To be irritated by this £100k a year whiner

[Viviennemary]

On Question Time tonight they were talking about subsidised childcare and the new benefits for younger children. Then a woman came on with a boo hoo sad face and said she wouldn't be getting it. So I think Fiona Bruce said because your income is £100k a year plus Then she said that it wasnt fair as there was only one wage. And their household only had one earner.

Well tough. Folk on just over £12k a year are paying tax and this cheeky woman thinks her child care should be subsidised. It made me mad.

It’s not the £12k earner or the £100k earner that’s the issue of course despite the fact this is exactly the type of argument the Tories want us to be having. It’s the wealth hoarders and the billionaires like our own prime minister that are the problem. Tax wealth instead of just taxing income and we might have fewer issues like this.

Our defence budget is woefully underfunded, decrease the defence budget any more and we won’t be able to defend the country. We could barely manage it now. We also need immigration because the native population is decreasing. By all means stop parliamentary subsidies but it’s a miniscule amount in the scheme of the overall budget.

I know about them, of course. But it continues to be a mystery to me as to what is in it for them exactly. Because nurseries don’t make any money.

I suppose the truth of it is that they are buying up the childcare premises. Unless they are getting massive payouts from the government that no one else knows about.

YANBU she was bloody ridiculous.

”we don’t get it because we earn over £100k but if we both earned £99k we would” well boo fucking hoo.

as for this quoted post - like the woman on £100k the person on £12k pays whatever the state requires they pay in tax. Tax is what you pay as the cost of living in society and supporting those who need it more. It’s not your personal investment bank where what you get is based on what you put in.

@TooOldForThisNonsense Why is she 'bloody ridiculous'?

You could easily spend about 95% of a £100k salary on two childcare places in London at the moment.

As others are pointing out, it is a cliff edge and it is unfair.

She is expected to pay taxes to fund multiple other families and her own on top of it.

She's not a billionaire; she's probably spending every pound she make due to childcare costs.

It benefits all of society to have good, funded childcare for children. That's the real issue.

Surely the whole point is to get everyone out working.
If one person in a family isn’t working then it is assumed they don’t need childcare. Two people, however do need childcare.
The Govn are encouraging all to work and those that chose not to are therefore choosing to be the childcarer.
I don’t think the tax payer should pay for childcare in this instant.

I do understand this could mean some children with one working parent will miss out on the benefits of going to a nursery, that, however is the responsibility of the parents not the tax payer.

You're one of the nurseries (two of them, then ) that is being squeezed out. You said yourself you're struggling to make a profit.

The way these companies are doing it is the way they always do it.
They have investors to make up the shortfall, they bide their time until the competition is wiped out, then they put up their prices and recoup their investment.
Sometimes they buy out the competition; sometimes they asset-strip them.

Totally agree.

And no, having paid for childcare for my own 2 children on nothing like a household income of £100k and now being in a position that time is past for me and can enjoy the money I work hard for (still not £100k or anywhere near) I am not now willing to have the double whammy of yet more tax burden to pay the childcare costs of someone on £100k! Cheeky fucker indeed.

Absolutely this, people have no idea how tax works but the tax burden on someone earning between 100-125K actually means they are paying more like 60% tax on that portion having lost the personal allowance.

I'm afraid it doesnt work that way. You cannot expect people to hand over up to 80% on the pound of what they earn and get little in return, whilst others are able to make a livelihood (house and feed themselves and their children) off those same taxes. That is not the point of taxes.

And if you think that is fair - have at it. Then it paves the way for only 2 kinds of people that will take advantage of that scenario. Those who will do as little as possible so they can be looked after by the state AND those who will follow unrestrained capitalism since the state will not support them despite contributing significantly. We do not want that

We need a society where it pays to work, work ethic is high, people are aspirational and EVERYONE is supported as needed. If that means marginally high earners receive subsidised childcare, so be it. If that means someone hard on their luck has free childcare, fair enough

I suppose it depends on age because no one I was referring to is on plan 2 which obviously does make such a huge difference. To be on plan 2, you're looking at being younger than ~29 ish which (especially in London) seems quite young to have 2 kids.
I don't think it's wildly incorrect to think that most people with 2 kids and earning 60k will have gone to uni before plan 2 loans started and before fees were so high that 60k loans were commonplace.
For those on plan 2 who do have children, I appreciate there will be an extra chunk out of their income though it's only £300 a month. But also they won't have been paying 7.5% interest for all the years they've been making repayment.
I guess for those people it's even more important to make use of cheaper childcare options and not be choosing a nursery that costs 3k a month.

Look at how much the UK government is spending on war, MPs subsidised meals/drinks and immigration. We should not be fighting each other about childcare. We should be demanding the government reduce these other budgets, in favour of free childcare for all.

And right now, kind Mr. Hunt is offering them lots of taxpayers' money via the "free" entitlement scheme.

So?

don’t have 2 kids then if you can’t afford to pay for them? Or wait til one is older if you can?

The state paying for childcare for people on huge salaries is ridiculous.

It’s such a sad state of affairs when we’ve gotten to a point as a society where we can’t appreciate everyone’s value regardless of their earnings/profession.
We seem to bash those earning 100k plus for wanting a (small!) share of the pie that, let’s be honest, they are the main contributors to and we bash those on low income (often doing vitally important roles!) for needing that available support.

Children are economically crucial to the sustained success of any society, who do you think will be paying future taxes and contributing to enormous pensions etc.

IMO the system is flawed and early education should be funded for all children. Why does it start at 3/4!? What do the government think happens those first 3 years? Parents, typically Women, either quit their jobs or take a lesser role. Alternatively, you continue working and you find it really hard to the point it just becomes unsustainable. This is where we as a family are now. I have no problems paying our taxes whatsoever, but unless we can make use of the child support we are contributing very heavily to, we cannot sustain our jobs.

OH earns just over £100k (but no way to get this down below via pension contributions etc and in any case, it doesn’t feel nice to have to “fiddle” a way around this). I earn well but nothing near that. Our careers are London centric and not remote. For reference, our rent is £2500 pcm and nursery fees for our 1 and 2.5 yr old 5 days in nursery is £3600.
We can’t make it work anymore and are looking at what to do next, most likely, move abroad for the short term
or at the very least I will need to leave my job.

i also think the “don’t have kids if you can’t afford them” shouldn’t be said to anyone. High earners could afford their own kids if they weren’t contributing so heavily to support the kids of others, and lower earners need that support in order to have their own kids.

If we cared or even acknowledged the structural inequality maybe we wouldn't need Comic Relief to raise money for Foodbanks in the UK, Foodbanks are a symptom and they are popping up all over the place, they are a way of life now.

Sorry if someone has answered this question but isn't everyone entitled to 15 hours. Why would someone who doesn't work and has a working partner need more subsided childcare than that?

I’m not willing to fund childcare of someone on £100k. I got not a penny piece to fund mine and had to cope. I pay my taxes (a lot more than I would pay if I lived in England) and am content I pay quite enough without further subsidising the lifestyle choices of the well off.

Oh the irony. Imagine if this applied to everyone. This means all people claiming 30hrs funded shouldn't have children?

Or does affordability only apply to the high earning couples in your view?

You have completely ignored the very basic maths that demonstrates why £100k actually means you're worse off than lower earners who have identical childcare needs.

No investor will ever recoup their investment in a nursery business. And if they do, the profit will be minuscule.

Yet clearly there are many investors. So there must be something in it for them. God knows what.

She was right about the unfairness. All parents should be treated the same. My own feeling is that money for childcare is not the way forward. That is just a way to get mothers to outsource childcare to profit providers and become economic units themselves. Money would be better invested in allowing parents to decide for themselves if they want one parent to bring up their children at home or whether both go out to work. The present system is geared to getting mothers out to work as economic units asap as if money were the only criteria of worth - which, in a neo-liberal society it is, of course.

Completely agree with this. When I was a low earner doing service jobs I worked much harder than I do now, in jobs that were necessary to keep the world turning. In my experience there’s been a definite negative correlation between how much I earn and how hard I work - my work now is interesting and well paid but it’s not essential to society, I’m not on my feet all day, I have a great work life balance and yes, I use my brain but it’s also enjoyable and reasonably paced.

Some high-paying jobs are essential and necessary but I really don’t agree with the narrative that everyone earning a high salary has busted a gut to get there and works much harder than low/average earners. it’s absolute nonsense. Networking, luck and being decent at what I do got me where I am but it wasn’t particularly hard. It’s absolutely right that I and people earning much more than me pay for services for lower earners, that’s how a functioning society should work. Childcare should be fully Or mostly subsidised as in Scandinavia as far as I’m concerned and I’m childfree by choice - would happily pay for that through tax to give others choices. Taxes may “prop up the public services” but they wouldn’t exist if no lower earners worked in them to provide the services!

So not having children until you can afford them would be a huge proportion of the population now- who is going to maintain the infrastructure of the country, who is going to pay taxes to ensure we don't end up a third rate country? 1 in 3 Millennials will never own a property, where are they spending all of their big bucks? Please don't say on fucking Coffee! So governments should have no interest in childcare, no education provision, no healthcare, I mean any policies at all? Respectfully you sound like you possess no economic insight at all!

The £100k drop off hasn't increased with inflation. The equivalent in the year it was introduced, adjusted for inflation, is £82k. A good salary but hardly some kind of millionaire uplands. The instant drop off of childcare and loss of personal allowance disincentivises productivity and encourages pension stuffing. Savings are good but we also need money circulating in today's economy to support growth and others' wages. It's a terrible system.