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

Only works if there is a universal basic income which is sufficient for basic living standard

If they have earnt their money, rather like Monkeybutt1's example below, you cannot call them greedy. What you mean is that they are extremely successful.

Monkeybutt1 · Today 16:21
My dads best friend went to a local comp school, did rubbish in his exams, left school and became a builder for a property developer. He lost his job and decided to the start his own company, which was financed with equity from his house so if he went bust he lost his house. He worked his arse off for the next 40 years building a successful company with a great reputation. He sold the company for 5 million, he has paid taxes all his life, nothing was handed to him. He deserves everything he has. He also doesn't own a yacht!

My friend - a nurse - worked her socks off saving lives , suffered life changing injury at work , worked through the pandemic

Are you really saying your dad did so much more than she that he's worth 5million more than her ?

People aren't paid their worth. People are paid their salary/wages or the money they earned with their own company. Your friend's injury should be properly compensated - but that has nothing to do with a man who spent 40 years making 5 million. That's his earnings.

Ok Borris, whatever 🤷

Well that's completely irrelevant. Chances are your friend trained for this role and went into it knowing the wages. The circumstances are different.

If there were no rich people, who would pay the workers?

Good God, people are still saying things like this.

If there were no workers, who would the rich people live off?

Yabvu. Why should averagely rich people, mostly working, expect to be responsible for everything that goes wrong in this country. I'm sick of all the in fighting.
If you want to do better financially/ buy a house/earn more money then read about it/study/do something instead of all this whining and blaming everyone else for having it easy.
Yes it's easier if you are born into wealth/an educated encouraging family with expectations etc.
But many others have done it themselves, I personally know plenty of examples.
People mostly have some spare money and what they do with it is their business. We will never have a perfectly fair society where everyone gets the exact same amount. Opportunities are still there if you cba.

I think the OP needs to define “rich”
and “workers”. The two are not mutually exclusive, not unless you are only referring to ultra high net worth folks as the rich. But the OP seems to draw the line at GBP100k which is ridiculous - as clearly everyone on this wage is a worker and will be into their dotage as pensions provide a poor income relative to work.

@Miajk well, to part answer your question "how do some people get so rich?"

The Russian oligarchs who are arguably the most obvious target for oppobrium got rich in the post-Soviet scramble for Russia's immense mineral wealth. Power-politics and rampant corruption. Philip Green might slot in here but there are relatively few UK candidates.

Some people become fabulously wealthy because of their talent. Movie stars who earn millions for each picture, and more through their production companies. Similar with sportspeople and musicians. Talent, sound financial advice and good management... look at the Beckhams, Paul McCartney, Elton John, Ed Sheeran.

Some inherit wealth like the Duke of Westminster, who also operates a very successful (risk taking) property development business based on his ancestors land in the part of London that became the West End. There are not so many of those fortunes left intact.

And there are entrepreneurs like Richard Branson, Alan Sugar, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk who created companies that they took public where the world's pension funds, insurance companies and institutional investors buy and sell shares on behalf of your and my pension savings.

This is obviously not the definitive answer but just for starters.

To be fair most of these examples are people who exploited people for their wealth + lots of tax evasion.

Jeff Bezos created a company in which people die in warehouses due to poor safety conditions, even in the USA.

The royal family stole wealth from lots of places, never bothered trying to make it right. And Charles won't have to pay inheritance tax. And the queen paid for Andrew's legal bills with more of that stolen money.

This is why laws need to change so scum like this doesn't benefit from harming others out of pure greed and nothing else.

So no one who wants a reasonable life / enough money for a comfortable life should train as a nurse ?

That's a stinking attitude

You seem to think people are paid what they're worth

They're not

They're paid based on what they provide. Your friend, a nurse doesn't add financial value to an organisation and is therefore paid less than someone who has built their own business, or a footballer who earns their club millions in sponsorships

Exactly, both sides rely on the other, without the 'workers' the money doesn't get made and without the 'rich' the workers don't get paid, or in fact there's no work to do.
The issue arises when the 'rich' start degrading the workers, those people whom they rely on, and telling them how shit they are, for not being like them and that leads to exploiting said workers because it's then a case of they deserve it so it becomes easier to do so in order to watch the bank balance grow.
No one gets rich in isolation, there's a network of other people that have helped it to happen, some of which will have been fairly compensated and some of which won't have been.
Opportunities can and do exist for anyone, but they can't exist for everyone or there's no bottom layers to hold up the rest and the whole thing collapses, we need the low paid workers to do this and the idea that they are less, that they are deserving of as little as possible is rooted in knowledge that they're essential to the cogs turning, but admitting that means you're admitting they're basically exploited and there might be a revolt so best keep them in their place so they'll keep doing as they're told.

It’s capitalism. Nurses earn less because there is (usually) plenty of supply, because the barrier to entry is low-ish (academically). And they don’t boost economic growth.
On the other hand I’m currently trying to fill a role that is ~100k a year and I can’t find anyone suitable. Now looking at resumes from outside the U.K. It makes me mad that schools /unis aren’t producing the talent we need, whilst there are so many kids ending up in zero hour contract jobs. At the same time, it wouldn’t taken much for self starting kids (and indeed much older people) to figure out where the labour shortages (and salaries) are and upskill themselves. And relocate as required. That’s what I did.

Two things to bear in mind.

Internet discussion groups always give a skewed impression, because most people working in 100k job or even 50k or 30k jobs full time don't have the luxury of time to post in them. Or if they do, they have to be very guarded in what they say, in case they are sacked. Less so for a relatively anonymous site like mumsnet but far more so for Facebook, Twitter, comments sections in the newspapers, etc..

Dividing people into "rich" and "poor" is straight out of the communist manifesto and far too left wing for the majority of hard working middle earners to support. If you really expect someone on say 70k pa in a stressful, difficult, highly skilled job to look at the deductions from their pay statement and go "oh there you are Mr Bloggs, who has barely got off his arse since school, I'll just GIVE you another 5% of my salary and be quite happy, you are living in cloud cuckoo land.

Couldn't agree more!

I always get frustrated when people's envy turns their energy towards working out how to take more money of those that already contribute the most rather than working out how to better their own lives through hard work and study.

The rich do very well from a system that works in their favour. You can see this evidenced by the recent mini budget

What do you mean by this? I don't think the recent mini-budget in anyway evidences a system that works in the favour of the rich.

If anything, it evidences the exact opposite as:

1. lower income families got more cost of energy support (and rightly so)
2. everyone got lower rate tax reductions - so equal?
3. those that pay higher rate tax got it reduced from 45% to 40%... I mean, it's still 40% (ridiculously high) and all that is is them being allowed to keep more of their own money that they've earns rather than have to give away as much as they already do which is already - in both % terms and absolute terms - more than those in the lower income bracket!!

So how it stacked in their favour?!

I have always been confused why people get offended when high earners say ‘I worked hard’

People assume the subtext is ‘harder than people who earn less’. I work with many high earners, non of them

Posted too soon

non actually think that

and that the government have given people earning over £100K a massive pay rise

Going back to this original point. The government also gave every working person a pay rise by reducing the tax rate by 1%. They also cancelled the NI rise for everyone. They also gave low earners £150 off their council tax, and a £600 cost of living payment, more if you are elderly or disabled. We are all getting £400 off our energy bills. You could turn your argument around and say that the poorest are getting a huge pay rise? No?

A person in the lowest wages will be a few pounds better off as a result of the tax changes - much less than the impact of inflation on a minimal standard of living

Those at the top will be a few thousand pounds a year better off - more that covering the inflation on any essential costs as required for a basic standard of living

That's why I agree the budget favors the rich

There are people who will be 56K a year better off with KK tax cuts.

What do you think those people will do with their 56K?

In an ideal world - the money will be spent going back into the economy by perhaps employing builders to improve (one of their) homes, perhaps increasing personal staff salaries, purchasing goods etc.

In reality, the money will most likely be squirrelled away or used to make themselves richer with investments/property purchases.

I dislike the term redistribution of wealth. As from the Latin root tribuere meaning to assign. It creates the impression wealth is assigned by some conscious mechanism, and the rich essentially steal the poor people’s share.

If that were remotely true then the resentments and anger at the rich would be more justified. However that isn’t the case. Wealth is generated and created. Pretty much universally those who invest capital also risk that capital. Investments that pay off produce returns those that don’t result in loss.

This cycles the upper echelons of wealth continually. Only a minority of ultra high net worth individuals inherited it. Most earned it and their heirs by two generations will have likely lost it. Creating generational wealth whilst not impossible is very very hard. So you see a natural cycling of wealth by that mechanism alone.

I am not happy with crony capitalism (it’s not truly the free market principles of which I am in favour of). I am a great believer in having a social safety net, but we’ve stacked it at the wrong end by bailing out banks when it should be there to provide those at the bottom motivation to take the risks of their time to innovate and try out new ideas. This allows social mobility and greater access to human potential which is far vaster than any of us realise.

The equalising factor we all have his time. We all have access to the precise same number of hours in the day. However you can use the time you have today to invest in yourself to increase the value of an hour of your time to more in the future. Even if someone dumped a load of capital in my lap, if I didn’t dedicate the time to learn how to manage it responsibly it would likely be gone in relatively short order.

What disheartens me is how many people get trapped into these cycles of poverty by believing they have been robbed, that the system is stacked against them and overlook their own inherent value.

Depends what you mean by 'rich'.