Do you trust the state to protect and provide for you?

[TFloss]

Read a Times article on 12th June - ‘Middle-class vigilantes are turning against the state’. It talks about a growing trend of middle-class Brits taking matters into their own hands due to perceived failures of the state, particularly around police and public services creating a shift toward self-reliance, driven not by ideology but by necessity.

Doing own police work to solve crimes, private healthcare, private education, private security/community networks to prevent crime, more use of private transport, use of private mental health services, private carers, private bin collections.

Is this unreasonable or are you seeing this? Are people feeling like they have no choice but to step in where the state has stepped back?

@chiseltip I've linked it now for everyone's ease and convenience. I'll read it later as I need to crack on in the garden now.

My work involves working with the elderly. A lot seem to have just given up and thinking no-one cares. A lot seem to have given up trying to access services, it's really sad.

But, I'm sorry, it's the higher middle earners who need to pay more tax. If you can afford an SUV, or a foreign holiday, a smartphone, and a Prime subscription, you can afford to pay more tax.

Of course they can afford it. The issue is if they are willing to. You see it here on MN en masse how these higher middle earners reduce their hours so to avoid 60%+ tax trap and removal of funded childcare. It's bad for our society full stop. If you push them to pay even more tax so they can't afford their foreign holidays/SUVs/Primes etc they will give up in the same way those at the bottom did. Just go very part time/retire early etc. Those better off have to be better off to continue making effort.
This is even before we start talking about our brightest and most driven youngster who can make it big but see this trend of tax-tax-tax and they chose to go abroad. We actually might be lucky here that Trump&Co made US no go zone right now, but it's unlikely to stay like this forever. And Dubai/Italy etc are still there and welcoming our brightest and the best with open arms (and low taxes and pretty decent quality of life)

This is a mentality that always baffles me. Surely anyone with half a brain can see that 40% of something is better than 100% of nothing?

what exactly do you find baffling? not making an effort when too much is taken from you? seriously?

you don't find it baffling that many people on benefits chose to only work minimal hours (16?) because their benefits would be reduced? why is this different for high earners?

I’ve explained exactly what baffles me.

Because if the rich are taxed too heavily, they can simply move somewhere else and that reduces our overall tax take.

The trick is to charge the maximum tax that will not persuade people to emigrate.

There is an anomaly in the tax system whereby hitting 100K triggers a marginal rate of tax way over the official tax rate due to the simultaneous loss of a whole bunch of tax allowances and benefits. The marginal rate tapers off around 125K back to normal top rate tax (or used to, I’ve not checked the boundaries recently).

On the one hand, I’m not weeping at people trying to minimise their tax at that point and there are quite a few things you can do to minimise it such as bulking out pension contributions. Some of the “woe is me” threads on this issue here are simply silly. However as someone whose junior/mid managers regularly hit this its a business issue because it results in good people reducing hours and slows their progress and at clients it results in good people declining promotion opportunities (especially those with childcare losses). Both these disproportionately affect women and young families.

It wouldn’t be top of my list to fix if I were chancellor but it does create problems for businesses trying to recruit and develop top talent and at that crucial career point is a disincentive to attracting overseas talent.

Governments (not just ours) have been trying to “unify” data sources in this way for as long as I’ve been in the industry. The challenges are huge, even now that the hardware is cheap.

In reality accessing your telecoms records or bank records is still going to require the requisite warrants/approvals just as it is now. Many of those linkages already exist, that doesn’t make them quick or easy to use. Fraud detection is expensive and difficult even with modern systems and most government systems still have bones created decades ago.

We should have gone ahead with regular ID cards 20 years ago - the case for universal government backed ID was clear then. In its absence companies use a mish mash of differing sources, most of which cost money to the customer and are simply unavailable to low income/mobile people.

Nope. A new law was just passed through parliament that gives HMRC access to all Bank accounts WITHOUT a warrant.

This IS now law.

I don’t think you have to be the so called middle class to think the state will fail you.

Even now, the NHS is a failing entity, despite the billions hurled at it, and adult social care is just dreadful.

It’s failing now, and it will get worse. 🤷‍♀️

HMRC are a special case and checks are almost entirely automated for the most part. You don’t have Fred in the tax office randomly snooping people’s bank accounts.

It happens where there is suspicion of fraud where a report is requested. Every access is audited and checked and has to be justified - they may not always need court backed warrants but they do need justification within tight criteria (and banks will challenge).

Fraud is a criminal offence which often relies on speedy investigation.

Unfortunately people seemed to have forgotten that the welfare state was something designed to minimise abject poverty in mid-20th century, post-war Britain. We now need it more than ever.

But some wealthy 100K+ earners appear to live in a bubble. Posts here on MN regularly demonstrate that many have little idea how hard some people's lives are. Worse, they don't care either.

Getting back to the OPs original question...

If people knew they could have cleaner streets, less crime, affordable housing, safe spaces for their children to play, the promise of retirement ... then most people would feel a hell of a lot better.

Well, if depends what you have to give up in exchange - and whether that is still worth it to you for only 40% of the extra salary which is meant to make up for that extra work.

Despite what people on here think, most people work pretty hard for those high salaries.

They might well prefer to have more time off or a lower-stress job, and choose that over getting only 40%.

NMW is £12.21. Would you be so baffled at someone on full-time NMW not taking an evening job where they only get to take home £4.88 ph of that? (realistically, high paying jobs require significant out of hours work).

Unfortunately people seem to have forgotten that the welfare state was designed to be funded by everyone and benefit everyone. It no longer does.

Me too as did my parents

Exactly - everyone’s just doing what’s best for them under the system whether it’s avoiding the 100K salary range or working less hours to receive benefits as they might struggle otherwise. There needs to be a change.

People should be better off working full time rather than staying around 16 hours like that person I mentioned upthread has done her whole (very short) working life.

She has 3 kids, all receiving education, using the NHS etc and she’s obviously not a net contributor and has no plans to be. I mean you could argue she’s raising “future taxpayers” but as with many families mentalities are passed down through generations. So their children then often (not always) go onto have the same attitude to work - or not working as the case may be.

And there’s the issue of some tax thresholds haven’t moved in a while. 50K now is not the same as 50K back in 2008.

Experience elsewhere suggests this is incorrect. A lot of tax experts are agreed that we need to charge lower earners higher rates of tax as happens in other countries. This would of course be almost impossible from a political standpoint despite making economic sense.

We have a distorted economy whereby lower earners pay relatively low income tax and higher earners pay very high rates yet many people still believe the opposite to be true.

The 100k tax threshold would be 180k now if it had been increased in line with inflation. When you consider that you can also make 60k pension contributions this would mean that it would only really hit people on over 240k had it been index linked. That would be a tiny number of people compared with those who are caught today.

That is crazy.

Seeing those figures really brings home that we are really being screwed in terms of our wages not rising in line with inflation and some tax thresholds being frozen.

4% of earners are on 100k or more

it’s hardly a problem for the normal everyday person

Link?

It's not just because we have private healthcare and use private schools. More and more of the state services we disproportionately pay for is being denied us through means testing.

We don’t get funded preschool childcare (childcare we need to get those salaries) - in fact we're actually screwed for even more to cover those free hours that everyone except us gets - because nurseries increase hourly cost to subsidise the under-funded government ones.

We don't even get child benefit. We don't get WFA now.

We've just learned that our children are denied NHS care because they go to private schools.

And if they're long-term ill in hospital, they won't be entitled to hospital education services.

They won't get access to full student loans.

If we lose our jobs, we get no safety net. Despite contributing £10s of thousands each year, we'll get no support that recognises our existing financial commitments, to protect us from losing our mortgaged homes and help us get back on our feet... back to contributing more £10s of thousands in tax.

The houses we've spent our lives paying for will be sold when we're elderly to pay for the same care homes other people get for free - in fact the state will be paying less than we are privately: depleting our life savings even more quickly to further subsidise the state

There's even talk about the state pensions we've explicitely built up over our whole working lives being denied us.

Why the fuck should we work harder to pay for all this for other people, when we don't get any of it ourselves?

Why the fuck should we work harder to pay for all this for other people, when we don't get any of it ourselves?

Because that’s the way a civilised society operates. I worked for the best part of 50 years, 20 of them at the higher tax rate. I had one child to be educated, neither of us used the NHS, no benefits were claimed and if I need a care home obviously my house will be sold to pay for it. Do you know what? I don’t care because it’s the price of being part of a society that looks after the least well off.

The social contract has limits.

They have been breached.