To think the problem with wealth inequality is that rich people don't know how rich they are?

[Neeroy]

Article in the Times today saying that people earning six figures 'don't feel rich'.

Because they are surrounded by six figure earning peers they are comparing themselves to people who have more rather than the 90% of the population that have far less. This is why the budget is poorly received in the news, because rich people think they already shoulder too high a burden when in fact compared to everyone else they still have far more disposable income. Even if they have to cut down on the number of holidays they go on. They aren't sitting in the dark under a blanket. Or only making food that doesn't require turning on the oven.

I don't think they realise how so many people have to live.

www.thetimes.com/article/1fb46414-8f65-436f-8f95-451d69626148?shareToken=8061d939633164c0dfbd805240c8e008

.....and school fees. The latter being a cost we could choose to allow the state to pick up.

You use 'pick up' as if the government are picking up a bill for a non-essential item.

You would not feel broke if you didn't send your children to private school. Are people sending their children to private school as an altruistic act to save us from recession?

Yes but we tax wealth through capital gains. Switzerland doesn’t have a capital gains tax. Uk’s CGT is 24%

Why is money “aspirational”. Why isn’t having enough to live on, with a great partner and children, being happy with a nice social life and a comfortable home, great relationships with your wider family and friends, having great ways to relax and laughing everyday due to all of these things “aspirational”. I have the latter and feel pity for people who think the former is what life is about.

It’s still a struggle though. I struggle to pay private school fees for my SEN child. The others go to the state school. I really wish I didn’t have to fund their schooling but they were self harming so badly due to their terrible state school experience it was either that or I give up work to home school. The council couldn’t give too hoots!

We earn lots after years of schoolwork, uni, professional exams, and yet I don’t have enough to get my hair cut by a professional. If public services were better and offered schooling to my SEN child, and if house prices hadn’t been inflated by endless consecutive governments who just wanted to make the voter base feel rich, I don’t think I’d feel so much resentment towards people calling us wealthy and taxing us sky high amounts when we have a pot to piss in.

But hey I have water in my tap and can turn the lights on so have no right to complain according to some.

Again with the envy. I’m glad that I didn’t have to pay for my children’s success. I pity those who feel they do.

Culturally, the UK doesn't have that outlook and that wasn't a problem in the past so what has changed is more the question.

@EuclidianGeometryFan the idea of leveling- down London is bananas. It’s the socialist idea of wanting equality even if it makes everyone poorer. The desire should be to make the poor richer not the rich poorer. To make the pie as a whole bigger and everyone better off. Without London, the UK’s GDP per capita is less than Mississippi’s.

All the successful people moved to the US?

What does that mean? Can you give examples of paying for your child's success?

Isn't it to do with distorted housing costs & intergenerational inequality? You can earn 100k but still not live the life you had growing up despite earning a lot more than your parents?

Yes, your normal becomes normal. Especially if your peers earn similarly. And away from the super rich, how do you define normal and rich? What is your minimum level of acceptable stuff you should almost be able to take for granted? Being able to keep your house at 18 degrees? Buying Heinz, not value ranges of baked beans etc? There is no single answer to that.

It doesn't help that there's been so much inflation the last few years so most people are feeling poorer, even if they aren't poor.

Basically it's all relative.

Indeed. If you save really hard for a deposit and earn £100k then maybe you can afford the house a window cleaner / gardener / shop assistant could afford 50 years ago. Why train hard to be a transport planning consultant / wind farm engineer / accountant etc when you’ll never afford to be live in a house like the one you grew up in.

They got that way through hard work. Even those who have inherited money, their parents will have worked their backsides off.

Did my parents work hard? yes. But the majority of their wealth came from buying in a part of London that underwent huge gentrification. They didn't work any harder than plenty of others.

@Jugendstiel , I would probably be described by many as ‘rich’. My husband and I are semi retired now, own a very nice house in a beautiful location outright, take several very nice holidays a year and have investments which generate an income which allows us to continue to invest.
We both left school at sixteen then spent the next decades working tirelessly in our business. There wasn’t much time for holidays then and my husband in particular missed out a lot on our children when they were growing up. We had staff in our business who we always treated well and paid well above minimum wage for our industry, they mostly stayed with us for many years. It really is deeply unreasonable to suggest that every person who achieves a good level of comfort does so by exploiting their staff. We started from absolutely nothing and had no inherent advantages, anyone with a terrific work ethic, who is not risk averse, doesn’t expect ever to be sick or have much of a family life could do what we did. Most people don’t for some reason want to make those sacrifices, that is their choice.

Wages are pretty crap in the UK due to years of stagnation and inflation in recent years.

100k is about 50k in the early 00s & 80k
only 5 yrs ago. That's a huge part of the problem.

Also taxes, fiscal drag has pulled a lot of people into higher bands whereas if you look at 20,30 yrs ago it will be a much smaller % than paid higher taxes.

Actually, ‘the top 50 richest families in the UK now hold more wealth than the poorest half of the population, comprising more than 34 million people’. Which is not quite the same but still obscenely offensive.

I feel like you're fairly out of touch to be honest. It's so easy to say money doesn't matter when you never had to pay nursery fees, and you're not trying to buy a home in the current climate. Get off your high horse you hypocrite.
You want a comfortable home and lifestyle today, you need a lot of money to pay for it and/or a lot of support.

But that's the thing - we do have labour laws. So unless they are being broken, where is the exploitation about which you are concerned? Campaign for better labour laws (but greater regulation tends to drive up costs - again, not saying it isn't worth it, but that there is a cost) if you think they are deficient, but economic inactivity is strangling this country. The way for us all to be better off is for us all to be more productive. Chasing away millionaires - who are more mobile than at any point in history - is unlikely to help that.

The way for us all to be better off is for us all to be more productive.

Better wages & cheaper housing would make a big difference to productivity

You poor thing, living in your big house.

But this wasn't some past utopia. Part of what makes those things expensive now is things like the NMW, is regulation - which increases the cost of providing a lot of services. There is nothing wrong with that - indeed we as a society have decided that it is more important that we ensure "basic" standards for everyone, but there comes a point where we have to pick between those standards and people "further up the ladder" having a comparable standard of living to that of their parents. Again, that's not wrong, but perhaps we are reaching the point, where the consensus is shifting away from increasing regulations and standards "at the bottom"? But we can't work out what the consensus is unless we have honest and sensible conversations that recognise that we can't have everything (not saying that you are doing that by the way just what your post made me think of)

So unless they are being broken, where is the exploitation about which you are concerned?

I think there is a nuance though isn't there? So before you may have being employed in a company that offered annual progression based on performance, sick pay, holiday allowance that maybe increased with service. Now the same job may be on a zero hours contract on a low wage with little progression, no sick pay just SSP, minimum holiday etc.

Compare this to model villages in the past built by industrialists to keep their workers happier and more productive.

So many people on here are communists at heart - they think everyone should have the same amount of money.

It's so childish

The only way to have any form of a functioning society is to have competitive capitalism. And we are holding onto that by a thread. I am not sure many people are really thinking through what will actually happen if we keep punishing people who make money with more and more punitive taxes. Incentives matter, they matter a lot, and if people have no incentive to make money, I can guarantee you right now that the poor as they are now, will get even more poor.

I really wish people would quit their envy and realise that just because someone has money, it is not stopping you having money. It is not a pot with limits, it can grow - and then there is more to go around for everyone.

That is pure envy coming out there. Do you see it? Or do you describe it as something else?