To think the 'Net Contributors' argument is just wrong?

[Yetmorebeanstocount]

Just been reading about "Net Contributors" of tax and how it supposedly is a bad thing that we don't have enough in this country.
i.e. - that most people receive more, in cash benefits, social care, NHS, police, education, roads, bin collections etc. etc. than they will ever pay for via their taxes, so they are 'net recipients' of the system rather than 'net contributors'.

My reaction is - well yes of course. That is how it should be!

Take a very-over-simplified example to illustrate the maths:

Say there are 100 people who earn £1k, and one person who earns £200k. Say the 100 pay no taxes, and the one person pays tax at 50% of £100k.

That tax gets re-distributed to the 100 people in the form of services and benefits and pensions, so that the 100 now have the equivalent of £2k each and the one person still has £100k.
What is supposed to be wrong with this? It is just basic re-distribution of income, which is something that every civilised society should do.

Of course in real life people earn all sorts of amounts and receive different things, so it is not so simple, but the principle is the same - a few at the top are 'net contributors' and the rest are 'net recipients'.

And of course, those at the top still get something back as they drive on roads and have their bins collected, and have the benefit of living in a civilised society which is policed and (mostly) does not have people dying on the streets.

And as an aside note- don’t get me started on the well documented phenomenon of what happens when high earners with options leave the public systems- be it schools or healthcare or transport- it gets shitter for everyone else else.

You can’t actually do this, though.

There aren’t really private A&E services for anything life-threatening, so sooner or later, someone in your family is going to need the NHS. And if you suffer serious complications while undergoing surgery or giving birth in a private hospital, guess where you’ll be transferred? And guess who picks up the bill? (Clue: it’s not you).

You can send your children to private schools, but many of the staff who work in them will have been state educated.

You can opt out of public transport and get your chauffeur to drive you around, but you’ll be driving on public roads, which need maintaining.

The only outcome of this would be the failure of smaller farms - which tend to be more environmentally friendly, and don’t need to utilise every last scrap of land, and often have higher animal welfare standards

As they go bust, the land would get bought by commercial farming companies who create mega factory farms which rip out hedges, cut down trees, use the biggest farm machinery they can possibly use.
Look at the US and Australia and their factory farming industries which have decimated wildlife and biodiversity

The fact you have zero knowledge of the economics of UK agriculture kind of undermines any opinion you might have on this tbh

By taxing those who have far more than they need. I don't claim to know the best approach to this.

My point was that contribution to society is not just about money, essential workers give far more than their pay would indicate. I wasn't just talking about NHS. Care workers, supermarket workers, lorry drivers, train drivers, factory workers, cleaners, teachers, childcare workers and so on.

Another tax coming for middle class and high earners is the private schools VAT. This is going to be last straw for many like me. Leaving before it happens. Enough is enough.

Eh? It isn’t complicated. As you say in your OP the problem is that there aren’t enough net contributors.

The mega wealthy always set up offshore companies, so they never pay tax in the UK (except the amazing JK Rowling who chooses to pay tax here voluntarily 🤩). So we’re talking here about the taxpayers who aren’t mega wealthy.

To use your simplified example, the maths works if you have 100 people earning £1k and 1 person earning £200k. But if you have 50,000 people earning fuck all and only 5 people earning £200k, the country has a big problem. Obviously those are silly figures but you get the idea. How many net contributors do you know?

That depends on where the cottage is.

I've seen the argument many times that people should move from deprived areas with no jobs to places where there are jobs (and inflated housing costs, of course).

I sometimes think about what would happen if you let the rich opt out of tax - but they couldn't benefit from tax funded services in any way - no using roads, no fire brigade if their house caught fire, no police if they were burgled or mugged, not able to employ anyone who had ever benefitted from any tax funded services (so pretty much everyone), no NHS ambulances or A&E if they fell down the stairs at home...

There comes a point when raising taxes leads to a loss in tax revenue as those who can afford it simply leave to pastures new without a backwards glance.

The UK is losing the wealthy at a very high rate - the net outflow of the wealthy from the UK is one of the highest in the world, and that’s been picking up steam rather than slowing down. That leaves an ever increasing burden on those with less, and so continues the death spiral.

It seems entirely counter productive to scare off the wealthy when in reality the UK needs to attract them (as other countries are purposefully doing). It’s better to have more people paying lower amounts of tax than it is to rely on getting high amounts of tax from the dwindling few.

@Pomonas Totally agree. It’s such a nasty spiteful tax, attacking children’s education, and it would be a criminal offence in the EU.

It’s all about Kier Starmer wanting his revenge for his own grammar school becoming private when he was there, and his jealousy of his political rivals who went to Eton. That most independent schools are nothing like Eton, and are in fact a refuge for the bullied / SEN children who the state sector ignores, is a fact Kier cannot comprehend.

The DWP budget is £280 billion. The defence budget is £300 billion. The overseas aid budget is £13 billion. If a Labour government really was serious about improving state education then they need to reallocate some of the billions we spend on other stuff: that’s what governments do, they allocate money.

Taxing private education costs the country more (in terms of kids moving to state schools ) than it raises. Kier doesn’t care. He just wants to make you jealous of your neighbours so you’ll vote for him if he promises that your neighbour will have to drive an older car and have less holidays.

I despise Kier Starmer. Don’t worry, I also loathe the Greens and LibDems for their campaigns against women’s rights and children’s safeguarding, and the Tories have just been a disaster since they got in. I’ll vote Tory for the first time in my life though because only an idiot would vote to pay an extra £25k in tax to help Kier feel better about his childhood and career.

#letsallmovetoCyprus 🥳

There’s such a huge dumbing down of the UK which is a real shame. Things that used to mark as us different, the Royal Family, excellent education system for example are just been stripped back and thrown away. I can’t imagine how fucking horrendous it’s going to be in a decade.

I’m raising my children to become independent and leave. I’m ploughing money into tuition and Uni fees with the hope they will be able to get to a level on their careers where they can choose where to live globally. It might even be that they pick roles where they travel extensively. If they end up living in a little local village nearby I would consider it a huge failure on my part. This country is done.

Trouble is that a lot of the people who've gone are people we DO need, such as doctors, IT contractors, actuaries, etc. I could weep when I look at my client list today (as an accountant) compared with 10 years ago. Literally dozens of higher paid "workers" have gone to work abroad. These aren't mega-rich billionaires, they're working professionals who were net contributors whilst they were working and living in the UK and now are net contributors to other countries instead. Yes, some would have gone anyway just for improved standard of living, etc., but IR35 has been an absolute disaster, especially for "knowledge" workers such as IT contractors and actuaries who can literally work anywhere in the World with a good broadband connection.

Yep, same here. We've "conditioned" our son from a young age to expect to move for work as we live in, frankly, a shit hole run down area of the country. We told him endlessly about the importance of a good education, specifically STEM and really encouraged any interest he showed in technology, sciences, Maths, etc., for him to get skills/qualifications that would mean he'd be "portable" and moveable for jobs anywhere in the World. Thankfully he took it on board, worked his ass off to get his First degree in Maths and moved straight away to a "nice" city for his first job with an international firm, where he's currently studying for a sought after "niche" professional qualification. In his own words, he's going to be there for the five years it takes to qualify and then "bugger off" to somewhere like Australia or Dubai, hopefully working for the same employer but at one of their foreign offices. He doesn't want to come back to our home town (and who can blame him) and has no real interest in staying in the UK at all.

Good for you and good for your son. Honest this shit hole is a massive race to the bottom. If I had known ten years ago what would happen I would have never brought the kids into it. Even the bloody billionaires are trying to move planet. I always think that says it all.

My kids will not be funding the huge victimhood of the generations coming up being passively parented to be entitled adult babies.

Here's an idea - how about everyone contributes according to what services they use?

I'm childless & a net contributor by some margin, every hour of overtime i do is taxed at 40% plus NI, so 1 in 2 hours overtime I'm working to pay the government. I'm sick of people saying I should pay more, especially covering over the cracks left by men who don't pay child support to the multiple women they've impregnated, whatever their income level. If we're going to raise women & families out of poverty, CMS needs to be increased to 50% of the amount that it actually costs to raise a child, per child, instead of the pittance it is now, and force the non-resident partner to contribute, even if it's held as debt till they're earning later on. You hear read it all the time on mumsnet - women struggling & down the food bank as their ex skips off on holiday with a new woman.

I don't understand how the government will happily set up a loan system for young students to saddle themselves with debt until they're 65, but shrug their shoulders and write off child support debt from NRPs who decide to hide their income until the kid hits 18.

The spirit of the thread so far has been that ‘the people who have far more than they need’ should just FUCK OFF and MOVE if they don’t want to contribute.

Short sighted, ignorant, envious logic.

We should be trying to keep our ‘net contributors’. It benefits us all, particularly those who rely on public services and have zero exit option.

We shouldn’t need to bribe people with a promise of low taxes - somewhere else will always win like that - Dubai for example as mentioned. I wouldn’t live there by choice, but people with no morals won’t mind propping up human rights abuse and the blatant abuse of women as long as they don’t have to pay tax.

It’s entirely self defeating. It’s not like the wealthy that are leaving are at all bothered by the ‘fuck off and leave then’ grumbling. No, they’re off elsewhere to continue living well. Meanwhile, those telling them to fuck off remain behind to live with the actual reality of wealth flight and all that entails.

It’s not the wealthy that are losing here.

‘Shouldn’t need to’ doesn’t come into it - the country does need to.

Fortunately not everyone is a greedy git motivated only by paying the minimum possible amount of tax. I am very pleased we have JKR and others to counter the Philip Greens - good riddance to greedy twats who don’t want to pay their way.

I would think it's obviously a good idea to have as many net contributors as possible. How that is achieved is the question, it seems everyone wants to contribute as little as possible. Nearly everyone feels hard done by, net receivers think they should get more, people on comparatively low incomes think they shouldn't have to contribute, the great middle class wonder why they bother to work so hard because they are taxed so much on each additional pound and the wealthy keep their wealth abroad in tax havens and can up and leave if they don't like the tax regime. No easy answers particularly not for politicians who want to be elected.

Only if you want to live in a race to the bottom shithole that makes the poor pay all the tax. I don’t.

I am (and have been for most of my adult life) a net contributor. I don’t feel overtaxed - and I don’t feel the burden should fall unfairly on poorer people to pay bribes to keep the rich here.

Those on low incomes can not afford to pay more and still feed their families, keep the heat on, pay the rent. To take more from the poor, they first need to be paid a real living wage for the essential work they do.

I was also badly hit by IR35 as mentioned by a pp - this didn’t cause me to fuck of to Spain or Dubai as I like the UK.