and thereby employ more people and lastly because they pay a lot of corporation tax and personal tax.

It seems that the left would rather the poor get poorer so long as the rich don't get richer.

You're falling for propaganda.

Because most billionaires have got there buy creating the structures needed for the world to run. Most of the money generated is reinvested into new ventures. Love his or loathe him, if Musk hadn't made money from creating paypal, he wouldn't have been able to create Tesla which has driven electric cars forward quite a bit.

To be fair I would prefer a more evenly distributed income but until those 10,000 people get off their arses and stop claiming from the state - we need that billionaire.

Well in theory of course yes - but if you are lucky enough to live on the 60k then thats great. Most aren't due to childcare etc. It also depends where you live - london is a 3k mortgage for small 3 bed etc. Also - its been proven in recent years that property is a far better investment than pensions as been so volatile.

The evidence I have seen suggests the opposite, returns are far higher from a diversified pension pot than from property.
https://moneyweek.com/personal-finance/pensions/pension-vs-property-best-income-retirement

'To find out which retirement strategy would be most lucrative, wealth manager Netwealth took a £50,000 pension pot and a property investment pot of £50,000. It then compared the average financial returns of both over a 20-year period.
To work these out, it applied the tax bills and additional costs an investor would expect to incur over the time frame (assuming 2024 rates continued for the next two decades). It also assumed typical property values and annual growth rates from 2023 applied to the two different strategies.
What it found was that the pension pot grew to £147,000, while the property investment increased to £83,000 on average – a difference of £64,000. It means an investment in a pension offered a 77% better return than one in property – a jump from the 38% gap recorded by Netwealth in its previous research.
The flexibility and tax relief provided by a pension was cited as a major reason why it performed better than property. The initial £50,000 investment would have immediately gained tax relief of almost £16,700. Assuming the pot grew 5% annually, it would stand at almost £150,000 by the end of the 20-year horizon.
For property, maintenance, tax and fees were all negatives. Assuming a buy-to-let property was bought for just under £170,000 with a 25% deposit (a typical figure, according to Netwealth’s analysis), the cost of stamp duty and purchase fees (including solicitor and surveying costs), followed by mortgage interest, capital gains tax and the general costs of letting a home (such as maintenance and letting agent fees) would all serve to slow the investment down.
Worse still for property investors, if say there was a base of 0% capital growth over the two-decade time period, the value of the investment would tumble from £50,000 to £7,225. In fact, purchase and sales costs combined with letting fees would wipe out the gross rental yield a buy-to-let could achieve if there was no capital growth over the 20 years.
This situation has been made even more desperate by high buy-to-let mortgage rates despite recent interest rate cuts, as well as extra stamp duty charges.

Sigh.
Wanting someone to leave a country because of the level of their wealth is ridiculous.

But the rate of billionnaires is growing and in the uk a lot of it is property and inheritance related, not just good business.

You also need think about monopolies. Its great that the guy created amazon and became a billionnaire, or was it better for society as a whole that we had lots of different shops with and local jobs etc.

I think its outside our government's control anyway, its a worldwide issue so othat that basis id like money spent here, but I dont think its good that the billionnaires are rapidly increasing thier wealth and controlling things and inequality is rising.

As a high earning family I absolutely hate the state of this government.

I'm tired of seeing this government punish us for our success (after years and years of hard work) and instead rewarding those who haven't worked hard.

I have sympathy for the physically disabled or those caring for the disabled. But apart from that if you're able bodied, got 2 arms and 2 legs, your life is down to you. Everyone has had difficulties and issues in the past. Get over it. Stop living of our money FFS.

PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY

It’s always so easy to give away other people’s hard earned money 🤷‍♀️

I agree it isn't in the government's control. It is in people as a collectives control. If you don't want to support billionaires don't. Buy direct from farmers and local business rather than using Amazon/supermarkets etc.

How patronising. I am talking about my actual experience and how my own family behave. That isn’t “propaganda” and I’m not “ falling” for anything.

Exactly. Too much on MN there's the "oh look at me I'm so poor. I'd never earned >£k therefore we should just tax all of it because I couldn't hit the heights of success other people could.

Our household income (me and DH) is c£150k. This is good for us. We don't count my DC's income but they do well as well and live with us

We don't begrudge those earning £500k, or millionaires and billionaires.

I'm thanking a billionaire for the phone I'm using (Google + Android) and for the windows laptop I should be working on.

We know a number of people whose businesses are facing difficulties because their clients are either tightening their belts or leaving the UK. My husband's businesses gets its income entirely from Europe, so it is 100% a fiscal gain to the UK economy - not just recycling money in the system already - yet taxes here are stopping him expanding. It is all very sad.

I'm sorry for your husband