'Taxes are the price we pay for a civilised society'

[Bargepole45]

Having just paid an enormous tax bill, I frankly am fed up with hearing this. There are lots of civilised countries that have a far lower tax burden than the UK. It's just a form of blackmail designed to make contributors believe that there is no other way other than to pay sky high taxes to subsidise people's crap life choices.

Have too many kids and can't afford them? No problem, the state steps in. Have a terrible lifestyle and don't look after your health at all? No problem, the NHS will treat you. Spent all your money with wild abandon and have nothing left to pay for your care when you get old? Don't fret, the state will fund the same care home as someone that has saved all their life.

Don't people understand that these 'safety nets' just facilitate reckless behaviour? We can have a civilised society where people aren't cushioned from all of their bad decision making. I say this as someone from a background where I didn't have much money and I am so fed up with people pretending that poor people don't know that an apple is healthier than a chocolate bar or that it's a good idea to actually attend school. It's insulting and disempowering to keep making excuses for people that simply aren't incentivised to make different, better choices.

Agree 100%

This is why I don’t get the tax them more responses. Usually tax businesses, look at Labour and their policies for SMEs

You can see the impact on jobs for graduates and non graduates. It’s madness. I hope we get better at choosing job creation parties.

Sorry, I thought this was the “What’s the most privileged thing you’ve ever read on Mumsnet?” thread.

Guys, don't you really see that there are no circumstances where benefits can be the answer to a healthy unemployed 20yo? just no circumstances.

In a few years time he (or she) will be depressed, have anxiety, drugs/alcoholism issues etc. All due to lack of purpose. They will keep themselves busy by popping kids and rinse and repeat.

There are many things which government can and should do, but they don't, so people have to save themselves, and benefits aren't doing them any favors.

How horrendously judgemental.

I agree with @nearlylovemyusername on this point, possibly not that addiction is inevitable, but that we should be offering alternatives, even a period of community service in a different region to shift their comfort zones.

Edited to refine my point.

I agree with this sentiment. I think healthy young twenty years olds should be working and would be much happier if they were.

I do struggle with if the jobs dont exists what happens if there are no benefits?

I think we probably need to look at how benefit could be structed to support relocation better though. We used to have a ymca in town which would put people in a room on low rent for 6 months to help them relocate. Its not there now.

And how to encourage employers try a young person out with no experience out in a way that retains them to. We have employers that churn low paid apprentices in coffee making who then cant get a fully paid coffee making role.

@Chiseltip Think about how you will pay for your children before you decide to have them.

If the people who are likely to struggle to pay for children decide to stop having them, we're going to have to massively increase immigration in order to have people to do all the work in twenty years from now.

Interestingly, the people who are most vocally against tax-funded support for childcare tend also to be those who are most vocally opposed to immigration.

I imagine they're expecting robots to be the answer.

Do any of you know why the north is in the terrible state it is? It’s because all the industry was killed off in the 1980s. Mining gone. Ship building gone. Steelworks gone. If you have a government that quite deliberately deindustrialises the country and focuses on service industries this is the result. And you have audacity to blame the people who are the victims of that. I thought the callous on yer bike attitude had died with Tebbitt. We’ll see how you all like it when AI really gets going and all the accountants and data processors are in the same boat.

In twenty years the workforce will be pretty different. You might have the opposite issue, too many looking for work.

Just to be clear my comments about making relocation easier were not intended as a 'get on yer bike' just a musing from my sons perspective in the south east that he would have struggled to relocate for work and there could be ways to support people that want too. He did get depressed when he couldnt fund work. It lifted when he did.

I completely agree the concentration of wealth in london was a political choice as is running down other regions.

Yes, @BIossomtoes my DM lived in Sheffield in the 1980s, and I loved it. I would have moved there to live, but I was only offered one job and that was as a trainee accountant in insolvency.

Apparently you're not supposed to be suggesting that households be personally responsible for themselves and to make their ends meet with their income. Apparently they should "claim" if they are entitled to.

I doubt it.

When the printing press was invented, it was expected that you wouldn't be able to walk down the street for the throngs of idle, redundant scribes. When the Spinning Jenny was invented, everyone wondered how the workers it replaced would spend their days.

It'd be great, wouldn't it, if new technology freed people to lives of leisure, paid for by the labour of the robots? But it won't. There'll be a brief period of adjustment, and pretty soon everyone will be working nine to five, doing jobs that possibly we can't even imagine now, and someone higher up the chain will be getting rich and complaining about the cost of labour.

Technology can't change the dynamics of society. The Industrial Revolution, for instance, simply moved the exploited and underpaid from the countryside to the cities. They were just poor and overworked a long way from trees.

Lifelong tax payer here, (not higher rate).
first job at 13 (Saturday job in a green grocers)
Numerous catering type jobs (washing up, waitressing and associated cleaning all through school and uni)
Working was essential but also made me feel better, the thought of those long summer hols as a student with no work made me depressed.

Anyway, what I find annoying is that everything is essentially tax funded. But taxpayers are never incentivised (by govt) or appreciated (by recipients of tax funded services/benefits).

Full time work is exhausting and takes its toll on you mentally - but that’s the way it is.
Raising a family and balancing work is tough and a bit more recognition from society would not go amiss. I’m so fed up of people finding every excuse they can to not work and then blaming the government (taxpayer) for not having enough.

i work with a large proportion of immigrant students and their work ethic is fantastic as is that of my immigrant colleagues.

There needs to be a culture shift in terms of attitudes and the necessity to work. (And I don’t include those who are genuinely too unwell, but let’s face it, people are playing the system).

Nobody would want to go down a mine these days nor is it good for the environment to burn coal. Technology changes happen all the time and people need to adapt. AI is going to change a lot of service type jobs but plenty of people will adapt and find new opportunities (it’s already happening). Seeing that Labour are all gun ho about AI are you going to be blaming them for job destruction too @blossomtoes?
People need to look at opportunities here now not blame some long gone thing and act the victim. I feel the same way about Boris Johnson but hope I won’t be blaming him for everything once I am in my 70s. We could backtrack on what he did right now if we wanted to. Nobody is brave enough to do it: they are cosying up to the Chinese and made STEM/AI the new magic money tree unicorn. It’s all bull shit anyway. People need the confidence to get up and make their own way and find their niche and parents need to instil that confidence and expectation in their children, everywhere.

My view is you and your family should be reliant on yourself to make your own ends meet.

I have exceptions for a few limited things.

Long term benefits: disabled yourself or caring for disabled family member and kids. Obviously depends on severity of disability. If people can work with PIP that's great let's help then. If they cannot work and medically can't, they should have basic sustenance levels from the government.

Short term benefits: massive life shock/change of circumstances. Benefits are there temporarily till you bet back on your feet and are self sufficient.

Because of the state of this country and the attack on success DH is very very much considering taking up his offered promotion and relocating full time to the gcc.

45% tax bracket. Away from family for work, working till the early hours of the morning. All for it to taxed away and given to others.

There's a difference between paying for shared public goods and paying someone else's income.

We got to go to the GCC over the winter. Wow, I loved it there. An economy built on hard work and achieving something. No income tax. And it's so much safer.

One thing that never seems to occur to people complaining about the level of taxation is that if tax were lower, employers would simply pay less. The market would assimilate the change in tax thresholds, and salaries would, over a couple of years, change accordingly.

Those already in well-paid jobs would do well for a while, but the system would level itself out.

"But people get paid more in the US and they have lower tax levels!"

Well, some people do. A lot of people get paid a lot less. But even if all other things were equal, in the US, federal tax is a smaller proportion of unavoidable outgoings. There's also state tax, health insurance, eggs. Have you been to the USA recently? God forbid you should need a tooth filled.

In fact, for most people in the UK, disposable income is comparable to US counterparts.

I've paid a fuck of a lot of tax in my life. And on the day every six months or so that I had to hand it over, I can't say that I was that chuffed about it. But I think that system is, on the whole, fair.

Huge sums have been poured into transport in London -I’m always amazed when I visit. How much housing benefit is paid there,where rents are so high? Also the plans to build thousands of homes. We’re told that tax from the finance sector pays for our services but there’s also a hell of a lot of money goi g into London that does not go to the rest of the country.

The transport into London is so they can raise even more tax. They have placed impossible huge housing targets on Home Counties to increase number of commuters in. They expect people to commute 1.5 hours each way and pay 40-60% tax and burn out and spend no time with their families. Home Counties are not going to be able to deliver any of those targets. And people en masse are rethinking here too post Covid. You cannot force people to work either if they hardly get to keep anything and have no time with their families. Loads of people are reassessing.

It’s ridiculous to think a substantial part of the country can be denuded of its employment opportunities with no investment to replace it and there will be no repercussions. At the time that happened the revenue from North Sea oil was pouring in but instead of investing it in new employment it was spaffed away on tax cuts. If only a sovereign wealth fund had been created like Norway’s.

Do you seriously think AI wouldn’t be an increasing part of the UK economy regardless of which party was in government? It’s already creating a shortage of graduate entry level jobs. There will be very few niches left soon. No manufacturing, substantially fewer service industry jobs - where do you think all these niches are to come from?

DH wants to accept the promotion + move. We are considering it.

I guess we’ll see in twenty odd years what the workforce is like. Not sure about this take.

So I should have children just to make good little tax payers for the future?