Quite a lot of better off people would be happy to pay more tax?

[Echobelly]

Provided it was channeled towards things like NHS, social care, education.

It seems weirdly outdated to me that mainstream political parties find raising taxes on the wealthy anathema. We've been living in such a low-tax society for so long, but households like mine (I'd say it's a 6-figure annual income between us) could easily afford to pay more in tax and still enjoy our lives.

But instead parties are obsessed with recouping money by removing benefits for the poorest people, which is stupid as the difficulties resulting from plunging people into greater poverty, as well as being cruel, will ultimately cost more money than it saves.

Take that money off people like me in taxes! We won't become homeless or sick or suffer mental distress for the sake of a bit more tax. Year after year I see budgets that will apparently save people like me £500 a year, as if this is supposed to be an incentive to vote for the Tories but tbh, I won't even notice being better off by £500 a year. Give that saving to someone for whom it'll make an impact!

@HermioneWeasley

Nope, if the government can’t survive on half of everything I earn, they’ll have to cut their cloth. I’m happy to come and help them cut budgets - no money to stonewall, reduce budgets for any police force recording non Crime hate incidents off the top of my head,

You aren't paying half of everything you earn.

Why not tax mega corporations such as amazon, google and facebook appropriately. Amazon in particular is killing off the high-street because it can undercut partly to paying very low taxes by being based offshore etc.

I think people would be more open to higher taxes if they felt the burden was equally spread.

No, we pay so much tax already.

If all additional date taxpayers lived in a cheap part of the world then sure, but most of us live in expensive places and don't feel particularly well off.

Why not tax mega corporations such as amazon, google and facebook appropriately. Amazon in particular is killing off the high-street because it can undercut partly to paying very low taxes by being based offshore etc.

You can't target someone like Amazon unless it's a global initiative. Customers though could use their spending power & not shop there but the cheap prices suit them.

[quote TwiggletLover]@daimbarsatemydogsbone
I wouldn't describe those as benefits. Everyone in the country has access to those services whether they pay taxes or not. What I am referring to is things like child benefit, the tax free child care scheme, sharing your personal allowance as a married couple. None of these things are available to us as higher rate tax payers [/quote]
No they aren't - I have no need of them and I prefer they go to people who need them. I do receive a return for the taxes I pay in services, that's how it works. If you are only interested in what you get back there's no point in taxes at all.

@daimbarsatemydogsbone

When you take into consideration council tax, road tax VAT.. you will be very close!

@dafey

Why not tax mega corporations such as amazon, google and facebook appropriately. Amazon in particular is killing off the high-street because it can undercut partly to paying very low taxes by being based offshore etc.

You can't target someone like Amazon unless it's a global initiative. Customers though could use their spending power & not shop there but the cheap prices suit them.

Yes you can - Amazon pays a lot more tax in the USA because the US makes them. We could do the same.

It’s all academic anyway. The pandemic has been so expensive, big tax rises will be on the way regardless of what we think. Someone has to foot the bill for those dodgy PPE contracts.

Depends what you define as better off. The people at the lower end of the defined group who might already be struggling wouldn’t be happy.

Donating money to charity doesn’t solve the major systemic problems though. All it does it plug some gaps and tinker about round the edges. Systemic change requires political leadership and at national level at least we have a government currently that exists in an ethical and credibility vacuum

[quote User310]@daimbarsatemydogsbone

When you take into consideration council tax, road tax VAT.. you will be very close![/quote]
If you include those it's probably well over 50% - but I assume the poster was talking about income tax and NI.

@Pendolino

It’s all academic anyway. The pandemic has been so expensive, big tax rises will be on the way regardless of what we think. Someone has to foot the bill for those dodgy PPE contracts.

And lockdowns and furlough

The falls for more and more to be spent was maddening

Government need to fund… when really it’s us who will pay. And our dc

People like value for money. We don’t have value for money, as far as taxation is concerned. Vast sums are wasted, as has been evidenced by PPs. Projects cancelled, computer systems that are inefficient and ineffective, people milking the systems where they work and some who don’t work milking the benefits system too.

Money is wasted in every area of central and local government and most of us will never know the half of it. There are plenty of people with stressful jobs, who work long hours, but earn a very average wage too.

If major organisations like the NHS, police, public service organisations worked cohesively and efficiently, the savings could be substantial. The money that is wasted, is wasted on layers of unnecessary management and wasted resources. It’s not the workers at grass roots level, but they’re the ones trying to prop it all up.

Calls..

Increasing taxation is not necessarily the answer.
Reducing waste within the system should be a priority.
The NHS will consistently require increasing amounts of funding that taxation cannot meet. Increases in National Insurance have happened twice by both Labour and Conservative governments apparently "ring fenced" the money, this still can't provide service let alone decent wages for many NHS workers.
I think I would prefer a more straightforward taxation system of 33% on salaries, Capital gains and IHT, that could easily be implemented and less easily avoided.
There might be more money in people's pockets and then this would return to the economy through VAT from spending on goods, services etc and income tax of the supporting workers.

I don't want to pay more tax because I don't trust government to spend it properly or wisely. Contracts to their already rich mates, the huge enormous inefficiencies within the NHS and the general waste and corruption of government doesn't inspire me to want them to have any more of my money. I give regularly to charities which I consider to make a huge difference to my local area and look upon that as my own directed tax to services which need the money and spend it wisely.

more income tax and perhaps more high earners would be looking at selling up their London terraces to invest in a nice beach house on the Caymans... Or those in finance would be snapping up those post-Brexit relocation offers

Then who is left to pay the tax bill?

Can you point to any properly conducted study which shows this actually happens en masse? We all know of various high profile cases when people have done it, but when you look at studies out of Canada and New Jersey, it shows that tax migration because of wealth taxes actually doesn’t happen. When you think about it, it doesn’t make sense that people en masse are willing to uproot their entire family and their lives just to avoid paying a few k more in that which they can easily afford to pay. If you are, one of the charity bosses I mentioned earlier earning £300,000 a year and your job is based in London, and your spouse has a job in London and your kids go to private schools in London, where exactly are you going to move to?

No large organisation are really efficient in every aspect - it's a myth that it would be easy for the NHS to be really more efficient

The nhs gets us a lot for how much it costs - it's pretty hard to find and health service that is as effective for less cash ( although some of the more recent schemes to improve efficiency are wasteful)

Private organisations can spend 10 to 20% of thier budget in marketing and advertising ffs

@daimbarsatemydogsbone but they don't pay what they should in the US though!

@SarahBellam

Donating money to charity doesn’t solve the major systemic problems though. All it does it plug some gaps and tinker about round the edges. Systemic change requires political leadership and at national level at least we have a government currently that exists in an ethical and credibility vacuum

An example of this is the five week wait for universal credit. Yes I could give money to my local food bank so my neighbours don’t starve, but I’d rather pay tax for DWP to pay staff so that they can process the claims within a week. More efficient and dignified for all.

@MichelleScarn

Are you donating some of this money you don't need all ready? Say to cancer charities who provide free transport to chemo patients, to homelessness charities who run shelters, to family centres who provide free afterschool clubs and meals to children in need etc? Your money would be better off their rather than being lost in taxes and not really going anywhere.

No, it wouldn't. What a single person can donate on charity is a drop in the ocean compared to taxation. That's why the super rich avoiding tax but donating to their pet charity To make themselves look good is a fallacy.

Taxation pays for the things that we all (or many of us) require but can't afford to finance on our own no matter how well off we are.

Yes, I'd be happy to pay more tax even for stuff that might not (directly) affect me. I believe a society that looks after everyone is a better society even for those that think they don't need so much looking after.

I think though it's the super wealthy and large corporate donors that the Tories are trying to protect from tax and not middle class or upper middle class tax payers.

Depends what you define as better off. The people at the lower end of the defined group who might already be struggling wouldn’t be happy.

I’m not so sure about that. I’m in the higher tax bracket but only just. Scotland has increased our taxes by 1% and it costs me 300 a year more than if I lived in England. That’s roughly a pound a day. Can’t say I’ve noticed.

An example of this is the five week wait for universal credit. Yes I could give money to my local food bank so my neighbours don’t starve, but I’d rather pay tax for DWP to pay staff so that they can process the claims within a week. More efficient and dignified for all.

I agree, although I’d be looking for the increase in staff to reduce the 3 month wait for people to get disability benefits.

@Echobelly, YANBU, and I would further add that one group of people , to which I belong, that really can afford to pay more tax, is people with a good standard of living whose main source of money to fund living expenses is savings and wealth, rather than work. in the UK, income in the form of dividends, interest and capital appreciation are all taxed at much lower rates than income from work.

1. there is less or no national insurance to pay on any of the above
2. dividends benefit from a separate, lower tax rate
3. capital gains benefit from a separate, even lower tax rate
4. people with extra money can do things to get extra tax deductions or exclusions that are unavailable to people without extra money. This includes EIS investments, pension contributions, charitable contributions and VCTs among others. Selling a primary residence is also tax-free, which makes sense in many ways (the opposite could leave the average homeowner trapped and unable to move at all), but this does also give yet another way for a wealthy person to enjoy tax-free capital gains.
5. perhaps most importantly: the owner of investment assets can choose the timing of realisation of gains, and therefore has ways to further manage down the tax by holding most assets and their inbuilt gains over time. They can even borrow to a certain extent against the assets in order to access cash for upfront spending, without realising the gain and selling the asset.

What would really be needed to claim a fairer share of tax from the wealthy would be a change in the way investment income and gains are taxed. This is challenging because very wealthy people are often more mobile and sometimes willing to move in order to reduce tax bills. But "challenging" does not mean "should not be done". I am not a tax policy maker, but there must be set of policies that would make it harder for this type of legal tax avoidance (aka "tax planning") to result in very, very low tax rates for the wealthiest, without causing all of them to leave.

Unfortunately I have not seen any politicians offering sensible proposals to do this: it's either the Tories for whom any tax increase on the wealthy is anathema, or it's Labour for whom any value accretion through asset ownership is borderline morally reprehensible and should be punished through some sort of confiscatory taxation. In my own view, investing in productive assets can be socially very useful, but part of the social utility also should come in the form of a fair (which means higher than now) means-based contribution to the collective institutions and infrastructure that enable the wealth increase to occur in the first place.