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?

Yes it is, it is all The Great Sexist Rock'n'Roll Swindle.

Linerunner surely you could have given 50% residency to your ex. and you could have moved to a more manageable property?

Me and Dp pay loads of tax and some years ice in the 50% bracket. However as children we both had a free education and my mum was on benefits for some years. When I was very ill health care was there. When Dp lost his job in his 20s he received benefits for a short while. When we had dd the nhs were brilliant

Had it not been for the people who paid tax then we may not be able to pay it now. Thankfully this society looks after its weakest members. Did you and your dh never benefit from the state op ?

NovackNGood - he buggered off.

I don't think you are being unreasonable but if you don't like it leave. I was fed up with the UK and left for the US. It has been a bumpy road but we have a much higher standard of living. Including health insurance, property taxes and income taxes we spend 20% of our income on these provisions. We have far better healthcare than the NHS offers, the education system available to us is far better than the state provision and we are able to save the full pension amounts for our 401K plans and IRA accounts (DH and I save almost $50K each year in our self funded pensions due to company matches). We are also able to afford children (we can afford up to 5 children based on our financial projections and house size but will have less).

You can't moan about the high taxes for the sake of it. Do look at leaving if you don't like it. If not, then shut up and pay up. The Scandinavian countries are high tax but the money is spent wisely. Canada is a great country to live in. The US is great too if you have a strong stomach. Not sure about the rest of Europe. FWIW DH paid less tax in Denmark (47%) than he would have paid in the UK (62% including NI) hence we were happy not to be transferred to the UK.

I've lived in the US and whilst it's a great place to be if you have money, it's shit if you don't or fall upon hard times. If you are out of work and have no health cover then it's a REALLY shit place to be.

I think the real issue is that in the UK we seem to waste our tax revenues. List one government IT project which comes in on time and under budget? None. Is our military procurement streamlined and efficient? No. We can't even get boots to soldiers fighting a war in time. They had to buy their own!

And we have such a large bloated public sector which is in percentage terms larger than even China's.

And not to mention our overly complex benefits system which seems to suit nobody except those milking the system. The needy are not adequately supported, it disincentives work and is unaffordable.

If we could make our tax expenditure clearer and more efficient I think less people would have an issue with paying high rates of tax. That said, if expenditure was more efficient we'd probably find we don't need as much tax to start with.

I begrudge the fact that next year we lose our child benefit due to the fact my husband is earning over the threshold. I work part time as a teacher. Next year we will lose £134.00 a month cb as husband earns more than £42,000. I earn £16,000. Yet a family earning £40,000 each with combined earnings of £80,000 will be able to claim cb. This makes me very angry. We work very hard and have never claimed any kind of benefits at all.

Bujt the family woth the two full time earners will have increased childcare costs, trevel costs childcare in the school hols etc. As with anything , Your Mieage May Vary.

cheeseandbiscuits you may not lose it. Think they have changed threshold to 50K. (may be wrong)
Sadly we will lose child benefit though £188. Probably would have been better off if dh stayed in his local job on lower pay. Instead now losing child benefit and spending a fortune on fuel. O yes and paying lots of fuel duty too.
Still at least we are supporting those more vulnerable members of society.

niceguy - do you not think there's a connection between the 'large bloated public sector' and the fact that this is a much better country to live in than the US if you fall on hard times? I think your Chinese reference is drawn from a comment that's bandied about to do with the NHS being the second largest employer after the Chinese Army. Don't know how true that is - especially not now thousands of posts have been cut, including several thousand nurses.

In fact employing enough staff to care for patients actually saves money - by treating people when they get ill, rather than leaving them to linger and get worse, you are more likely to restore their health and reduce complications, avoidable deaths, avoidable disability, avoidable suffering. Oh, and get people back to work and paying taxes where possible.

Swift appropriate available treatment and social care also reduces the number of relatives who have to leave work to care for people who have become disabled. It reduces the number of carers who crack under the strain and become long term sick or disabled themselves. It helps those carers who were long-term sick or disabled to start with, avoiding them becoming unable to care.

Good healthcare is not only a good thing in moral terms, it is a good thing in economic terms too. So leave it out of any references to the public sector being 'bloated'. Unless you are brave enough to wonder down to your local hospital and go up to the one or two qualified nurses on duty coping with a ward full of vulnerable elderly people who all need taking to the loo and help with feeding, let alone their healthcare needs meeting, and ask them whether they are feeling part of a 'bloated' sector with far too many people.

edam

niceguy - do you not think there's a connection between the 'large bloated public sector' and the fact that this is a much better country to live in than the US if you fall on hard times? I think your Chinese reference is drawn from a comment that's bandied about to do with the NHS being the second largest employer after the Chinese Army. Don't know how true that is - especially not now thousands of posts have been cut, including several thousand nurses.

Helpfully, the BBC did some research on this, and in their smug way claimed to SMASH the claim that the NHS was the 2nd largest employer in the world. ]Here's the article.

It's the fifth largest. It has 1.7 million employees, so cutting 'thousands' makes no difference. The NHS has an employee turnover of about 120,000 people a year, so those 'cuts' aren't even at the levels of natural wastage.

Looking at the BBC article, which helpfullly lists the ten largest employers in the world, what should become glaringly obvious even to the most starry-eyed admirer of Stalinist healthcare systems is that the NHS is the only healthcare provider in the entire list. Four of the top 10 are in China, whose population is 20 times larger than the UK. Two are in India, whose population is merely 12 times larger than the UK. Three are in America, and two of those three are huge multinationals with employees in every country in the world.

Nobody else's healthcare system comes close. Not France's, not Germany's, and not America's.

^In fact employing enough staff to care for patients actually saves money - by treating people when they get ill, rather than leaving them to linger and get worse, you are more likely to restore their health and reduce complications, avoidable deaths, avoidable disability, avoidable suffering. Oh, and get people back to work and paying taxes where possible.

Swift appropriate available treatment and social care also reduces the number of relatives who have to leave work to care for people who have become disabled. It reduces the number of carers who crack under the strain and become long term sick or disabled themselves. It helps those carers who were long-term sick or disabled to start with, avoiding them becoming unable to care.

Good healthcare is not only a good thing in moral terms, it is a good thing in economic terms too. So leave it out of any references to the public sector being 'bloated'. Unless you are brave enough to wonder down to your local hospital and go up to the one or two qualified nurses on duty coping with a ward full of vulnerable elderly people who all need taking to the loo and help with feeding, let alone their healthcare needs meeting, and ask them whether they are feeling part of a 'bloated' sector with far too many people.^

Unprovable claims of 'saving money' and emotional blackmail, all in two paragraphs. Well done!

Buggering heck. I really must learn to preview. Here's the article.

I would also like to say that I ended up being laid off yesterday and just got off the phone with the department of labor (they open at 8am). I am entitled to $574 a week through unemployment. That is almost $30K a year. While it is a fraction of what my job paid it is not means tested. I need to claim weekly (by phone or internet) and support is there until the end of the year or 99 weeks if the act extending unemployment from 26 weeks is extended beyond 2012.

I don't plan to be unemployed for long. A client who was impressed with my work has already come back to me with two contacts who are looking to hire. My sister was laid off in the UK a few years ago and got zero help from the government.

Personally I think the issue with the NHS is that they need to stop comparing themselves to third world healthcare systems. When I go to to the doctor all of my notes are kept electronically. The doctor doesn't write notes but speaks into a microphone. When I had DD my notes were readily available to my obn, my GP, the paediatrician and the hospital. In addition, when I was in the hospital with DD there were lots of nurses and healthcare assistants. The obn and paediatrian popped in once a day for about 5 mins each. They had a system in place where all babies were examined together by the doctor in the nursery once a day. The nurses were fab but didn't feed me but monitored my health, helped me with breastfeeding and taught DH and I how to care for DD. It was the healthcare assistants who did the feeding, helping me to care for myself etc. I didn't see a manager once.... When my grandmother was in hospital in the UK I saw more managers than nurses.

I don't think Stalin's famed for running particularly good health services, tbh. People tend to concentrate more on the slaughter. HTH.

Stalinist health care is where you take the intelectual pig doctor and make him work in the fields no?

flatpack, you've got your figures wrong. Think you've confused 7 and 2. HTH.

edam

flatpack, you've got your figures wrong. Think you've confused 7 and 2. HTH. thanks for explaining to me how wrong I was about the NHS.

FTFY.

You're welcome.

It's a bit disingenuous to say that the NHS is the only healthcare provider in the list. In the US, there are lots of companies providing healthcare, so I'm not surprised that the NHS as a single employer is bigger.
When I was in the US there were two receptionists at my doctor's surgery which had a single doctor - one to book you in and one to bill you! I'm sure there are far more people employed in TOTAL in the US in healthcare.

Crystal In Chester and London the NHS doctor groups that I attended had more admin than doctors. Most of the doctors and dentists that I have audited normally use someone on a part time basis for billing or they outsource it. I have also audited a company that provides medical billing for radiology departments (anything involving xray through to ultrasound and nuclear medicine) in 11 hospitals in New Jersey. For all 11 hospitals the billing department was 9 people including the manager. They were able to provide 24 hours coverage with doctors in Israel reading x-rays to reduce the error rate caused by the doctors being tired (thought that was a genius idea).

I would hope that there are far more people employed in total in healthcare in the US since the population is about 250 million people compared to 60 million in the UK.

Again, I don't think the majority of waste is generated in the NHS. I think local councils and the government have a lot of managers that are not needed. Under Tony Blair there was a large increase in the number of public sector employees. I am sure that half of these jobs are not necessary. I was also surprised to find that applications for British passports are available in umpteen languages. I find that very wasteful. If you are an adult British person you should be able to read, write and speak English. I think the same should apply to benefits for residents. Basically the only forms that should be available in other languages should be for asylum seekers.

Oh My..............some people leave such sheltered lives. Must be blissful to be so ignorant OP.

Agree with you Supermum, wrt forms being available in umpteen languages.

I'm not sure why we are spending money on translation services for immigrants. If you choose to move here, then you ought to learn the language. If you move here, unable to speak English, then it ought to be your own responsibility to find a translator (and pay for it).

When I lived abroad and was ill, I took my dh to the doctor's appointment, because I couldn't speak the language. I didn't expect the health service in that country to provide me with English leaflets and a translator. We do not have the money for this kind of thing any more.

I also wouldn't provide benefits to immigrants who have recently moved here. I think you should have to have private healthcare insurance and unemployment insurance until you have worked and contributed for 5 years.

I am torn about the different languages leaflets. I disagree on principle as I do think anyone moving country must make the effort to integrate and language is fundamental to that.
However I suspect that it actually doesn't cost that much when compared for e.g to the costs of certain groups of immigrants who have higher birth rates than average and a culture against women working,or who specifically come to uk to have a baby.

I see the advantages of having those leaflets as really benefitting women immigrants from a very misogynistic culture who have to rely on their husband to translate with a doctor etc. These women could suffer as a result (such as missing out on medicine like the cervical cancer jab, probably there is a better example).

For me this always comes back to education. Not only gives people more opportunities but opens minds and allows women more choice about number of children, which aspects of their new culture suits them better than the previous culture etc etc.

I stand by my opinion that education should be a greater proportion of the tax bill than welfare.

wasn't it Adele who was caught moaning and whining about the fact that she had had to hand shed loads of tax over following her many millions earned off the backs of her two albums?

OP - enough already. We all work hard for our fucking cash ok? if you don't like it there's always the caymen islands...

Queen I agree with you on education. I disagree with you on the cost of forms in a foregin languages. They cost a lot of money to create and administer. First you need to hire people with that particular language to read the form and they need to be bi-lingual as you need to be able to train them in English. Then, how do you ensure that the language translation is being done properly? You will need managers who speak the other language. Multiply this by the number of languages they cover which is 15 (Welsh is not included as this is a language from within the UK).

There is a need for foreign languages in some areas such as asylum seekers but I think the emphasis should be on only allowing those who speak fluent English or who are able to afford a translation service into the country. Those seeking asylum should be put into language classes the day they arrive and stay in education until they have reached a passing grade at GCSE English language. This education would eliminate the need for forms in foregin languages.

Copletely agree with the languages. The fact tha translation facilities are theree keeps women form wider society, It should be a basic requirements of every citizen to use English for transactions with officialdom, or find translators themselves at their own expense.