To feel that having nearly half of your salary taken away is just not right?

[WinnieTheWho]

I don't earn enough to pay tax & NI but my DH has a pretty good job & salary for which he works BLOODY hard. I was horrified to work out after last pay day that for EVERY £1 he earned, he only kept 60 pence. This is due to a combination of paying very high income tax and NI, as well losing all of his personal allowance because he might get a bonus at the end of the year! It just seems that if you work hard to get paid well and you are a PAYE taxpayer, the Government & HMRC will just shaft you from all angles. It just makes me wonder why we bother? So... AM I BEING UNREASONABLE?

I had 5 years off (maternity leave/career break) so I have been the other side of the coin but I guess what I mean is that some people have jobs (or are qualified for jobs) that pay a lot, I only work part time but earn more than an average full time wage. I don't think I am lucky as such as it is down to a number of reasons we were fortunate enough to be able to do this.

Yes I trained very hard to do the job as did my DH but some people are not able to earn this sort of money for one reason or another so may only be one wage earner in the household. Also I do believe that people should have the right to be SAHP rather than paying someone else to look after their children but under the current regime this is not always possible.

I am not sure what the answer is at all but I just feel some parts of the system are not quite right but I think whatever the government did it would adversly affect someone so there is no perfect solution.

When/if I earn over the tax threshold I won't begrudge paying extra tax as we are both working and we should be contributing more but if I was a SAHM and DH was working and earning over the limit I may feel a bit different.

Yes it does Outraged eg full-time state funded childcare for all children over 1 if both parents are working; free school meals for all children; paid time off work for either parent if their child is sick

TheUnMember, those are the sort of things that I mean, things that will make a difference to everyone in the country. I have to admit though that my opinion on Swedens public services only comes from a friend who went down with pneumonia when there and felt he received a much better service than he would here.

Obviously we have to support the poor or vulnerable in a civilised country, but if those people feel they don't get good enough support, and everyone else feels they get little or no support, then there are always going to be people that begrudge paying a high tax rate. I can easily understand why.

So outraged - that's an argument for higher taxation, not lower. I'm confused as to what you're saying. What we've got at the moment is what my gran would have called a bugger's muddle - it's not low, but it's not high enough to make any perceptible difference.

Higher taxation across the board would really make a huge difference but no one here wants to pay that.

Oh good grief - HE aren't paying enough tax now?

No one wants to pay it because we have so little trust in our government. They have always spent far to much on wars and weapons and other countries for us to want to give them more of our money.

What I'm saying is basically that I agree that 40% tax is too high when the people that pay that get very little in return, and those that do benefit from it don't benefit as much as they should.

If we had a government that concentrated on giving its own taxpayers the benefit of their own money, then I would agree that HRT at a low threshold is fair.

As others have said, most people have a pretty good lifestyle in the Scandanavian countries and they are taxed very highly. So it's probably a pretty good bet to do that.

Likewise Germany. High tax, most people have a good lifestyle, they have a strong economy.

Also, they don't generally don't whinge on and act like entitled asshats in those countries.

Yellow, do they have a good lifestyle because they are taxed highly, or do they have a good lifestyle because they are not countries that get involved in other peoples wars?

Outraged I think the biggest difference to people's quality of life here is the cost of housing. Our house is massive (3 floors, 6 rooms on each) and our garden is the size of a football pitch, literally. Yet we only paid 55k for it, and that was premium price for the area because we're in the town centre. Same house in the outlying villages would be around 35k. If the British government seriously addressed the cost of housing, they'd be loved forever.

Outraged, do you really think that most of your tax goes on wars? Because you are severely mistaken if you do. The largest percentage of it goes on care for the elderly in this country and my mind boggles that anyone would resent that.

The Germans are doing some serious whinging at the moment - they are rather pissed off at their tax money being thrown into the black hole that is the Greek economy!

Bit of a special case though, isn't it?

How much of our tax money is ploughed into the EU?

Probably quite a lot but I'm not sure you'd enjoy the alternative very much.

Unfortunately, we're kind of stuck with the Empire stuff so we have to support other countries in the commonwealth. We have plundered them after all. I do agree with you about the wars though although as members of the NATO pact we have signed up for that (Sweden isn't a member)

Don't get me wrong - the Euro was the German's bloody silly idea - seems the least they do is help Greece, now it's all going tits up. Just saying that they are less than happy about it

No, I don't think most of it goes on wars. But I think enough of it is directed away from the people of this country in wars and foreign aid and nuclear weapons that there isn't enough left to improve services.

One not often mentioned point about Scandinavian countries is that they are more homogenous and don't kane in nearly as many immigrants, which does push up a lot of relative costs of tax-paid services.

kane=let. iPhone, yknow....

So basically, immigrants, wars, benefit scroungers, the Europeans, boo hiss.

OK, gotcha.

That's a good point too Whatmeworry.

It's not just the high tax that creates the good standard of living in higher tax countries.

Whatmeworry - once again, allow me to pull out my trusty wiki guide that proves that isn't true at all! In fact, 14% of Swedish residents are immigrants, compared with 10% here :)

The facts, not the fiction

Gosh, I'm on FIRE tonight. It's wikipedia vs. the Daily Fail :o

We are part of a trading bloc (the EU) that generally has high tax rates. Within that trading bloc, we're towards the top end in terms of the higher tax rates.

However we live in a global economy. It is questionable how long we can sustain high levels of personal taxation and remain competitive.

I'd much prefer to live in a society built along the scandanavian model. But it's not going to happen anytime soon.

Dowagers that's not quite correct. It's now 15.1% for foreign born + 19.6% born in Sweden to foreign parents.