To , just once ,ask is anyone else fed up of being the squeezed middle?

[Wildandallthatjazz]

Thats it really. !

Yes , on mn , its seen as a privilege to have a mortgage, a job etc .

But sometimes it feels hard and you just wish that you got a break . Recognition of the hard slog maybe .

I am not begrudging those on benefits who got the extra payment support, its more about just wanting to have a treat / a bonus/ etc .. a spare bit of money.. a boost .. the heating on … or maybe recognition that the middle can struggle too ?

I totally accept that people can struggle and need help , sort of also feel the struggling middle are invisible ? ( and not seen to have the’ right ‘to have a little moan as it does you good sometimes )

I do think we are incredibly lucky to live in a county with a welfare state, nhs, free gp care I really do .
But sometimes, it just would be nice not to feel you are paying taxes , working as much as possible, and to be able not to feel squeezed all the time and the need to just have a grump about it .

sometimes it is good to let of steam .. when you cant IRL

and then you move on in a more positive fashion .

Exactly. Of course there is an issue of loopholes and corporation tax, but on an individual level the wealthy are already being heavily taxed.

It might be a good idea to recalculate council tax every time a property was sold.

Agree with all this but final straw lockdowns and war too. Energy inflation has been a killer after demands for lockdown.

Having been raised on a council estate, then been a poor, single mother in a private rented house, to what I am now - a squeezed, middle class, home owning, decent earning still single mother, I know what I prefer being.

Difference is, I’m now choosing to not eat meat any more, be more frugal with the heating, invested in smart bulbs/plugs, etc. I have choices.

A decade ago, I had no choices. I had one meal a day, made from Smart Price ingredients, debt racking up on the pre pay gas meter due to standing charges, debt collectors hounding me for the thousands my abusive ex racked up in my name, me and DD1 wore hats in the bed we shared as I could only afford to plug the (from Freecycle) electric heater on in one room, I spent my days in the library to try and keep warm, I was in the thick of PTSD and suicidal.

So nah, this ain’t that.

But if you’ve never, not even for a second, had to genuinely stop and think about spending money, then I can see how this would feel like hardship.

Same here

1% of earners are on over 160k.

Do you mean wage earners paying through PAYE, or all earners?

Either way, I’d (slowly) increase minimum wage. Which would reduce the benefits bill and increase income tax intake. We’d be paying more for some state employees (or those indirectly employed by the state). But, ultimately, we’d be pushing the burden of paying workers away from the state and back on to businesses. If your business cannot function whilst paying at least enough to cover housing, food and heating, then your business is not viable.

The welfare state should exist for those unable to work. Whether that be long term due to disability, or short term job-seeking. It shouldn’t be there to subsidise businesses, and their owners.

Local property taxes in the US, which fund council type spending including school/education costs, typically account for most local government spends.

Do you mean wage earners paying through PAYE, or all earners?

Quite, the rich don't tend to be on paye

@Spectre8 I agree at how single people are treated. The main thing to fix this is to equalise the tax thresholds so that they are based on household/ family unit. A couple living together should not get twice the tax free allowance that a single adult household does. Or earn twice as much before paying higher rate tax etc. Fixing that would solve a lot of poverty, for both single people and single parent households and be entirely fair.

Of course there is an issue of loopholes and corporation tax, but on an individual level the wealthy are already being heavily taxed.

Are they?

Yep. The issue is that everyone wants someone else to do more, give up more, but not them.

I went to a pregnancy fitness class this evening. Out of 10 women, 7 were either overweight or obese - two morbidly. After initial introductions I discovered I was the only second time mum there! Sat in the waiting room for my scan I was shocked at how many pregnant women were overweight. Now imagine how much more will need to be spent on consultant appointments, medications, check ups and birth interventions for them.

But if I dared to create a thread about it on here, I would be absolutely slaughtered with endless ‘’ responses and cries of mental health/how dare you/fuck off.

Personal responsibility seems to be absolutely alien to a lot of the public.

I volunteer at a charity that works with people on benefits. A lot seem to have more disposable income than I do. Not begrudging them, but it is very demoralizing to be working so hard and find that I have pennies left towards the end of the month.

I think someone further up was talking about having to work until April for “the common good” before starting to work for themselves.

DH is a pretty high earner, and he puts in twelve hour days, five days a week. From 1st January until mid-June before he starts earning for us.

He doesn’t resent this, he knows it’s what we need to do to have a working, but five and a half months of sixty-hour weeks for “free” is not a massive fraction less than some civil servants do for the state all year long.

You should do a benefits calculator as based on the information given you should consider applying for PIP for yourself and DLA for your children. This can then gateway entitlement to other benefits- for example, being in receipt of disability benefits could push you into the threshold for eligibility to UC, you may be entitled to additional discount on your council tax liability, you would be able to apply for a Max card to give you discounts on participating days out/attractions, you may be eligible for a blue badge, and so on.

Thank you. I've been fighting to get PIP and DLA for ages. My children should also be getting support from social services, but aren't. I am not entitled to UC. Blue badge application has been sat on by the Council for almost a year now and gone into a complaints procedure. At one point they told me they hadn't replied because "maybe given the delay, I may have died by now".

We are being squeezed for ever more tax hut none of the services we pay for seem to exist. They seem to want it both ways, charge me a small fortune each year which I've happily paid for decades but when we need help, we get absolutely none.

Haven't read the whole thread.

We are definitely being squeezed. We lost around £80k of work through covid, with not a penny in gov help.
Now we are back in work, we have to pay for the covid financial help we couldn't receive.

We have no savings left as we had to live off them for 18 months.
It feels very perilous.

Yes, very much so. In the UK it’s on,yo the top two quintiles who are net contributors, everyone else is net recipient.

Of those two contributing quintiles nearly the whole tax burden is on the top one.

I’m not sure where people get the idea from that the top 10% or 1% aren’t paying their fair share.

The problem with the welfare state is the fear of what happens next. I've worked with long term unemployed people for years and they are petrified of being worse of and in many, many situations this would be true or they may be £50 better off (but now have to pay for travel to and from work). IIf a family has children and only one person capable of working they would lose a lot of the top ups that keep food on the table and face weeks with nothing if they start work and it doesn't work out and they have to start their claim again. Can't blame people for being stuck in the system really. That being said I sometimes feel angry that because I've worked my way to a comfortable (but no where near rich) lifestyle that I am now getting closer to the breadline every day. What happens when the squeezed middle become the new claimants, which will happen if the economy continues to crumble? I can see a huge crisis when tax will rise so much that people will be better off not working and then we are screwed! It's a scary time to be alive and I can't see a solution.

What’s enough do you think?

I was taxed 45% via PAYE for years. Then quit, for a variety of reasons, but tax was one of them. The state now gets no income tax from me - that’s not a good outcome. Very happy to pay my way given the circumstances I grew up in but when I read these comments it’s almost comical and we wonder why the UK has low/negative economic growth.

Look at the stats above, the maths doesn’t add up. When people talk about ‘the wealthy’ I think they are often confused that even on a salary that necessitates 45% tax, it doesn’t equate to the take home pay of Jeff Bezos.

@QualityAndQuantity are you just referring to income tax though? Are you including capital gains etc?

@CopOut27 I said upthread I think income tax is high enough. I'm not talking about paye though, ime the "rich" aren't generally on paye.

Having recently been morbidly obese, for around 18 months, after a really severe, debilitating illness that fucked my mobility, didn’t affect my appetite or what I ate, and having never had a BMI above 21 previously (including during pregnancy), it’s no fun being that size whatsoever, it destroyed my MH.

People treated me very, very differently.

I say recently, because this year, since January, I’ve lost 7.5 stone (I’d put on 6.5 stone), and the only difference is that I have no longer been bed/sofa bound, not on certain medications and I’ve finally been signed off to join the gym again this month. Whilst I’ve lost the weight I gained and then some, my fitness level is non existent.

Most of my family are obese. All of them live in poverty. All of them think cooking is getting something beige out of the freezer and putting it in the oven. The skinny ones are chain smokers, which brings its own issues, short and long term. Three have diabetes that will kill them early because they won’t follow their diets.

What a daft comment. You do realise that if you tried to claim Universal credit whilst choosing to work part time you would likely have a work coach hassling you to look for full time work unless you have kids below a certain age?

The magic money tree known as PAYE has been discovered.

@VillageCottageEmo is right. People in the "squeezed middle" are not truly poor. Their life is maybe more restricted than it was and it's a concern to them as they've come to expect more but I doubt they are sitting in the dark and cold because they can't put credit on the meters or going to bed hungry to allow their DC to have the last of the food. I accept there may be some exceptions to this but generally it is true.

I’m not sure where people get the idea from that the top 10% or 1% aren’t paying their fair share.

Because the data suggests they aren't...

"Using anonymised data from personal tax returns, we show that in 2015-16 the average rate of tax paid by people who received £1 million in taxable income and gains was just 35%: the same as someone earning £100,000. But one in four of these paid 45% – close to the top rate – whilst another quarter paid less than 30% overall. One in ten paid just 11%—the same as someone earning £15,000. The rich, it seems, are not all in it together."