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.

riven: "And you never ever get a child saying ' I wished mummy and daddy had worked more hours so we could have more stuff'. Nearly all of them in survey after survey wished they'd seen both parents more while growing up."

I don't know. Depends on the parents and child. If someone had asked me in the survey, I would have said I would have preferred it if my mother worked and made our family circumstances more financially secure and was less of a martyr about staying at home for the children. As a teenager and older, I could certainly see the benefits of having more money. Not to just buy stuff, but to invest in education, buy a property, just have a leg up in today's competitive world. It is one of the reasons I continue to work - with my dcs' long term interests in mind.

100 hour weeks are a lot. In high earning professionals, I don't think it is exploitative. The remuneration comes with a very very high premium to compensate for the intrusion into personal life. And to a certain extent, unless there is a reason you need the money (like OP), there is a choice to change employer, downscale at any time. Lots of high stress professionals cash in early at 40, after having paid off their mortgages and then go sailing around the world. It is a perfectly recognised financial model to structure your working and family life at different stages in your career.

The best of both worlds is as Xenia describes. To love your job and integrate it into your personal life so that it is seemless. Then you can work until you retire at a usual age. Long hours will not be a chore. Work can be supremely interesting and lots of it can nowadays be done remotely by home computing, telephone, blackberry. If you are happy with that lifestyle (I am not because I prefer work and family life to be compartmentalised), it could work very well plus bring great financial rewards. I know men and women at my firm who are like that. And their children are lovely, well turned-out and well-behaved.

Riven - althouh i agree with almost everything you said it seems to me that we are looking at the value you get from work( cash, self esteem, a sense of achievement) with the value you get from family (love, security, support) and expecting them to be capable of being compared - you cant compare them it is like saying apples are the same as oranges. Surely the point is that you have to try to get the right balance for you and every person's balance will be different.

Some are fortunate to have found that balance (high paid, low paid whatever) and some haven't. If you are paid an absolute shedload it is only right you work your socks off - it is a choice to work 100 hours a week but i see no reason why a company should not expect it if it is willing to give value back in return for that work. Business is not an altruisitc affair, it is just capitalism and there's no shame in that. You are right, a company cant care but then why should it, that's not the reason for its existence.

I think that its better for a child to have two parents working than be in a family that is living on benefits.

I have not yet seen any studies that show that the children of working parents lose out academically or socially. I think children benefit from having parents with a work ethic.

Well said really tired, totally agree

I surely cannot be the only reasonably high wage earner to thank my lucky stars that Labour did not go back to the punitive rates of tax at the top end that existed pre-thatcher? I think we are bloody lucky to be capped at 40%, especially when you consider the whole tax burden of the country (and include stuff like VAT): this burden falls disproportionately on the lower earners. Anyone who thinks it appropriate to redistribute the tax burden at the very highest levels, thereby increasing the already phenomenal rich-poor divide in this country deserves to be, I dunno - maybe strapped to rockets and fired into south Lebanon? Yes, I could have cried when I saw how much of my annual bonus went on tax when I got it this month, but I was bloody grateful for the bit that remained, and don't for a second think I am a more deserving person than, say, a nurse, because I got that money and the nurse didn't. I was just very thankful that I live in a democracy where my skills are valued at a high market rate, and not living in a meritocracy instead.

Personally, I find the levels of inequality in this country really embarassing. Just because I embrace stuff like private education in raising my own kids and just because I am (horribly) proud of my own achievements doesn't make me comfortable with the fact that most of the country get a second rate life compared to the lucky few. I grew up in a very poor family and everything that came to me was a direct result of the grammar school system (and to an extent the work ethics that were driven into me by both family and teachers). I think it appalling that even these educational ladders are being removed and that school class sizes and suchlike are robbing people of the opportunities I enjoyed, and all this is being done to keep taxes low and politicians in their jobs.

And I am also angered beyond belief that the very vast majority of people in this country feel aggrieved by the very same issues but no-one seems aggrieved enough to take it up with their MP's, get involved themselves politically, nor to look behind the headlines when it comes to election time and focus on policies and not how 'nice' the leaders appear to be. Until that happens we are all living on Animal Farm. And I say that as one of the people feeding at the trough.

What a can of worms! I can't believe this thread's still going!

Surely you dont need to earn that much to live on so cut down ur hours and like someone said this would result in less tax and hey preseto u can be part of a family again!!!
If ur having 72 k tax taken off u must be earning over 300K.

Nice turn to the thread for a change. Perhaps the housewives are busy taking their children to school.

Some people are just miserable whatever they do. I don't think that whether you work or don't is the factor that most decides your brain chemistry, your propensity to despression, your life view.

100 hours a week is not common. My daughter's friend who went straight from university to a bank (he is an exceptional boy in all respects) to a starting salary of £65k has been working some 7 day weeks and things like 24 hours without time off so may be he has been up to 100 hours but that's quite rare.

It's hard to know what hours I work. If I'm out solidly doing one thing then that's pretty easy to calculate. If I'm here then I do a mixture of things. I just broke off to cuddle the gorgeous sleeping twin with his red and squidge up cheeks who looks about 3 hours younger when he's asleep then I broke off earlier (much earlier) to deal with the other twin, gave the 21 year old money for the hair dresses, put on dishwasher, in other words the home and work things are a constant over lap when I'm working at home.

(Don't need anyone to work for me - it's just too complicated to bother with I think. I like the purity and simplicity and cost saving of my being the only one working here)

On the question of whether children want mothers (and fathers) to work it's not straightforward. My mother was very clever and worked full time (in fact kept my father when he was a medical student for years on her pay in the 1950s) for 13 years until I was born when she was about 33. Then I think she was content to be at home when we were little but about 5 years in she seemed hugely to resent it, complained constantly about she'd just done 5 loads of washing tha tmorning whereas my father was being treated like a God, on TV, admired by patients. When she died I found stashed in her room some grateful notes from his patients she had intercepted and never given to him (I think she hated him very much which is a separate issue). So yes she became the martyr thing, didn't she and I really can't see how we benefited from that at all except that it presumably made all 3 of us including my brother reasonably feminist I suppose. She could have returned to work. no one stopped her but she got trapped in a cycle of feeling fed up and hard done to without effecting change.

Many women do this - they love to moan about their lives, their men, their children but they never then change anything.

I think that there needs to be better respite for disabled children and childcare. The parents of some SEN children are really pushed over the edge to the point of being suicidal.

I would be prepared to pay more tax for better support of families of children with severe SEN. The respite services in our area are not enough.

Its particularly bad for children who are not physically disabled, but have major learning difficulties like autism.

I'm getting the strong impression that some of the people that resent paying too much tax are doing so because they feel that the services they are getting in return are not as good as they would like.

For example, someone has complained about their local school. and someone else about the NHS. I'm guessing that these parents are choosing to go private, at least on the schooling, and resent paying to support the other schools and less than perfect NHS out of their pay as well.

This makes some kind of sense, but also explains the muddiness of some of their arguments, as there is no logical answer. I'm sure they wouldn't want to go totally private, say on health, fir example, I'm assuming that the OP's husband was treated by the NHS after his accident, and her daughter is seeing NHS consultants; and I'm sure they wouldn't really want to live in a country which had no safety net for the poor or sick. That's kind of why the only suggestions we are seeing are flippant, or illogical.

What irks me the most about paying taxes is that it isn't getting spent on improving services for everyone, it's paying for some lazy b's to sit on their backsides all day when they are perfectly fit and able to work. I'm not talking about SAHM's etc, it's the lazy sods who won't work and think it's their right to live off the state.

Rant over (and breath!)

oops, breathe

'it's paying for some lazy b's to sit on their backsides all day when they are perfectly fit and able to work. '

And even more of it is going to pay MPs and other high-ranking civil servants to do very little work for relatively large amounts of money, enormous pensions and even second homes in London which they are able to sell on for profit.

Still more is going to allow large corporations to get away with paying people a non-living wage and you get to top up the difference whilst the corporation's top echelon gets even richer as their shares go up, as do their bonuses when their profits climb even higher.

I already did the MPs Expat. I mentioned that they were getting a bloody good whack for unskilled middle management ...

Yes, well, it obviously hasn't sunk in for some, Quattro .

Did you know that the top 1% of earners pay around 25% of all income tax in this country?

Tootaxed will be in that bracket I would imagine.

I find it sad to think that children have lost their father and mother is working 100 hours per week.

the very highest earners [and highest earning corporations] pay no tax at all and cost us all billions a year. If you can afford the right accountant anything is possible.

Look at this link. It shows that the poles are having to do many jobs in this country.

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7316261.stm

If the poles do decide to go home then I think we need to get the British unemployed people doing these jobs. I think the poles bring a lot to the UK, but obviously we cannot force them to stay if they don't want to.

The problem is that a lot of benefit claimants see these jobs as being beneath them. They aren't prepared to take a low wage like the poles do. The benefits system does not encourage people to take such low paid work.

I am happy to pay taxes to help families with disabled children/adults. It is understandable if someone with a severely disabled child chooses not to work. I think they should be paid a carer's allowance, or alternative heavily subsidised childcare/ respite should be provided if they want to work.

I am not happy with my money supporting able bodied people who have no excuse. I think that they should be made to do part time community work in return for their benefits or forced to retrain.

I have a neighbour with two healthy kids, the youngest is six and she is PROUD to be on benefits. What kind of message does that give her kids?

tax is tantamount to theft imho regardless of what you earn - tax brackets haven't moved with inflation so most people are in fact paying far more tax than they ought to. A meagre 3k salary loses 1k in tax. It's plain wrong. My local ctax is up 5% and guess what? local councillors allowances have increased. We provide money for the bureaucrats to piffle away on second homes and final salary pensions, expenses and that doesn't even count the billions wasted on failed projects and initiatives. All the while education continues to fail our children and lacks investment. I could go on.. and on ..

Actually 3K in salary a year would incur no tax at all because it would fall under the tax free allowances. If you are talking about being paid £3K a month then that is not a meagre salary of £36K a year which would incur a £810 monthly tax bill.

To pay 6K a month in tax then your take home pay would be roughly £9.5K a month and your yearly salary would be roughly £190K (sorry if these calculations had been done earlier in the thread)

I don't think is is unreasonable of me to think if I have time to do these calculations then I have too much time on my hands at my job
www.listentotaxman.com/index.php?calc=1&year=2007&age=0&add=0&taxcode=&period=1&ingr=1900 00

Reallytired, Poles are often more able to do these jobs than many British people because they often arrive here having left their families at home.

That makes them far more able to survive on what is a non-living wage for someone who has to house and feed a family here.

When you are on your own you can share a flat with ten people and afford to pay the rent out of £5.80/hour and eat and pay bills as your costs are far lower.

Being on your own also means you don't have childcare issues.

I think the government wants the public to direct their anger towards benefits claimants, which are a drop in the ocean compared to the amount of corporate welfare that's doled out to big companies each year AND the scam of MPs and high-ranking civil servants and their vast salaries, pensions and housing allowances.

I think people who have massive salaries should be happy that they work in an industry where there is loads of money floating around and keep quiet about taxes. The distribution of wealth is not fair and has little to do with 'working hard'. Tax does something to redress the balance. There aren't enough resources for everybody to have second houses, foreign holidays and loads of cars. Some people do, thats life. If you happen to live in an era and a country and have a lifestyle where you can do that, I think the last thing you should be doing is complain - there are plenty of alternative options.

I don't agree that the distribution of wealth has little to do with working hard. I agree that there are massive differences in world economies but to earn a lot of money you have to work hard.

It is also possible to work hard and not earn a lot of money of course.

But it's pretty well universal that to earn a lot of money you have to work hard.