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 suspect he’ll cling on until Labour get trounced in the May elections (assuming they aren’t cancelled).

I’m single parent to a 4 year old. I work nights and weekends regularly, and need to pay childcare if I am at work. I skate around losing nursery hours and have unexpectedly been paid for working in order to keep my service safe (the joke is I was actually expecting to work unpaid for a shift). This has the potential to lose me about £8 000 worth childcare AND I paid for someone else to look after my child. Can you understand why I am not keen?

How are people feeling about GDP per capita falling in the last 6 months? Started falling after the April budget, which hit business hard.

It's quite simple if you increase taxation then you reduce economic growth.

If you have lower economic growth then you have less tax revenues meaning you need to increase taxation again further reducing growth and so on in an economic doom loop.

Indeed in May 2023, Keir Starmer pledged to break a high-tax, low-growth "doom loop"that he argued the UK economy was trapped in. Yet Labour has only exacerbated it.

So what?

They are still left with more money than the majority of the people in this country after they have paid tax ...

But if GDP per person falls, there's less been created... which means less to tax... which means less to redistribute

Everyone loses.

As predicted.

"You cannot tax yourself into prosperity" Winston Churchill

It is incredibly difficult to design a tax that captures the ultra wealthy.

DH has an adopted sister. From eight days old, she was treated as middle class. But she remains of fairly low intelligence.

Yet Churchill supported increasing taxes on the wealthy, to fund extra services to for the poor.

He also introduced a "war levy" tax on the wealthy firms who profited from war, a windfall tax if you like.

What politicians say and do are very often totally different.

Taxes in themselves don't increase prosperity, its what they are spent on that does.... spend it on education, capital investment, R&D, transport, can open the door to private investment.
No business will invest in an area with a low skilled workforce, poor transportation, limited schools and hospitals for its workforce.

I used to be a big believer and leaving people with most of what they earned, at any level of wealth.

But globalisation, governments’ response to the financial crisis and then COVId and, now, AI is concentrating more and more wealth in fewer and fewer hands.

The only solutions to this are either restricting global trade and technology or significantly more and increasing redistribution.

There are other ‘solutions’ but they are things like wars and revolutions.

But we're now in a World wide economy, so the "rich" can move elsewhere for cheaper tax regimes.

We first saw it in the 70s when lots of authors, musicians and entertainers left the UK to avoid the 98% rate of income tax on unearned income and 83% on earned income. Simply because they were "relocatable" and lots of their income was derived from overseas sales/services anyway, and they could still return to the UK on a short term basis within the allowed numbers of days, for TV appearances, book-signings, etc.

Nowadays, pop stars plan their Worldwide tour dates carefully to avoid taxation, there are also plenty who "live" in Switzerland "for artistic reasons". Same with high earning sports personalities, let's not pretend Nigel Mansell lived in the Isle of Man because he likes steam trains!

And it's not just the rich. Ambitious, highly-educated young people too.

When ideology meets reality, reality always wins.

Surely, the amount of redistribution should be a function of how wealth is distributed in the first place and other policies which concentrate wealth (as highlighted in my PP).

I have a thought experiment for those who are against greater wealth distribution. If AI makes 80% of jobs redundant and you end up with a mixture of billionaires (those who manage the AI) and a servant class who cater to their needs on not very much (an average of 30k say (the masseurs, chefs, cleaners etc)) and many many unemployed, how would you structure a tax and benefits system?

The above isn’t outlandish and is just a continuation of the trend of the last 40 years or so. The GINi coefficient in the U.K. has massively increased over that period.

The government should be looking at how many of the 35% of unemployed people they can support to get back into work. I absolutely despise people who refuse to work when they’re perfectly able bodied yet are happy to take handouts. You can bet your bottom dollar that if the rules for benefits were changed and it was mandatory to do some sort of community service (eg 20 hours a week scrubbing graffiti off the walls) all the people who ‘can’t work’ will be desperate for any paying job.

Another massive thing is over participation in university.

We actually borrow money to take a bunch of non academic people useless degree. They should be working and contributing to GDP. It is about 5% of a career wasted.

When I went to uni the participation rate was about 15%. I think that is about right, if maybe a little on the high side.

That was the past, depending on your age it could be the distant past!

Look at other nations - what do you think will happen to the UK economy if we try to go back to a past that no longer exists? We can't have a 1970s education level for the 2030s work environment.

We are in desperate need of better qualified people, there may be an argument the subject balance may be wrong, and apprenticeships could be increased vs. university, but overall the idea of cutting back on education is nonsense.

@verycloakanddaggers ,

it’s a fantasy.

I have taught people at GCSE who shouldn’t be anywhere near A levels and these same people who understand way under 50% of the A level content then go on to supposedly degree level work.

You can learn what you need while earning money and being productive in the economy.

Genuine degree level study is for the small proportion of people who are cognitively able to benefit from it.

The impact of AI is a big worry. I don't know how we safely navigate through it.

But what I'm sure of is that we won't end up with the society you seem to be hoping for: with a small number of tech wizards working and providing for the rest of the UK's 70million and growing, very culturally heterogeneous population to have a good lifestyle whilst not working. Especially as that worklessness and lack of contribution from large parts of the population continues to result in the country degrading - with potholes, anti-social behaviour, long waits in hospitals etc. And people loudly complaining that the very people supporting them aren't 'paying their fair share'. Why in earth would those tech wizards choose that?

Wishing for that is like wishing for endless free energy and proposing we invent a perpetual motion machine.

Human behaviour might not be as consistent as physical laws, but it is just as great a folly to ignore it.

-Human relationships are based on reciprocity. Not always equal, generally the reciprocity is transitive and 'pay-it-forward', and easily allows for time - but not forever. But at their fundamental core, reciprocal
-People will always tend to the option that they judge results in the best overall outcome for themselves and their family (and a circle of relationships which weakens as it widens) from the options they have

Autocratic attempts to force massive redistribution (communism) have always failed. They have always resulted in suffering and lower living standards for everyone. Always. I very much hope the UK doesn't ignore history and sacrifice a generation to prove the same thing again.

If we attempt to go that route, we will instead end up with a very poor country with no one having much at all. And if we do it for long enough - 2 generations should do it - we'll lose all the experience, knowledge and cultural infrastructure which enable the incredibly high expectations of living standards we have. The UK's current wealth - and resulting complacency - is the rope we're on course to hang ourselves with.

Ongoing national wealth is far, far less reliable than human behaviour.

BTW, saying that £30k is not very much is rather out of touch.

Our GDP per capita is £40k. State services cost £10k per capita (excluding the £3k per capita welfare costs, so that we don't count it twice). So if money was exactly divided up - not considering a person's contribution at all - we'd expect each person to earn £30k. Children make up 20% of the population. If you exclude children, about £37k per adult would be complete redistribution of our GDP.

Our current GDP - which is based on people's current hard work - that is.

Then watch it free fall.

As of April 2025, the median gross annual salary for full-time employees in the UK was £39,039, which is £31,628 net.

Compared to £37k per adult if our GDP was completely redistributed that doesn't seem at all bad.