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.

Shaking my head at some of these comments. I earn less than £12k. I don't get a single thing free. Zero, zilch, nada. I have to pay for everything. I don't get a single penny of benefits due to being single and having no dependants.

And before someone asks why don't I work more or better myself, it's my health. 9 chronic conditions, no hope of improvement and I don't qualify for a penny of help.

Do I feel sorry for her, nope.

The example being trotted out here that someone earning over 100k could be a GP and if they drop their hours we will all suffer, is disingenuous. Most of these high earners will be working in corporate.The pay range for salaried GPs spans about 70k-104k.

I agree that it has to feel that the system is reasonably fair and that everyone benefits as well as contributes.

The UK system has become a complete mess of ridiculous and obvious unfairnesses. And no government looks likely to fix them either, which is dreadful. Most obviously the way that child benefit and childcare/early education support thresholds are set. I am still amazed that parliament approved a system that is designed to fuck over single mothers who earn £50+, and then make it even worse if they dare to earn £100k.

When it came in I was part of a household that fell into the lucky fuckers who still get it because neither of you earns more than £50k (but collectively the household income is more than that). And I simply could not understand how that could be allowed to happen.

The thing about the tax and benefits system is that people have to believe it’s somehow fair and just. Choosing to make it unquestionably unfair in any way - especially a way that is front and centre for families - undermines it in all sorts of ways.

Although cynically i suspect that stoking anger about tax and benefits was the intention. Making child benefit unbelievably unfair is a good way to do that.

I think you may be misinformed about the replacement cost of an entire person.

It's up to you whether you're irritated or not OP, but your attitude is very short sighted and self indulgent.

The UK has a stupidly designed tax system, and there are lots of cliff edges and bottlenecks. These potentially disincentivise work, which is a bad thing. These exist at the lower end just as much as the higher end, people on UC are making the same kinds of choices too. All of these things are facts.

Having this kind of system is a bad thing for all of us, especially in a society where we don't have enough workers. But people like you insist on seeing the issue in terms of their personal sympathies rather than what's most sensible for us as a society. You're a bigger problem than she is.

Why would they only pay full fees from age 1-3? You’ve missed the entire point of this thread which is that if one earns over £100k they don’t get any funded hours so they pay full fees - less a tiny amount for the stretched 15 hour funding - (which are often inflated to cover the cost of funded places) until their child goes to school. At which point if they need to use before/after school care and holiday care they don’t get to use tax free childcare towards it.

slightly off topic can I ask what you do that gives you a £30k retirement pension ? Just had a shock at how low mine is for working 30 odd years 😪

Sorry not 30k pension, I meant their salary was 30k.

This is so unreasonable. On this site alone there must be thousands of accounts of feckless men who play the system so they pay nothing towards their children. It is in no way reasonable to design a system with the assumption that both parents contribute or participate in their children’s lives.

You could say that but it wouldn't be true.

Totally believe all the above professions should be paid much more than they currently are, but they aren't due to mismanagement of public funds and not because highest earners aren't already paying very high taxes and astronomical childcare fees.

You should definitely check out your entitlements here. If you earn lots less than £12k a year, you are probably entitled to UC. Unless you have significant savings.

@ClutchingOurBananas there's a lot of rumours about Hunt doing something with the child benefit system in the budget next month, so maybe that situation will improve a bit. Although if I were a betting woman, I'd say they're more likely to raise the thresholds than get rid of the underlying discrimination against single earner households.

So many straw man arguments here.

The crux of the issue is whether the public sector (taxes and services) should ever act as a disincentive to work. The answer should always be a resounding no.

To deal with some of the straw man arguments, which, by definition, really have nothing to do with the point the woman on question time was making:

‘Choosing to have children’. I never know where to begin with this but want to weep that people at a society level that society has no choice but to have children if humanity is to continue. Now we can talk about number of children that people can reasonably raise but if everyone ‘chose’ to have no children we would all be in a pickle.

’Essential workers are underpaid’. This may well be true. The problem is most of the essential workers are also public sector workers and so reliant on the wage they do earn from tax payers.

‘People who earning in excess of £100k can afford it’. Maybe and maybe not. But does that mean that they should pay for everything that they can afford that is currently a universal service? If we do we just introduce another barrier from the public sector for working harder.

Putting all this to one side I would scrap all personal allowances and just have a flat income tax rate that we all pay regardless of what we earn. Rich people will still pay a lot more than poor people but even the poorest contribute a little. It is like the threads where someone says how much they should contribute towards bills in a marriage. Everyone seems to think the fairest approach is to pay proportionately to what each partner earns. I don’t know how that is different for tax.

The benefits system used to operate by reducing income support payments relative to child maintenance. If your ex actually contributed to his kids upbringing, it could reduce benefit entitlement to zero. And people just had to pay for childcare with little support available, so getting back to work was even harder.

The system left lots of children living in poverty. Especially as the reduction would apply whether the man actually paid maintenance or not.

It was a really bad system. It trapped lots of women in abusive relationships.

This is not a comparison between herself and those earning £12k. It's a comparison between her situation and those where the same income is make up of two earners. In that situation, she would qualify for child benefit (or a proportion of), childcare assistance and pay less tax overall. So yes, her situation is unfair and unjust. Obviously she is far better off than someone in £12k, but her household should not be bringing in less than a household of two lower earners.

We are in the same situation. I gave up my job when DC were small as we were struggling g to co-ordinate both jobs without any family support. DH's career took off as he was able to be very flexible and work very long hours. We are, however, worse off financially than we would have even had we both pushed on in lower earning roles. I do not deny that our quality of life has been better, but we have paid a big financial price for it.

Minimum wage full time is almost £24k now.

None of the rumours are about fixing the unfairness. Just tinkering with the thresholds to change who is affected by it.

I agree with you on one side but surely the reason you took for not working was to contribute childcare, thus saving costs, even if partial? Single parents often can't do this and so are theoretically hit twice; not having the extra income and all childcare coming out of their one pot.

Flat rate of income tax plus wealth taxes - both universally applied - would be fairer

YABVU

How about those part time low earning "whiners" stop expecting things for free?

Not nice is it

I've seen a bit about universal, but I agree with you that doesn't seem likely. It's a fundamentally unfair system and discriminates against single income households.

I would be happy for my taxes to subsidise their pre-school childcare costs if it means we keep one or two extra people paying high rates of tax for the rest of their working lives to pay for good quality public services. If it were up to me, I would stop child benefit being means tested too. I would, however, keep free school meals means tested, but remove universal free school meals for infants and use the savings to extend the FSM threshold so more low income families qualify.

The one near me is £110 per day so for two dc full time it would be 4K plus.

On a separate note despite DPs impassioned defense of forest schools, I still don’t see why we should willingly pay this kind of money for our child to go play in a bush in the cold and wet. It’s just so first world to pay for the poverty experience.

My view is that if you pay tax to subsidise childcare/child benefit you should be able to access that subsidy whether you earn £20k or £200k.

20 years ago when we bought our house it was worth £140k. Assuming that you had a 10% deposit and 2 salaries you'd need a household income of £28k to purchase it. Same house now, £650k so assuming £65k deposit (ha!) you'd need a joint salary of £130k. Wages have stagnated, taxes, housing and childcare costs have rocketed. £100k income, especially in the South, doesn't go far.

It's interesting that this poll thus far is that OP is BU. I wonder whether that would've happened even a couple of years ago. People may be more receptive now to hearing that we can't actually afford outrage wanking over this issue, and need to focus on practical solutions.

But if wages are capped, tax receipts go down so where does the money for all the subsidies comes from?