To think getting less than 50% of your pay is crazy?

[rampe]

If someone earns £15,000 a month. They have a student loan. They pay in 10% into their pension.
They take home less than £7,000 a month.

Why would you be better off? You only pay higher rate tax on the salary OVER the tax bands you don't pay it on it all. You'll get the same tax free allowance as everyone.

People who earn less don't necessarily work less hard.

Plus I don't think you can say very high earners "are holding the country up", because there's way fewer of them than the middle earners who are paying the 40% rate!

And there's a lot of high earners who manage not to pay their dues.

People don't hate high earners but it seems as though you expect people to thank you for paying your taxes. Lots of people on low salaries prop this country up doing essential jobs such as care work. Your alzheimer's research is so valuable, but someone caring for an alzheimer's patient is really valuable too but this isn't reflected in their salary.

No it's not a big difference, as they would only pay the higher tax band on the proportion over £50k, not the whole amount. The cliff comes over £100k.

Whoah whoah wait. I read that as £15k a year. Now changing my vote. Very very unreasonable!!

Oh stop whining, OP. You? have student debt - your choice - and are putting a healthy amount into your pension - also your choice.

Your point being? Outsourcing overseas is bad for the UK economy and customer service, completely agree.

One of my siblings' employers tried it.

They realised that the overseas workers didn't have the knowledge.

Luckily broadband was just about in every home so the union negotiate that a way to save the company money and keep the knowledge but also to keep their members employed was to get everyone to work at home. This did mean that about 5% of the workforce had to go as they had no space to work at home.

So yes lots of jobs can be done overseas but things like knowledge, skills, data security and customer service means they don't always leave it that way.

At this point, I want to suggest that the burden of taxation which funds all the issues closest to our hearts, including but not limited to children, disabled people and seniors, and their health needs and actually the solution is to put 1p or 2p on the basic rate of rate, so every tax payer chips in more. It is more straightforward that if you declare income of £x, there's a 35% chunk taken in tax... no matter how it is acquired... so charged on capital gains too. Stop paying UC, which is a subsidy to (usually) big businesses who suppress hours, eligibility for pensions and sickness benefit, which would cut into shareholder dividends, which in turn make the pension funds/wealth we shall all need and spend in retirement. At which point we shall discover which businesses are truly viable because they can finance a true living wage... Sadly, I fear it would collapse too many small businesses that teeter on the brink of insolvency.

I totally agree. It's a horrible system, so unfair.

I also read it and assumed per year despite it clearly stating otherwisee. 7k a month is more than enough for anyone.

I thought it would mean they're paying less tax - presumably that's what they find most galling.

I don't think it's misleading at all, in actual fact a wide range of economists have identified this as a failure in the tax system. The impact of the marginal tax cliff edge (including loss of free childcare) in reducing GDP and overall tax take is well acknowledged. The impact of stamp duty on downsizing is also well acknowledged. Rather than relying on your personal experience/judgement you could instead rely on the existing research that exists?

You don't see the link between tax and regulatory systems for profits/risks and banks lending to property? Forgive the simplification there are rules around bank liquidity and risk requirements which impact on bank lending and the return on the banks capital from doing so. These regulations impact on risk/profit of different types of lending due to required liquidity reserves for different types of loans, changes to regulations and liquidity requirements can increase/reduce lending to for instance residential real estate or businesses. Being more radical Richard Werner also has interesting suggestions about methods of restricting bank lending to real estate to prevent residential asset bubbles and skew lending towards productive assets.

From MSE's calculator:

To be honest, as someone who is very pro-taxing the well off, I don't think we should be removing these things from higher rate taxpayers. Every parent should be eligible for free childcare, and everyone should get their full tax free amount. Free school meals? Every child.

It would make the system far less complicated, for starters. It would also cut out the ridiculous argument that people who pay in don't get out (which they do. Even if they don't claim a state benefit in the whole of their working life, they rely on the labour of others in their society who are supported by those systems. We're all part of it and we rely on eachother for society to function).

The "marginal" tax rate on earnings over £50k is 42% plus eventual loss of child benefit when between £60-£80k.

The marginal tax rate on earnings over £100k is 62% plus the immediate loss of free childcare hours.

Those figures are just income tax and NIC. You'd need to add in the student loan repayments too if appropriate.

That's exactly why the likes of higher earners like doctors choose to work part time so that they can keep their wages below £100k.

That's why it's so damaging to the country. We need to encourage such people to work more, especially in professions where there is a shortage of workers.

You could sacrifice your very high wage to give low paid workers a salary increase then you'd pay the same tax as them 👍

Why would anyone spend years of extra studying and low pay whilst training for the same pay as those on low wages??

There is a reason that some people are paid more, and it's usually recompense for extra years of studying and low/no pay to gain knowledge and experience.

No one would ever train for a decade or more to be a doctor if they were paid the same as Amazon delivery drivers!

I trained for 6 years and then a further 4 for my charter badge and earn c£1.20 more p/h than a delivery driver. I’m well aware that my profession is not respected enough to get paid for that effort. Fine. I believe what I do is important and needed and I bloody well know you would notice if we all stopped doing it. But let’s not pretend that sustained hard, extra work equals high wages.

These doctors could do years less schooling and go into finance/banking/consultancy, to make the same amount with less stress (because if your slide deck is shit, no one dies).

But they CHOOSE to be doctors.

Anyway, doctors choosing to work part time doesn't actually cause the problems you seem to think it does. It creates space for more positions. If 40 hours per week are budgeted for a position, and someone only works 20 hours of that budget, they can hire someone into the other 20 hours.

I do, to some extent, think that more part time doctors would go some way into fixing the health service: less stress for each doctor. More open positions for juniors to move upwards. Less of a bottleneck.

@QuickJadeUser

I do, to some extent, think that more part time doctors would go some way into fixing the health service: less stress for each doctor. More open positions for juniors to move upwards. Less of a bottleneck.

That idea only works if medical school places and training places are doubled to allow for every GP to work half a normal working week. What happened in reality is that the BMA refused to sanction a massive increase in training schools/places. It's not rocket science that training the same number of doctors as we did decades ago when they tended to work full time, in a time when they'll work part time, would cause massive shortages, which is what we're seeing.

Medical school places isn't the problem, it's the number of training places, and the number of senior positions (people in certain specialties end up in junior positions for far longer than they should due to the lack of consultant positions).

But this is all neither here nor there. We can improve the number of training spaces. That's something we can do. We just choose not to because six figure earners whine about having to pay tax, and people on 30k pretend like they're temporarily embarrassed millionaires. People should give unto caesar that which is caesar's (id est, pay your damn taxes and do it quietly. WWJD? pay tax. TWJWD.).

High earners choosing to work part time to keep their wages below £100K only makes sense if they actually want to work part time. I assume that they will have less take home pay than if they worked full time, even with the higher tax burden?

I am surprised at doctors doing this to deliberately keep their taxes low when they, more than anyone else, can see the effect of underinvestment in the NHS.

When the loss of free childcare (on earnings over £100k) is added to the 62% marginal tax rate, and pension deductions, and maybe even some residual student loan deductions for younger ones, it's quite possible that they end up worse off by doing an extra day/shift, hence it's simply not worth it.

We also had the lifetime pension punitive tax cost, too, which meant that the likes of GPs were hit with a tax bill when their pension fund value breached the lifetime limits, which again, encouraged them to reduce working hours/days so as to reduce the amount by which their pension fund value increased.

Even if they're not "worse off" by working full time or extra days/shifts, there's a balance as to what the extra is worth compared with the opportunity of having an extra day off to allow them to do something else. When you're already earning well, you're not "desperate" to earn more as you can cope fine anyway, so if you only "earn" say 25% of the day rate for working an extra day, you may well think sod that, I'll have an extra day off - after all, it could mean they save on childcare, or dont' need a gardener, or don't need a cleaner, etc if they have a day off, meaning more savings!

The entire point is that once over the threshold the amount you lose if you have children in other stuff means you aren't actually making more until you reach £130k I think it is. So may as well work part time and go back full time in the future/when you get promoted