Who do you think deserves to be paid £70K +?

[drdreamboat]

Just out of interest, I was wondering who MN thought "deserves" this sort of income?

Judging by the threads on here, most people feel that GPs, midwives, teachers and health visitors don't deserve it.

So does anyone? Or should we all live in an equal society?

I guess there is a significant difference between those working in the private and public sector.

Private sector workers command a salary that reflects the type of revenue they bring in. It's a lot harder to use that example in public sector workers but you could create a model that rewards financial initiative.

It's also interesting that people feel surgeons to be more deserving than other groups of doctors.

I, myself, specialised in Medicine and tranferred to a career in general practice which is much vilified in the national press. I find it all a bit odd that the public think a surgeon is more deserving than a medic, paediatrician or GP. They all do different but equally important jobs.

I agree in part, drdreamboat - but it is also about skillset. A surgeon is a more skilled doctor. The risk is higher, their responsibility is also higher. Stress levels, all types of factors....

It depends what your definition of skill is. If it is manual dexterity then surgeons, like carpenters, are more skilled. If it is cerebral skill and problem solving then a physician is more skilled.

As for risk, his is probably greatest amongst GPs who have to pay 2nd highest medical indemnity after obstetricians.

Me!

In the private sector - anyone who can persuade the company bosses/owners/shareholders that they bring £70k's worth of value to the company.

"Unfortunately in private sectors the employee is paid because they generally bring money to the corporartion, where a public worker will always be taking money away from the system (though of course are of tremendous value)."

If only it was that simple

Not sure all those ponzi scheme arsewipes in financial services who did their bit to almost destroy the global financial system with a mixture of greed, incompetence and short termism deserve the insane wages they choose to pay themselves.

Equally they worked in an environment and infrastructure where it was possible to earn such riches because of the hard work of thousands of public sector workers.

Never worked in the public sector, I'm sure there's massive waste there but I have also seen countless unproductive private sector employees paying themselves insane wages whilst providing little (or negative) value.

"In the private sector - anyone who can persuade the company bosses/owners/shareholders that they bring £70k's worth of value to the company."

So Fred Goodwin deserves the many. many millions he earnt whilst driving a venerable financial institution to the ground requiring billions of taxpayers money to stop it going out of business?

If you have to pay a lot to learn, it might follow that the job you take afterwards should help repay some of that money

For example, it costs somewhere in the region of £80k to get a commercial pilots license for business jets/airlines (airlines have stopped sponsoring students)

So then you would expect that a job as a pilot would pay enough to make a dent in this debt over the course of your career

But if you get into the issue of whether or not a Ryanair pilot 'deserves' a lot of money (it may not be front line work like that of a nurse) it gets a bit messy

But given the amount of work and cost involved in qualifying, you'd want a substantial salary or you wouldn't bother...

I might have put it clumsily, but does that make sense?

The vast majority of people who earn that kind of salary have had to study and/or graft bloody hard to get to that level, never mind the hours, stress and responsibilty they need carry to keep it. It doesn't matter if they are a surgeon or a electrian doing huge amounts of overtime. Effort deserves to be rewarded. Anyways, the salary isn't quite as impressive if you think that 40% goes away through tax.

People in positions of great responsibility. So whilst I might not agree with his policies, I still think the Prime Minister deserves to be paid more than 70k.

People who invent and manufacture products which improve lives. (and which we can export, so that we can afford doctors, nurses, teachers etc)

People in parasitical occupations (eg many in the finance sector) shouldn't be vastly well renumerated. If they are awarded bonuses it should only be for long term added value.

I'd pay a doctor 70K, but some are currently on vastly inflated packages - I'd much rather see most doctors going up to say 100K if that left more for nurses. Similarly with academics - there are far more professors than there used to be (not to mention Vice Chancellors), some get a very generous basic pay but then they can get shedloads more for consultancy etc. (which is fine if this activity is invention/commercialisation).

Thanks for partaking. Some very interesting points.

I guess public sector pay has to be pitched at a certainlevel to compete with the private sector. If experienced GPs and consultants were paid less than 60K in the NHS, you would get a fair number leaving to work privately or going abroad ( although a lot of that is happening already)

May I be so indulgent as to share my story with you all?

I left 6 years of medical school in 1990 being 9K in debt ( I am from a working classed family, worked every holiday possible and had a tight budget) It took me the good part of 6 years to pay it back on a basic starting salary of 13K. ( in those days any overtime was paid HALF your normal hrly rate!) I worked 100 hours a week for at least 6-7 years.

I could not get on the property ladder ( due to debt) until property prices were already sky rocketing in London so paid through the nose for my first flat.

I now work as a GP partner and earn approx 75K per year. That equates to a take home of about £3K a month. I work approx 50 hrs a week + and attend many meetings in the eveneing and my holidays. My mortgage is approx £1500 a mth as I live in a good area of expensive housing so my kids can get a decent state education.

Why am I revealing all this? Because I am really disturbed by the recent sea change of opinion towards drs and GPs especially regarding their "worth" fuelled by the Daily Mail. When I was a junior doctor, I felt a valued member of society. Now, I feel I want to hide my profession to strangers for fear of being "ripped off" by tradesman etc who think I have an over inflated salary for doing little work.

Don't you think its just symptomatic of the Dm seizing what it thinks is its moment to get the NHS scrapped though?

Speaking as a nurse who has had to put up with that scumbag rag denigrating nurses for well over a decade as uncaring and incompetent thickos, I would suggest ignoring it. to do otherwise adversely affects one's blood pressure.

I take great delight in taking every opportunity to demonstrate to daily mail type believers that I am not thick or incompetent, it's quite rewarding to see the shock on their faces.

Anyway I would agree GP's should earn the amount they are for the responsibilty they take on. And me obviously.

Anyone feeble minded enough to allow their view on someone's 'worth', (monetary or otherwise) to be influenced by the Daily Mail is a bit beyond helping drdreamboat

I hear you tho, it's always the outlier rule proving exceptions that get leapt on by tabloid crap like the Mail.

That said I don't know enough about this topic to make an informed comment, I would be surprised if there wasn't a fair few GP's taking the piss.

I have a friend who is a part time GP, picks her kids up every day from private school, goes riding on her horse before school each morning (so hardly rushed off her feet is the point i'm making), nice car, nice house, clothes etc.
I suspect her lifestyle and choices are purely down to geographical location.
She is still worth whatever they pay her of course she is but you could have decided to live somewhere else and done equally as well.

"The main tax avoidance mechanism involves a limited company and favours large companies, and the Government seems disinterested in tackling this."

With apologies for going off topic, but the statement above is factually incorrect.

The tax gap in the UK (that is, the difference between the amount of tax that should be collected and the amount that actually is collected) is around £40bn. That compares to total taxes collected of around £400bn - so about 10%.

Of the amount missing, somewhere between £5bn and £10bn is down to avoidance across all businesses and individuals. I certainly agree that the majority of the avoidance is due to high net worth individuals and companies (although not necessarily large companies - in my experience medium sized owner managed companies are far more likely to want to push the boundries).

Another £10bn or so is due to inaccuracies, where the error is accidental. Some of it is timing differences (so, for example, where a trader records VAT in Q1 of Y2 when it should have been paid in Q4 of Y1) that will unwind automatically. A lot more is where people simply fail to understand how the rules should be applied, particularly around one-off transactions.

Around £20bn is down to deliberate fraud or criminal activity. Evern HM Revenue & Customs acknowledge that this is almost exclusively the preserve of sole traders. It's the builder working cash in hand, the contractor falsifying receipts, the trader who fails to declare income, the moonlighters and payroll ghosts.

The problem for HMRC is that it's incredibly hard to catch the millions of people who commit this kind of low-level low-value fraud. It's even quite hard to spot unless we're willing to pay for thousands more investigators who can spend literally weeks watching soletraders at work.

By all means crack down on avoidance. In my view HMRC is actually doing a pretty good job of it. Tax schemes are being challenged more and more often, and are closed down far more quickly, and are taken to the courts for arbitration on a regular basis.

But we should also focus on the largest source of missing revenue - fraud.

We earn way less than 70k, but my answer would be

1. Surgeons - in particular ones who work with children
2. Nurses - particularly oncology nurses
3. Teachers - deserve a lot more than they get, especially ones working in deprived areas, but possibly not 70k.
4. People who have worked hard throughout their life and educated themselves in order to get a job that pays 70K
5. Firefighters
6. Military

The above is in no particular order btw.

People who do not deserve to earn 70k a year are:

1. Those who expect to be just handed it on a plate without having to work for it.

I would say that in an ideal world lots of people deserve it but few get it... We live in a capitalist society, so pay versus job done isn't fair.

I would not be happy with military getting paid that amount as a lot of them leave school with no qualifications and the military offers them a way of being employed when no-one else would. So why pay them a lot when someone else has spent a lot of time and money studying for a job which pays less (nurses/ teachers for eg)

According to this, the average salary for a GP is around 63K. Median 60.

(I'm not sure if this is all on the basis of full time - a lot of GPs I know work part time)

I've not seen the DM but presumably its report is a distortion based on the minority who've managed to get much larger amounts - in some cases excessively large.

People dont get paid depending upon their skills, they get paid depending upon how difficult they are to replace.
If there are loads of people who could do the job, it wont pay very well no matter how valuable to society.

[round of applause emoticon] for CinnabarRed

This is why the Great British Public should not be in charge of decisions like this. So a surgeon (who can command £100k per year in private work) is worth their NHS salary, but an old age psychiatrist who works with the less glamorous dementing elderly patient, doesn't? What about the histopathologist who reports on the cancer slides? They're worth more than a chemical pathologist who advises on a little old lady falling over and breaking her hip because her sodium is too low?What about the radiologist who does the CT scan? Or the GP who picked up the fact the patient had cancer in the first place amongst the 100 people who consulted him that week with enlarged lymph nodes (the fact that he absorbed the risk of those 99 other patients probably not having cancer means that the NHS is bankrupt within a fortnight).

OldMacEIEIO has it right, I think.

As evidence, look at the current situation where wages are flat but inflation is soaring. That's exactly what you'd expect when there aren?t enough jobs to go round, so employees are in a weak position.

(But, as Keynes demonstrated, this is exactly where the market fails to work ? the unemployed don?t get priced back into work when wages fall in real terms. All that happens is workers spend less, so fewer goods and services are required, so fewer workers are needed to produce them, even at the lower real wage rates. So we have both price rises and unemployment.)

And if you need further evidence, think about wages in the most popular parts of the private sector. Actors, for example, generally get paid a pittance because there are so many of them chasing so few roles.

drdreamboat

Off topic slightly but if you say you earn 75k pa and are taking home about 3k pm someone is ripping you off.

Unless you are a partner in the surgery and have costs taken off etc in which case you earn < 75k

Depends what message you are really trying to put across of course.

Do you work FT DrDream? I find 75k a v low figure for a GP.

I am confused by you OP where you make it sound as though midwives, HVs and teachers earm over 70K along with GPs who patently do as you've listed your salary!

About half of all GPs are salaried, and will be earning 50-75k a year pro rata.

The rest are partners, and running the business, so hours will be far longer, reflecting the additional responsibilities of being small business owners. Average pay for English GPs (Welsh and Scottish much less) is £115k full time, which will be about 70h a week. Out of this you pay about £5k for insurance, plus your pension contributions (nothing is paid for you). The hours are such that it is often cheaper to take on an extra partner rather than pay for a salaried GP (+ employers NI contributions) because of the 'added value' you get from a partner.

Of course, some people say that is far too much; if you want some of it, you would need to spend 5-6 years at medical school, another 5 postgraduate, and then 3-5 years as a salaried before you found a partnership, by which the time the NHS will probably have gone bust anyway.