to think that 6000 per month is excessive for the government to take off my pay for tax?

[tootaxed]

Surely there should be a maximum limit that each person has to pay as tax? Six grand per month in tax is just excessive imo. And that is before NI contributions etc. If the government set a maximum tax limit they would take more care over how they spent their central funds. And I wouldn't have to work so many hours away from my DCs only to have 72 bloody grand a year taken off my income to fund their mis-spending.

The NHS is amazing if you really need it i think non life threatening stuff does get pushed to the back of the pile due to money and staff shortages but I can honestly say in over 25 yrs of virtually constant treatment I have never had to wait for anything and 99% of the staff have been brilliant.I have ahd 2 transplants emergency heart treatment and treatm,ent for a malignant tumour and so I really needed them and they certainly saved my life.

So if we're capping taxes at 50k, then who is going to make up the shortfall?

Well perhaps it would encourage more people to work if the tax thresholds were inverted. No personal allowances and tax rates at say:

50% for the first £30k
40% for the next £30k
25% thereafter

Seems fair to me!

quattro are you serious?

Do you live anywhere near the real world?

The John/Dan snow programme that was on TV recently said that about 90% of people earn less than something like 40K (ish- can't remember the exact figures but the top 10% of earners started at around 40k)

So you would tax almost 90% of the country at 50% tax to 'encourage them to work harder'.

I suggest you get out more tbh.

Quattro that has just made me larf and larf and larf.

Erm, do you not think that if your plan had any merit at all then ONE government in the whole entire world might have tried it?

Besides (as I have already pointed out at length on this thread) the poor actually pay MORE tax ALREADY.

Part of the reason we have supertax is to offset the disproportionate burden that council tax and VAT place on the very poor. Supertax tries to redress this slightly but the very poor STILL pay more tax than the very rich, so if anyone is on here moaning about their tax burden it should be the people in the lowest income bracket, not the highest.

Think Quattro is trying Xenia's trick of throw something contraversial in when you're running out of steam with an argument...

Got this from housepricecrash.co.uk

"46K and over was the figure for the top 10% on "What Britain Earns". 20% of the earners are on less than 10K. The 4,500 top earners in the country earn the same amount of money as the 3M at the bottom."

It would be utterly obscene to tax the majority of the country at 50% to support the wealth of the top 10%.

If taxes were like that the majority of people really would be better off on benfits It also only benefits high earner and by high I mean v high!

But Yurt, I was also going to axe all benefits for able bodied people capable of working. D'ya like the manifesto?

No I was not being serious. Was being entirely flippant in fact.

But I do want to make two serious points

(i) The current system does not incentivise people to work especially hard and in fact penalises those of us who work hard by taxing us more.

(ii) It ill-behoves those who do not pay a lot in the way of tax to demand that more money be given up gladly from those who chose (or feel they have to) work very hard.

That's true of course

who says the people supporting tax on this thread don't pay a lot themselves?

I don't think anyone has posted their salary!

It's a rather big assumption that only low-earners are altruistic.

Besides which (sorry to bang on about this) the low earners PAY MORE TAX THAN THE HIGH EARNERS so if anyone deserves a break it's them!

And btw the current tax system doesn't exactly disincentivise hard work. I seriously doubt anyone ever turned down a payrise because they only took home 60% of it

I'm with Fio. Can we drop the myth that the only people who work hard are the high paid.

As someone else said way back, salaries reflect taxes. If higher rate tax wasn't 40% then the gross salary would be lower. Net the same.

fio, I'll pay on behalf of you

Two words...Victoria Beckham. It's hard work!!

yurt - so true.

Plenty of low paid people work far longer hours than city lawyers simply because they have to in order to get by. Some have two or even three jobs. And when they get home they have to do their own cooking, cleaning and childcare (also work). And maybe they are being paid for most of the hours they work so in that sense they are not working unpaid overtime, but the total is still infinitesimally less than the city lawyer. They are still working longer hours, equally hard, for less money.

Also long hours do not necessarily equal hard work. I know from my own office that the people who are there at 8pm are not necessarily the ones who have worked their arses off all day. I moan if I have to spend the weekend looking after clients - it's a pain and I'd rather be at home with my son - and yes, it's 48 hours of unpaid overtime - but it's not the same as scrubbing floors for 48 hours.

Googled and found some numbers from OECD, they relate to 2000 so are a bit out of date I'm afraid. The first percentages are income as a percentage of average income for the country, the second percentage is the tax suffered including employer taxes.

France
67% 47.4%
100% 49.6%
133% 50.6%
167% 51.7%

Germany
67% 48.6%
100% 54.0%
133% 56.2%
167% 56.0%

UK
67% 28.3%
100% 32.2%
133% 33.0%
167% 35.2%

source

Seems to me we don't exactly pay massively high taxes in this country compared to the two other main european countries.

What those statistics show (if accurate) is that lower paid workers are getting a much better deal in the UK than in France or Germany.

The young visitor has kept banging on about the poor paying more tax - here

"But please can we ditch this idea that the wealthy pay more tax? For the last time THEY DON'T.

They pay more INCOME tax. They do not pay more GROSS tax. They pay less gross tax than the very poor.

Here are the figures given in answer to a parliamentary question about gross tax levels.

In the 2004/5 tax year households in the bottom bracket earnt an average of £8376 and paid an average of £3564 gross tax - about 43% of their total income.

People in the top bracket earnt an average of £84357 and paid an average of £29420 in tax - about 35%"

Of course she is talking in percentage terms and conveniently choses to ignore (1) that the figure of £29420 is eight times larger than £3564 and (2) the poor households get lots of benefits and child tax credits etc.

Lots of benefits and tax credits! Oh that's ok then, they have no worries - I must get on the blower and tell everyone that there are LOTS of benefits and tax credits to be had!

percentage terms is the clearest way to put it! Because it clearly shows the inequality of the system - how can it be equitable that the poorest households pay a larger portion of their household income in tax...