to wonder where this idea has come from, that no one pays enuogh tax to cover the services they use?

[StealthPolarBear]

Where do these people think the money actually comes from?

& yes Cold, when I say 'net-contributor' I mean the family as a whole, not just the main earner.

I can only conclude Stealth, that some people are being deliberately obtuse or 'thick' as I like to call it.

So, there are, & have to be, tax payers (irrespective of incidental taxes), whose income is such that they contribute to the economy.

In a fairly substantial way.

There is something that people are not saying, and I want to know what it is

Dunno - I think we've done the "large % of population will always take more state money than pay back" haven't we (was about 1/3rd last time I looked).

Problem of course is that a lot of work (eg SAHM, Carer) is not costed into those figures so that person on benefits caring for granny would be earning a lot more than they consume if it was a commercial contract.

What do your instincts tell you that you're not being told OP?.

I have no idea. Something along the lines of huge assumptions being made about MNers or a logical fact that must be true about MNers which means that no-one can be a net contributor. I just keep asking and they keep avoiding.

The one thing that is usually obfuscated by Globalisation enthusiasts is how small a % the emerging Asian states pay in salary benefits (aka the crap living conditions for workers) because they dont want us boycotting those cheap Asian goods.

*salary and benefits

I work with renal patients. Without question those with end stage renal failure become net takers. Absolutely no way for it to be otherwise - because conditions which generate huge needs also generate problems which reduces your contribution right down.

or a logical fact that must be true about MNers which means that no-one can be a net contributor

That's probably based on HMG spending taxes from business as well as citizens' taxand VAT, and in fact spending more than all its tax income. As income is a power law distribution I'd expect a very small % of the wealthiest to still be net contributors.

Righto

I get me bins emptied once a week.

I get no tax credit - in three years I'll get no CB.

My children are (or will be in the case of the youngest) educated independently of the state.

I have private health-care (although both of my children were born using the NHS).

I have no street lights.

I was independently educated.

We pay in excess of £60,000 a year in income tax.

I'm sure there are many on here who pay more than me.

Despite any extraneous tax we may pay I'm, sure we must be contributors.

I am happy with that, it's as it must be, but we do exist.

It's almost impossible to make calculations like this meaningful, because "receiving from the tax pot" is so woolly.

As mentioned above, do we mean the whole family? Who is included in "whole family" when you're 50, your children are 30, your grandchildren are 5 and your parents are 70? And how do you cost carers, SAHP parents, etc, who are contributing to the economy but not in paid employment?

But also the amount of indirect "receiving from the tax pot" is immense. If I start up a business and have 20 employees, I may think of myself as a "wealth creator". But in fact my 20 employees are the ones creating my wealth, and I am benefitting from their state education even if I was privately educated. Further, if my business pays a lawyer (say), that lawyer too is piggy-backing off my 20 employees' state education. No education for them = no business = no fees for lawyer.

It's really hard to see all this when you're embedded in the UK - but if you've ever considered business in a developing country it becomes blindingly clear when the skills you wish to employ are simply not available. It's all very well offering to pay for medical treatment, but if the country hasn't trained enough nurses and doctors you're fucked. You want safety in your home, but if there's no competent, well-resourced police you'll be paying a lot more for private security whose scope is anyway very limited.

I think high earners who agitate for lower taxes genuinely think they'll have more money in their pockets and everything else will stay exactly the same. It won't.

There is a balance needed whereby higher rate tax rates are high enough to get lots of income in for the government but not too high that individuals think the government is extracting the urine.

Once they think that they use tax avoidance measures or leave the country. So the net gain to the country is reduced.

The most unpalatable truth I can see here is that if you have a system where the top 1% (there are about 20m working people, so thats about 200,000 people) are paying 25% of the tax take and they get pissed off and leave, then you have a very big problem. I suspect thats why the whole "drop the 50% tax rate" is going up the flag.

so what are the stats comparing tax from 'people' and tax from corporations? always thought it was the company tax that kept us afloat, despite vodaphone boots etc defecting abroad - was that just a myth?

I work in the City and a higher rate taxpayer (both here and in the USA, the joys of an American passport - double taxation!). Although I am a fabled "non-dom", because I receive a salary I pay more than 50% of my income in tax as well as paying tax when I transfer shares, etc. I have the money to pay for that and don't resent paying into the system when I don't take advantage of almost any of the services - although I have private health insurance, just for the NHS alone I am happy to pay the amount I pay, particularly when I compare it to the frankly cruel situation that is in place in the USA regarding healthcare. I have made my home here and have an interest and a duty to make sure that other people are taken care of here on my doorstep, through a redistributive progressive tax system. (That sounds smug and halo-polishing I know, but don't know how else to put it.)

Just a comment on the richest 1% not finding it too disruptive to leave the country from a tax POV - that may be true for some but not for most higher rate taxpayers from a practical POV. I've lived and worked on three continents now and London has some major advantages from a business perspective - a strong and predictable legal system, a financial system that while messed up is nowhere near as messed up as elsewhere, and - and this is going to sound silly, but it's really true - the time zone. We coordinate all deals from our London office because we can deal with Asia Pacific in the morning, the US in the afternoon and Europe and the Middle East all day, so where do people want to live and work - London, so they don't have to take conference calls at midnight or 5am. And for people who are living here with their families, London offers a great lifestyle and excellent schools for those who have the means to pay for it. I grew up in Asia and I and many of my friends were sent to the UK to be educated - my family moved here for my brother and me to go to secondary school in London despite having no connection whatsoever to this country.

Whenever I hear people on the radio saying that all the richest people are going to leave London for somewhere else, I think to myself - where?? Continental European financial centres are in a similar time zone, but more expensive for the richest people as far as tax is concerned and with other disadvantages (just one case in point - my French colleagues have to fly to London first to connect to most places in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa). New York might be an option but the tax burden can be higher depending on where you live, is too far behind time-zone wise to deal easily with Asia and the US is not as international in its business and investment outlook (and their legal system is not the preferred medium with which to do business in places like the Middle East or Asia). AsiaPac has the converse problem - in fact the most recently elected chairman of HSBC tried to move his headquarters either to HK or Shanghai (can't remember which) and shortly afterwards returned to London because he couldn't run a global business as effectively from there.

Anyway, apologies OP, I have gone off the topic of this thread - there may be some very rich people who are sensitive to the tax rate and mobile enough to leave - but from my financial/legal/City perspective, there are a lot of higher rate taxpayers that no matter how much you tax them aren't going anywhere, no matter how international their outlook.

There was a thread about the 50% tax rate the other day mercibucket where someone posted a statistic about the value of corporation tax revenues when compared with personal tax and the corporation tax revenues were very small by comparison. I don't know where the information was from though.

I spose it depends how you reckon it. As a carer, I claim Carer's Allowance, which is £2,888 a year and I don't pay that in tax. But OTOH if I walked out, to replace me with paid carers would cost upwards of £200,000 pa either in the community or institutionally, and I'm not even married to DP and have no duty of care (he's not my child etc).

A single no-children high earner with private health insurance uses few services directly and on the face of it pays more in tax and council tax than s/he costs the public purse. But of course we all benefit from other people being healthy and non-infectious and - more or less - educated and literate, so things are not what they seem on the face of it.

We pay for services over a life time. In my early twenties I was young single with an excellent job. I was paying quite a bit of tax for services I did not use.

However later on in my life I needed those services. There are points in my life where I am a net contributer and points in my life where I am a net taker.

I am certainly a net contributor.

Between us, me and my husband pay around £70,000 in income tax. Plus VAT, airport taxes, council tax, fuel tax and all the rest. Until this year, I visited the dr about once a year on average. My husband wasn't even registered with a GP. We don't have kids (yet) and take very little from the pot.

We get our bins collected.
We use public roads which are lit and maintained.
We have that one visit a year to the GP I mentioned.

As we are probably paying a total of around £90k (maybe more) a year in all taxes, that seems like really poor value (particularly as the bin men always leave our bin about 1/4 of a mile away so we have to do part of their job for them - grrr).

I am lucky to have a well-paid job, but in reality I worked extremely hard to obtain and keep that job, making many sacrifices along the way (I have cancelled holidays and countless social events because of work).

As an aside, I mentioned above that I had seen a dr about once a year until this year. That is because we have just started having fertility investigations (so I have had two GP visits and one gynae appointment this year, plus some tests, on the NHS this year). My husband has finally registered with a GP and gone along once. So we are taking a little more out of the pot than before. But it will be difficult to get the treatment we need at all and certainly in a timely way on the NHS. We are fortunate because we can pay. Many cannot. But it saddens me to see the negative attitudes to fertility treatment on the NHS. As someone mentioned above, the system works by paying in according to means and taking out according to need. Apart from when the need relates to your lady bits not working properly, apparently. If it was any other bit of me that was broken, the NHS would do its best to fix it. Anyway, this last paragraph is a bit off topic but it does make me rather resentful that I contribute so much and get so little back when I need it.

completely agree eurochick - no one complains about people having cataract operations, but when the topis is IVF someone always mentions that the NHS should only be for saving lives .
Good luck, hope everything goes well for you.

Eh?

The argument I prefer is that my exes pay more than enough in tax to cover the amount of benefit I'd recieve out of work caring for their children, and neither of them want nuclear weapons or to fund racist nutjobs (most people in the army), so actually no other taxpayer would be paying for me if on benefits, and they're happy to do so. Hence the daily mail can fuck themselves. I also think it's absolutely fair that a minority of people should pay most of the tax, seeing as that minority of people own most of the stuff and usually haven't worked any harder than anyone else, however much they whine about it.

"I am lucky to have a well-paid job, but in reality I worked extremely hard to obtain and keep that job, making many sacrifices along the way (I have cancelled holidays and countless social events because of work)."

Ohnoes, not cancelled holidays and social events. My heart bleeds for you. Shame about the cleaners/healthcare assistants who are up at 5am every day mopping out loos and can't afford to book holidays in the first place, they're obviously just not working very hard, are they?

But it's not just income tax we contribute though is it? Think of all the indirect taxes- VAT, tax on petrol, council tax we pay.

I know mumsnet hates it, but I must LOL at cancelled holidays.

I have never been on holiday as an adult. Sometimes rich people are just SO LOLARIOUS.

LOLLERSKATES.