To not be happy about paying this much tax

[Lovingthehamsterwheel]

Name changed to enable objectivity.
I just saw this new tax calculator that shows you how much tax you are paying in total, including all hidden taxes, council tax etc

For a Person on 75k a year, 44 percent of earnings go on tax.

10k of that is spent on welfare.

Am i being unreasonable to think this is absolutely a terrible time to be alive in terms of taxes in the UK. And it is no wonder higher earners are leaving the country.

tax.corgi.global/

That's fine if the service improves to actually be something useful and efficient.

I don't. It's yet another "tax on workers" who are already being screwed by tax, nic, student loans, housing costs, childcare costs, workplace pension deductions, etc. If anything, we should be encouraging and prioritising the health and wellbeing of workers as we need as many people working as possible, not languishing on sick leave awaiting appointments/treatments!

Of course, those exempt would continue wasting appointments for trivial things.

I do agree that IF we are to have charges, then there should be no automatic exemptions for OAPs and that yes, they should be means tested, likewise for free prescriptions. Just set the means testing threshold high enough not to affect poorer pensioners- maybe the £60k threshold that we manage perfectly well to use for child benefit claw back via the tax record system.

Agree, if we want a better health service, then start with our own life choices & introduce polices to reduce tax burdens on working people, esp those who work or want to work in the NHS.... ie Tuition fees.

It's yet another "tax on workers" who are already being screwed by tax, nic, student loans, housing costs, childcare costs, workplace pension deductions, etc.

Your constant harping on like this is getting very old. Student loan repayments and childcare costs are optional and pension contributions are a tax free investment.

Student loans aren't optional for lots of professions, such as nurses, doctors, actuaries, architects, etc. where degrees are essential. Organisations have also moved over to degrees being a minimum entry requirement for lots of jobs that never used to require degrees. So, I'd say that for lots of workers, especially professional level, a student loan is pretty much essential, as most people would need a loan to finance their degree studies. Another way in which the oldies have pulled up the drawbridge behind them as most of them only needed good O or A levels to get good jobs/professions, and those who needed a degree didn't have to get £40-£50k in debt to do so!

Workplace pensions are tax deductible but not NI deductible and again, weren't so essential in the past as they are now as today's young workers probably won't get automatic state pensions and will probably have to wait even longer.

Childcare is essential if we want workers to have children and carry on working. We need workers to have children to pay for and care for the oldies in years to come.

For almost all NHS roles, a degree is mandatory, so tuition fees aren't optional in that sense.

My DD is now Band 6, her loan repayments are about £80 per month, add in v high rents, council tax, running a car - essential for her job - & she isn't left with a great deal each month, better off than many of course but people seem to think that now a days, a salary of 37k is equivalent to what it was 15 years ago.

Don't be daft @BIossomtoes. Are you reality so out of touch with reality?

Correct, of course. Unfortunately, someone who makes such a dismissive remark is unlikely to want to listen to logical explanations. I hope I am wrong!

@badbadbunny the issue in relation to jobs and degrees is that many employers now request a degree when it is not needed for the job. When MIL qualified as a teacher in 1957, she did not need a degree to teach. She needed a teaching certificate.

What cannot be sustained is 40% of the population going to university to get a degree when it is not essential. I am sick and tired of interviewing graduates, usually from Post 92s who cannot construct a grammatically correct sentence, think critically or perform simple arithmetic like converting a decimal to a fraction.

Exactly. Too many dependents, lazy people. And most of them apparently hellbent to produce more of the same.

What is taught now is totally different to 1957 or even 1997.

Same in healthcare, engineering etc etc

All of our major competitors have moved to degree education, the UK at about 36% of students going to Uni is on par with competitors in Europe.

That still leaves 66% to do non degree roles, such as trades etc but even these are getting more and more technical, heating/plumping and electrical work in particular.

I agree with you. Far, far too many non-contributers who think that they are entitled to other people's money. And a Labour Government that agrees with them

Lol x 100

The benefits bill soared under the Tories, as did our national debt, as did immigration both legal and x channel... wages collapsed, leading to the huge growth in Working benefits.....

...but all Labours fault.... one couldn't make up this level of nonsense.

@Alexandra2001 the issue you are overlooking is that in the UK yiung people now leave education very well qualified but regrettably very poorly educated in relation to the basics.

I agree, which is a failure of the secondary education years, not the university years. A degree, to some extent, papers over the cracks, but the cracks are often still there. It's more obvious in those without degrees just how poor our state secondary education system has become. So many who don't even have a "living life" standard of literacy and numeracy despite over a decade of full time education.

@badbadbunny regrettably I think it starts at primary. So many degree educated teachers at my dc's primary on the noughties clearly hadn't had the privilege of a good foundation education.

The bar for many degree courses is just far too low nowadays.

You may be right. It's just that I, OH and my son all had really good primary educations, followed by absolutely crap secondary schools, so our experiences may be jaundicing our views. For us, certainly, it was the secondaries that were crap spanning the decades! I was a straight A* pupil leaving primary school, but left the crap comp at 16 without a single qualification, even Maths which was my "best" subject, I failed miserably. Once I'd left school, I "self taught" to get GCSEs and A levels, including top grades in Maths, and then onto self study chartered accountancy! 5 years in a comp school did absolutely nothing for me, except ruin my mental health, knacker my self confidence, and ruin my social skills!

I don't disagree that secondaries are a problem and have long argued that huge comprehensives do not work because one size does not fit all.

The amount of jobs that require a degree to even look at your CV now is unreal. I'm late 40s. Left school in 1995 with GCSEs only. Managed to charm a guy in an interview (which I wouldnt have been offered today) and got a junior role in banking. Worked my arse off and aced a bunch of professional exams and was promoted to trader over time. Because of that role I managed to switch banks a couple of times to get better jobs. Unfortunately had to give that up due to birth of twins - 12 years ago banking Industry didn't really do flexible or part time working.
Had to look at other work. Literally couldn't get an interview because my qualifications are very industry specific and I haven't got a degree. So now I'm working as a basic level finance assistant. And the only reason I got THAT job was because they needed a bit of admin help for a few days and I knew someone that worked there. Since it was just a few days they overlooked their usual hiring practices. Luckily for me they saw what a good worker I am and I'm still there 10 years later. But it's a completely different world to the one I started out in.
They wouldn't have even CONSIDERED me without a degree. Even though it's absolutely not necessary for the work I do (which is obvious, since I dont have one)
So a degree (unless you have a trade) really isn't optional. Which means the astronomical student loans which are necessary to fund these degrees is 100% a tax on young people.
The childcare being optional comment though is so ridiculous I'm not even going to answer that one!

You can’t include the NI your employer pays fgs. That calculator is naff.

and a Quick Look at the ONS will tell you that those in the lowest percentiles pay more tax as a percentage of their income than someone on 75k does.

@Shwish I did the same albeit starting in 1980 and then having 8 years with the from the mid 90s.

However I got a p/t job in HR, starting back at the very bottom, and did not need a degree to do that. The employer sponsored me to do my professional exams and DH paid for me to upgrade my dissertation to a Masters the following year.

Where I work now, I have removed the requirement for a degree from all entry level roles, insisting on excellent foundation skills instead. And those skills are tested.

I did it on the HMRC calculator and it comes out at 27% tax

Likewise, when I used to take on staff when I first started my own business 20 years ago, I didn't really pay much attention to whether the applicants had degrees or not. In the job prior to that, a much bigger firm, we had minimum requirement of applicants having a degree and I was pretty often disappointed at the standard of applicants and staff we recruited and that was after years of being a "worker" rather than a manager where I was likewise disappointed with the abilities of co-workers, some of whom had degrees, some didn't - there was not noticeable difference!

When I had carte blanche to choose my own staff with no pressure from above, I paid more attention to a good suite of GCSE and A Levels, and experience/skills rather than whether they had a degree or not.

For everyone, degree or not, I set up a competence/skills test, which took about an hour and was aimed at testing basic literacy and numeracy for everyone (even qualified accountant applicants) with more skilled/complicated/specialist sections dependant upon the level of job being applied for. It was quite an eye-opener to see people with top English and Maths GCSE grades not knowing how many days there were in April, how to spell February, nor how to work out how much VAT at 20% on a Mars bar costing £1.20 (so many people said 24p!!). For higher level applicants, i.e. people claiming they'd had experience in accounts preparation, (or who had a degree in accounting) they didn't pick up on mistakes in a "fake" set of accounts where I'd deliberately added closing stock and deducted opening stock from a trading, profit & loss account, and other similar howlers that would be blatantly obvious to anyone who genuinely understood a set of accounts!

Very, very worrying! But it does start to explain the reduction in service quality throughout lots of organisations.

Tell me what’s out of touch with reality in what I said. Incidentally an increasing number of employers are apparently now regarding degrees as meaningless and removing them from person specs for entry level jobs. Obviously healthcare, the law and other professions will continue to make them a requirement other employers are beginning to see a qualification held by half the population for what it is.

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/education/article/why-employers-choosing-non-graduates-b7vv3hggp

Well according to international comparisons within PISA, UK secondary pupil results are very good, exceeding OECD averages.

Same in maths too.

Doing a degree usually requires very good basic skills - i'm not talking about Surf board design... though down here thats probably a very good one to have.... but the good students will have a career path mapped out, perhaps your company is attracting those who struggle to find work?