AIBU to believe rich people should contribute much more?

[marcusian]

A bit tongue in cheek, but given that its almost impossible for poorly paid workers including care workers and nurses to strike, and that the government have given people earning over £100K a massive pay rise, what other ways could the most wealthy be made to pay?

My idea: - a new LUXURIES tax (think 50% VAT) on things ordinary people cant buy, like superyachts, airplanes, £10K+ dining tables, a box at wimbledon, £500+ handbags, £100+ football boots!

AIBU - No - they should pay more and heres my ideas how they should do it!
AIBU - Yes - leave wealthy people alone, its not their fault

You could create an app.

And I could pay you for it and thar would create wealth for you.

But it would decrease my wealth.

All we've done is move my wealth from me to you.

That's not creation. Its movement

But if my app made your life easier and allowed you to be more efficient, then you could also make more money.

And so on and so forth.

Leave rich people alone.

they already pay soo much tax. If you tax them more in everything they will leave UK and take their businesses some where cheaper. And UK economy will be collapse.

same as VAT aswell. Why bother to buy mulbery handbags but have to pay lots of VAT. They will buy LV, dior or hermes instead. And mulberry will be collapse because no one wants to buy it with too expensive VAT.

believe it or not bug we need the rich to mKe oir economy moves.

You already pay VAT on luxury items. £100 football boots or a £500 bag don't make you super rich either, they're quite ordinary purchases.

www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-bulletin/2014/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy

Money I'd have to take from someone else

🤷‍♀️

I mean,a quick Google would bring you up the huge amount of info (actual books and research articles) on the myth of endless growth.

But yeah

I'm definitely trolling

Nobody but you has said endless growth.

Right now we’re seeing growth in green initiatives because there is a need. Not so much 40 years ago.

Also a growth in cyber security, because there is a need. Again, not so much, even 10
years ago.

We are messing growth in drugs for obesity treatment - not needed 50 years ago.

The Dot com era - growth and then bang, done. Not never ending.

Looks interesting. I shall have a read. Thank you.

You said wealth creation and create more wealth.

And my answer is still no.

Not without taking at least a portion of their wealth.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/12/wealth-inequality-reasons-richest-global-gap

What do you think a ‘fair’ rate of tax would be?

should there be any personal allowance (income you can earn tax free)?

just now we are taxed at 20% on everything we earn over 12,500 to 50k, then everything above £50k is taxed at 40%. We have national insurance of approx 10% on top of that. Is this ‘fair’? If not what would be a ‘fair’ amount?

personally I think you should never face an effective tax rate of more than 50%.

I’ll have a read top thanks

(still queuing for my bathroom 😂)

When posters repeatedly come out with these types of threads it makes some high earners want to vote Tory. Luckily they all don’t but vilifying ‘the rich’ when a £100k salary would buy 2 things off your list (and a clue one is not a super yacht) is pretty stupid, irrespective of the validity of supporting people in poverty/on lower incomes.

It’s way more complex than that and I’d get your head around it as threads like this will lose Labour the next election otherwise. ‘Tax the rich’ more and more and more when they already pay huge amounts in income tax, stamp duty, capital gains, plus send kids private, private NHS etc. is not a solution that’s going to work.

What is then?

£100 football boots are within range for a kid/ adult who plays football / rugby week in week out and saves all year , not super rich

Which services would you cut to keep the tax take down?

Yes, rich people should be taxed more. There should be a tax on second homes and while I am at it, abolish private schools. Nobody needs obscene amounts of money.

Wealth is created. Money is just a token used to facilitate exchange - let’s ignore it, as we can see wealth creation without money.

Jane has 2 pieces of gold and Mary has 100 apples. At this time, this is what the world consists of, 2 nuggets of gold and 100 apples. (If both agree that an 10 apples is same value as a nugget the total wealth is equivalent to 120 apples).

Mary plants apple pips and spends time raising apple trees. In 5 years time she has 2000 apples, she also ferments apples into cider. Mary has created much more in the world by farming and brewing. (Mary and Jane both agree the cider from one apple is worth two 2 apples, So Mary now has 2200 apples worth of wealth)

Jane spends her time making intricate rings from one of her pieces of gold. Her efforts have transformed lumps of metal into something that is much more desirable by others. Again, Jane has created much more in the world through art, and both agree they would exchange 100 apples for a ring)

In the eyes of Mary and Jane (the population that determines the relative value of things), their efforts have increased the lifestyle and enjoyment of the world, and hence have increased the value of what they have together - they have created wealth. (Over 2170 apples worth). There is no doubt that value has been created and that they can now exchange that increased wealth if they want - movement can occur, but overall wealth has been created and it was not dependant on the exchange at all.

(Of course trade can be eased by introducing a paper apple - but it makes no real difference)

In general wealth is created through people expending effort - physical or mental, and higher growth is achieved by doing this more efficiently, often through the development of technology and understanding or by innovation/invention.

Right, now you have your example.

I can’t work out whether these posts are just wind ups or genuinely naive/ignorant about the way tax works.

The UK government can put 50% VAT on super yachts if it wants, but that would yield 0 additional revenue because super rich people would simply go to Monaco to buy their yacht there, and keep it year round in the Med or Caribbean. In fact it would probably DECREASE tax revenue because any business involved in superyachting in the UK would shut down and those jobs and corporation taxes would move offshore too.

Ditto luxury handbags. All that would happen is that rich (and not so rich) people would buy them in Paris or New York, and retail jobs making and selling them in the UK would disappear, along with the tax revenue.

You can keep going in this vein - taxing into oblivion all kinds of things that rich people from all over the world currently come to the UK to use/buy/pay for like private hospitals, private schools, luxury goods industries, stupidly big houses in Millionaires Row, and driving offshore all the services that support these things (lawyers, accountants, private bankers etc) and all their tax revenues and demand, until eventually you end up in 1970s Eastern Europe, where everyone who can’t leave the country works for the state.

Quite amused at how much the continued misspelling of Jeff Bezos name has irritated me

And let’s not forget, ”rich” people already pay a lot of tax.

At a certain point though (the point at which “rich” people become super rich), they can and do bugger off to pay less or no tax elsewhere. As do companies. There is a reason why US tech companies like Apple choose to sell digital products to UK customers out of Ireland, and it’s not because of the Guinness - it’s because Ireland has a more favourable tax regime.

Personally I don’t think anyone was calling for the 45% additional rate to be scrapped right now - it wasn’t low enough to attract people to the UK but nor was it high enough to be driving people offshore. But putting it up to 50%, or sticking 50% VAT on goods and services that people think rich people consume, is not the simple genius revenue earner that the Left think it is.

There are already taxes on second homes that don’t apply to first homes.

Abolishing private schools - do you plan on stealing their assets then after you close them? Otherwise who is going to pay for the new schools for all the displaced private school kids? and how are you going to replace teachers who won’t teach in the state sector again. When my db taught in the state sector, he was assaulted, he was followed home by a gang of teens who threw rocks at his windows and upturned his wheelie bin and took anything not nailed down outside. Not to mention the thousands of autistic kids in the private sector functioning in small classes who would need some state paid SEN help. The private school near me gave a free place to a Ukrainian kid. Private schools aren’t all just bastard cunts you know.

and why do you think these rich people would work anymore if they were heavily taxed? Lots of them are burning their health and sanity away by working 7 days a week in highly stressful jobs. If there is no reward, well, nobody will do it.

Income tax should be reduced to 20% - Same as VAT. Everyone should pay the same tax.
More people should be encouraged to work. If you trained as a hairdresser and there are no jobs in that field, people should take a different job until their dream job is available. It's not up to others to finance your life.
If the 440K people who claim Job seekers allowance paid 3K in taxes - that's 1.3 billion in taxes.

Good explanation. Rather embarrassing for some posters though that you have to explain a principle so basic that I was taught it in school when I was about ten.

Low income people generally do not want the same salaries as higher skilled people, that’s not what it’s about at all. They want fair distribution.

Everybody, imo, as a human being should have a basic standard of living as a matter of morality. Enough to get by on without having to use food banks and go without basic utilities and have public services stripped away.

As PP’s here have acknowledged, a lot of people who are in low paid work and perhaps shit at their jobs have learning difficulties or low IQ, or some of those people don’t work at all because of those reasons.

Some people just don’t have opportunities going for them and also someone has to do the lower paid work, just because someone might work as a bus driver or factory worker etc, those are still valuable jobs to society so why should they go without things while the super rich hoard wealth, which they do, there can be no denial of that. Resources are being stripped and the poorest are being made poorer all the time.

I actually don’t think more taxes of the well off is necessarily the answer, but people shouldn’t be allowed to be insanely rich with more money than they could ever hope to spend, while other people have to eat from food banks and go without heating! Neither should high earners have benefited from the tax cut. If anything the low earners should have got a bigger one as they are more likely to spend the extra rather than save it.

The underlying problem is greed, not the poor or the immigrants or the ‘’lazy scroungers’’. The tories are completely mismanaging the taxes paid and making their pockets even deeper while taking away things people need; yet it always seems to be the poor or lower income people that get accused of being greedy when they show discontent. Ironic.

@Turkey98

The problem with your 'example' is that we only have a finite amount of gold

We're exchanging imaginary apples for imaginary apples mostly.