How should covid be paid for?

[KenDodd]

I think there should be a small wealth tax (up to 1%) and before anyone starts saying I'm just jealous or whatever, I would be in for thousands of pounds that I don't have and would have to owe. I feel really strongly that we can't just load yet more debt onto the young, they have it much worse than my generation did already (I'm 51).

Yabu - No to wealth tax
Yanbu - Yes to wealth tax

If you vote No, please suggest an alternative that you think would be fairer.

@Pumpertrumper With the greatest respect, your household income isn’t what I (personally) was meaning by “high income”. I was meaning £200kpa plus. I can’t speak for others of course.

@Pumpertrumper I think you can stop panicking, for you to be taxed so that you have the same to live on as someone on NMW then you’d be taxed around 75k/83%. That’s never going to happen, least of all because we actually do need your spending contributing to the economy (as with everyone else’s).

@TheLastStarfighter I agree, I wouldn’t say 90k combined was a “high salary”. I think average is about £35k, which would make their combined £70k on average. The fact that her DH is a contractor not getting employment benefits may even knock them to below average if you looked at entire remuneration package.

@TheLastStarfighter

That’s very much what I would consider ‘high income’ £150k+ outside London and £200k+ in!

99% of threads like this on MN though seem to class anyone who can afford to buy a lunchtime twix at Tesco metro as ‘CF’s who should be paying more tax’.

No one seems to stop and account for things like student loan repayment (9% after tax deduction from any wage over £21k) and living expenses. It’s just horrible...like ‘why do you think you deserve a house when others live in council flats?’ .... Maybe because I funded myself through uni to do a specific skill others aren’t qualified to do/don’t want to do and I exchange that unique skill for a nice place to live? I’m not a charity. I’m not going to work 60 hours a week in a physically and mentally taxing roll to take home just marginally more than someone working PT in ASDA.
I’d much rather work PT myself and enjoy less responsibility/stress

Sorry not rtft but I'd cancel HS2. That would save fortunes and could be used to support the Covid debt.

Just for insight our take home after tax/NI/professional fees and student loans is £4500

So we lose £36k before we ever see it 🤷‍♀️

I think we should send China an invoice

@Pumpertrumper I very much get where your coming from. Ideally there would be a massive shift of tax burden, taxing the high earners (I’m in that bracket myself and it’s not a stealth brag, but I am happy to take that hit), use that to benefit the lower earners and leave those in the middle pretty much alone ideally.

But what tends to happen is continually hitting the middle, leaving the high earners pretty much unaffected, and making very little to the lower earners because overall there wasn’t that much gained to redistribute.

recent posters, ie the last dozen or so, it's interesting to define a high income. Here in Cornwall, we are among the highest earners we know locally. But income varies with the work. As a household, perhaps £80K annually is average My builder and plumber earn about the same. But most of the non-professional people I know are not going to earn much above NMW. If you have children, encourage them into a trade.

My plumber said that he won't take projects that are going to take his earnings into VAT territory because he doesn't want to do the paperwork, so he tells you what to buy, comes and does the job, and only sends an invoice for his hours. To stay under the £87K threshold for VAT registration. Which suggests to me that he's nearing the VAT threshold on fee time.

Don’t have an alternative but I still voted no. I’ve worked full time for the NHS throughout this and don’t see why I should have to help pay back loans that have been handed out. It’s not fair.

Yes, we need more people to know what tax is taken off. Eg my son mentioned a high pay and I had to remind him for that person 50% just about came off in tax and NI so that person albeit on a lot was taking home about half of the sum and then had to pay eg £20k per toddler at full time nursery so £40k in their case ( expensive London nursery with care for the very long hours of city jobs), rent can be £3000 a month etc etc. No one will cry for high earners of course.

I have just been scanning my child benefit file from 1984 which has been quite a trip down memory lane as each child of the 5 was born and then we come to 2013 when as a single mother of 5 working full time the state decided to strip me and other "high" earners of all child benefit so I claimed it from then to 2017 and paid it all back once a year with my other huge tax.

We seem to have moved from a we all contribute and all take out system to some of us pay a huge amount of tax and get nothing much back rather than we are all in this together with mortgage interest tax relief, free university and all kinds of hings the middle class used to get not just the very poor.

Yes @Xenia I was exactly the same albeit with fewer children. I was very happy to pay back my child benefit because others need it far, far more than I do.

And yes, thankfully we have moved away from everyone taking the same out of the pot, towards those who don’t need it not taking it.

Xenia, some of us have always paid a lot of tax and got nothing back. I was a higher rate tax payer for years with no dependent children and making no demands on the NHS. It’s called collective responsibility. The state isn’t some kind of piggy bank, those of us with the privilege of earning the most have the responsibility of contributing the most. Of course you shouldn’t have got child benefit to subsidise school fees for five children.

It should be paid for in lives.

Oh, it is already.

@XingMing good idea. As a starting point, I find it inconceivable that people earning what I do and above shouldn’t shoulder a lot of the burden. I earn between £200k-£250k this year, which will rise to over £300k in the spring.

I think any household earning less than £40k shouldn’t see any hit at all, and ideally that should be all the way up to somewhere between £70k-£100k.

I don’t think we should do away with foreign aid, because of both the obvious moral Reasons, but also economically - it pays for itself in the longer term.

I don’t agree with HS2, but I do think big infrastructure projects are a good thing in recovery because they get the money moving in the economy and ultimately, when recovering from depression, generate more in tax Over the longer term than the initially cost, counterintuitive as that may seem. It’s not the same in other economic contexts. I would rather it was a far greener project than HS2 however.

YANBU

Eat Tax the rich

When you take away child benefit from higher earners, you create a “them and us” mentality of people who pay vs. people who take and a disconnect from the benefits system. Genius divide and rule from the tories. Additional revenue and a whole swathe of middle class voters no longer identifying with people receiving state benefits.

No, everywhere I’ve seen wealth tax in operation it’s caused problems for asset rich/cash poor.

Corporation tax is too low, too many activities which would happen anyway are funded through tax incentives. The additional rate of income tax should become payable at a lower level. Cgt should be higher

The UK's housing stock is worth £7.4 trillion. Gains in value over the past decade (excluding new builds) total £2.74 trillion. This could be a very tempting target for a government to raise revenue.

Council tax raises about £30bn/year and stamp duty about £13bn/year. This is less than 16% of the average gain in value each year.

Yet the problem is when we move from a contributory welfare state which Beveridge set up to a non contributor one you lose the buy in of the higher earners which ultimately destroys the welfare state. When all feel that they pay in and take out it works a lot better as originally designed. Most of the EU has something similar - you pay your NI and only if you pay enough in do you take out. The UK lost that and that has damaged our welfare state. I remember the days when if you had lots of NI paid in then you got much higher unemployment benefit than those who had not paid in.

The problem with taxin the value of people's homes is most have to live somewhere so it is not real cash. if you taxed their savings instead that would be fairer. I think it was Cyprus that confiscated some of people's savings during the last crash.

When you take away child benefit from higher earners, you create a “them and us” mentality of people who pay vs. people who take and a disconnect from the benefits system.
I agree. I think universal benefits are important. I do however think CB should be capped at two children.

I have read about half this thread and a couple of points come to mind.
The first is that I think no one has grasped how large the debt is going to be from this crisis. To think it can be paid off by just the tip 5% is naive. We will all be paying for it, one way or another for the rest of our lives, and the debt will still not be paid off.
There have been a number of people advocating cancelling the triple lock pension. If you have paid the full amount of national insurance over your working life, you will get £175 per week. Not enough for most people to live on. If you are female, you will probably have to work for an extra 6 or 7 years than you thought when you first started work before you will get your pension. That is also 6 or 7 more years of paying national insurance. The increases in pensions are accumulative. So if you are 45, with a pension age of say 67, and the pension increases are reduced by just 1% per year, that means YOUR pension will be over 20% less than it would be with the triple lock (actually a lot more as I haven't compounded the 1%) We already have one of the poorest pension schemes in Europe so why do people want to make it even worse? Yes, some pensioners are quite well off, but if they have had a high income then it follows that they have paid a high amount of national insurance too.

We will all be paying for it, one way or another for the rest of our lives, and the debt will still not be paid off.
Well only if you subscribe to the ridiculous idea that it's like personal borrowing on a credit card.

We already have one of the poorest pension schemes in Europe so why do people want to make it even worse?
Ignorant divisive nastiness, that's why.