To be fed up with the amount of tax / ni I pay

[Elephantstone1]

although my salary looks decent from the outside. I’m beginning to get really fed up with the amount of tax / ni I pay.

so on £60k end up coming out with just around £3k per month from £5k after all taxes (including council tax) have been paid.

we’re not entitled to any help that others may get

my commute costs about £400 a month, but I’ve already paid tax on that money, so i have to earn about £600 a month to pay for it.

i know I’m lucky to be on a decent salary. Just with the col increasing, I’m getting a bit fed up

I don't think people are saying total financial equality

I do think people are saying less difference between rich and poor and a floor for being poor that isn't inhumane

Q: Who should pay more?
A: The rich.
Q: How do you define rich?
A: someone who earns more than me!

always the same!

Yanbu
to earn that salary you probably also pay a significant amount of student loan repayments too- it all adds up. I think most people are happy to pay taxes but it’s hard when your classed as a high earner (so not entitled to child benefit etc) but in reality your not living a ‘high earner’ lifestyle

I don’t have a problem with paying tax on many things but I do 🙄 at paying for the “I won’t work more than 16 hours or it will mess up my benefits” brigade.

Even if you think no government spending is currently wasteful, we have too few people working too few hours. I would make much less provided by the state but reduce taxes so people can buy an equivalent level of service. It’s too easy at the moment not to contribute. There’s loads of threads on here about how people don’t feel any moral obligation to work. A small group of people basically pay for everything for everyone and that’s not fair.

Do you have DC OP? You are at a particularly annoying marginal effective tax rates point in the system if so.

They have had a say. There have been 3 general elections in the past 8 years and every time the country have voted for the same party. Clearly a lot of people are happy with that.

In order to maximise the economic prosperity of the country we need to ensure our population is motivated to upskill, take on more challenging positions at work, retrain etc. make them selves more economically productive. They aren’t going to do that if they get totally hammered by tax if they earn more. It’s a delicate balance, but anyone with kids in nursery is massively disincentivised to earn over £100k. That’s a mistake by the government.

This is unpalatable but true. Cliff edges and bottlenecks occur at various points on the income spectrum and are bad for all of us.

That happens at every cut off though. People stick more in their pensions to bring them under the higher rate of tax band, or stick more in their pensions to bring them back under the child benefit threshold.
They just don't get viewed in the same way.

Isn't it strange sometimes- DH and I earn £35k each, and would happily pay more tax to benefit our children and the areas around us etc. We actually said in the last budget that a 21% basic rate would bring in so much more yet only slightly affect each individual, but if it meant better social funding then I'm all for it.

(our council tax is more than yours too OP, and we have FT nursery fees going out atm)

I earn just over 150k and paid 61k in tax last year. We are comfortable but not ‘super wealthy’. The more you earn the more you will contribute from a % perspective- even without higher tax bands and loss of personal allowances. My kids are at independent schools and we have access to private healthcare so we are a minimum burden. I’m happy to pay pay my share but I think giving 40% of my earnings back is enough. I don’t understand the ‘rinse the rich’ mentality. I come from a good northern working class background and went to the local comp - I have worked - and continue to work - really hard. This hard irk benefits other directly - success has seen huge team growth enabling me to employ and develop scores of people. Higher taxation is just taxing ambition, aspiration and work ethic and will lead to brain drain and even less active tax payers to fund social initiatives.

Work not irk. Freudian slip 😆

You can't control everyone behaviour
Yes people may make choices that are personally optimal that reduce tax income compared to if they didn't make those personal choices

Do people want to ban personal choice in favour of tax revenue maximisation?

The goal is to maximise the revenue whilst accepting that sone people will always try to optimise their personal financial situation

But on the whole people don't do that - most people are much less financially driven than those who are financially motivated realise and trying to capture everyone is more expensive than it's worth

( less financially driven does not mean they don't want to earn enough to pay their bills , it just means that they value other things like time with family and mental health over a new carpet )

The problem is that 'inhumane' is a subjective term and to some extent so is poverty. I know we have official measures to attempt to define it but it really is relative. Immigrants are drawn to our country because even in the poorest here are better off than an average citizen in their home country.

I think a large part of our problem is that the welfare state was envisioned at a time when our country, economy and population was very different. Back then it was possible to offer a safety net to the poor whilst also affording decent public services that benefitted everyone Over the ensuing decades entitlement has set in and we all have expectations about what should be possible. The reality is though that we are spending in real terms double the amount of money on the welfare state and it feels like this will only increase further as our population ages and our GDP stagnates. Tax payers have a higher tax burden than over the past three decades and are expected to not only suck it up and accept it but to pay more and more without question or complaint.

That is not true. Everyone benefits from children having a good education, from the roads being maintained, from good mental health services - we all benefit from looking after the vulnerable in society directly or indirectly. No one is an island. I thought we learn't that lesson from covid.

As an example

Many people in the Scottish border region could move 5 miles down the road to get into a lower tax bracket

But they don't

Don't get me wrong, I've paid for a private Autism assessment for my own DC and yes, it's frustrating that we faced the choice between paying or waiting 3 years for an NHS assessment but at least for us it was a choice. I still wouldn't want to swap places with the parents I work with who are unemployed or being exploited in zero hour contract jobs. It's the posters asserting that those on benefits are on easy street that I take issue with.

The problem to me isn't taxes being raised

It's how they are used

I am a believer in value for money over minimising costs where I can and this government is all about cost minimising in a way that costs us more in the long run - poor acccess to preventative health support, mental health support for crisis only ...

More people seem to be avoiding work because of the way benefits work.

I have to wonder if people who make statement like this actually have a clue how benefits do work.

During the pandemic my elderly dad was placed on the end of life care pathway (not Covid related). There is just me and mum (and DD who was doing her GCSEs at the time).

My employer was unsupportive to put it mildly and I was forced to take an unpaid sabbatical to become a full time Carer. Carers Allowance - for which caring needs to be your full time job, is approx £300 a month. In addition I received universal credit…but CA is deducted from that, not in addition to.

I have always worked…part time from when my Dd was 18 weeks old, full time when I got divorced to support the pair of us. I have a mortgage so no help with those repayments.

The experience of being a carer with no support during a pandemic, and the subsequent loss of my dad has left me with PTSD, GAD and panic disorder for which I’m finally receiving therapy in the NHS (I was turned down while all this was going on, despite having been referred to the CMS for suicidal ideation 6 months previously).

Despite this, I am now working a combination of freelance and casual work. My mum still needs support…she’s nearly 84, diabetic, heart problems, very hard of hearing etc, but because it’s not full time I can’t claim carers allowance.

When DD goes to university in September, I will no longer get child benefit or maintenance from her dad. I will no longer get the child element of UC and the minimum income floor will no longer apply to me as a newly self employed person because I don’t have a dependent relative living with me. This means that my UC entitlement will be knocked out by my earnings…which on a good month just about hit £1k a month.

So I can probably cover my mortgage and bills, just so long as I don’t need to, you know, eat or anything.

Obviously I’m looking for ways to mitigate that by finding additional/different work, but how that will work around my MH issues and my mums needs I have no clue.

The admin and hoop jumping as a working person on benefits is an absolute bloody nightmare too…I’m desperate to find a way I can be free of them altogether as it’s such a pain in the arse to manage.

The view many people seem to have that you just rock up at the CAB, fill a few forms in and get thousands poured into your bank account for sitting on your arse is, frankly, so wide of the mark its batshit.

But ultra high net worth individuals do, they really do. Mainly because a lot of them were either from overseas to start with or their job takes them oversea a lot so they feel less of an affinity to the UK. It’s these people we need to attract to pay taxes here.

Elephantstone1 You've got my full sympathy on this one. I work for myself as a contractor, and the past 5 years have been a tax attack on independent contractors and small limited companies. I now pay 40% tax and I have no paid holidays or benefits of any kind. Taxes went up dramatically to pay for shutting down the economy, paying people to laze about the house, and fund all these useless tests and plastic accessories provided by govt friends. Taxes pay for big government to infinitely expand. It is almost impossible to reign in useless spending once the beast is unleashed. If I could opt out of paying for the NHS I would. Because I don't use it. I walk into A&E and I'm last on the list of priorities even after a multiple shoulder and hand fracture. Then I go private because I was completely neglected. Sure I want crime controlled and the trash collected, but do I want to fund the war in Ukraine and half the middle East? Do I want to enact cameras every 10 feet to surveil my movements? It's legalised extortion, and if that weren't bad enough, we are paying for the surveillance hell to imprison us.

Those who pay nothing also benefit from those things. You don’t get a greater benefit if you are a higher rate tax payer.

I hear this a lot from contractors due to my line of work. Don’t you earn enough to make up for no holidays or sick pay? You earn much more than a salaried worker does? And if you don’t, why not take a salaried role?

No you don't.

Crime, education, healthcare, etc is exactly the same whether you earn £30k, £60k or £90k or £120k. Your experiences of public services don't suddenly improve if you take on a promotion, earn £10k more but pay £5k more in taxes and other deductions do they?

It's why so many higher earners now work part time, and that not only reduces tax take, it also causes shortages of workers in occupations like doctors, dentists, and even at lower (but still above average) income levels in jobs such as lorry drivers.