To be confused by 'high earners' complaining about taxes?

[tutuland]

So high earners pay lots of tax. The top 20% pay for 70% or whatever the numbers are.

But (beyond printing more money) isn't the money there high income people make just coming from the paying public? No matter who you work for, your company's profit is just an accumulation of normal people paying for things.

So ultimately, isn't it all our money anyway? Just beacuse the game is rigged and you get paid 400K for management whatever, it doesn't mean you're more deserving of that money than anyone.

This is mumsnet, sweetie. Everyone assesses risk and gives their opinion based on that the poster has said.

@tutuland i can 100% say its not chatgpt,

Jealous, you are.

What do you suggest as an alternative to these undeserved wages? Enslaving the work force to extract their labour for free?

there is a feature where you can write out your draft and then right click it on the desktop version and ask co poilt to rewrite it for you, so its mostly your words but enhanced, @tutuland

Perhaps I should make it clearer, do not tax the high tax payers even more.
Either fix the broken system so everyone gets support when needed
Or
Tax us all 50%

Ive said in a previous thread I earn £48k so I'm just under the next tax bracket, yet even now I have to pay out for insurances and extras that others earning less do not. I begrudge these hidden extras to protect myself and I'd dislike it even more IF I paid more in tax like the higher earners. I'd happily pay 50% tax IF it meant I could access a doctor's (it took 5 different appointments, 5 different locum GPs before they caught my cancer!) IF I could have had time off sick without worrying and negotiating with the insurances, which took almost 3 months to sort out. IF it meant my kids going to uni didn't put them at a disadvantage of others if I didn't pay their accomodation IF those with children weren't screwed on childcare costs IF those with two people earning a middle amount weren't better off than a household with a single high earner.
The system is broken, the answer is not tax the high earners more

DH has done all this tirelessly to provide for the family. He's well respected at work for the value he brings and delivers.

He's worked his way up from absolutely nothing to be the successful man he is today. We both had barely anything growing up, but thanks to hard work and determination we have a good life for ourselves now.

Unfortunately we are now in a society that increasingly devalued hard work abd aspiration. It's apparently unfair that low or no effort isn't equally well rewarded.

The reason why communism always fails is you have taken away incentive to work hard if to take all someone’s money in taxes. So he doesn’t work hard. So the company he works for moves to a country where people do work hard, he goes on benefits and we all suffer. We have the system we have now as it is the one that has generally been shown to work best.

Get off your arse and work / study hard if you want to earn a high wage. If you can’t be bothered, you’ll not earn much.

Apparently he doesn't deserve it.

Thats a simplistic argument from a place of unacknowledged privileged.
Being able to study at a post graduate level requires a lot of privilege before. The ability to afford it, support and direction towards it, the ability to navigate career planning. All this at 16/17/18?

Working in McDonalds from the age of 18 to 21 is much harder than going to university.

I think a lot of the people who don't agree with what I'm saying are clouded by their perception that everyone who isn't on a high salary is just lazy, work shy and on benefits.

The stupidest thing I have seen on the internet this year.

Sounds like somebody is bitter and envious.

Copilot/hCatgpt/gemini same thing really. They all take whatever you give it and flesh it out.
It reads like AI generated content. It might have valid points, but it's very weird to read.

I came for one of the shittiest council estates in the west of Scotland. One where drugs deaths were sky high. Many of my classmates from school have died already from drugs / suicide etc. I worked at school. I got out of that. You don’t need a post grad education to get a good job. In fact in many industries it hold a you back. You just need the right attitude.

Happy to help!

Oh and I know a lot of lazy workshy people on benefits so what am I supposed to think?

Is everyone's success due to privilege? Even if you came from nothing (like we did). UG SFE isn't perfect but it is there. People do get the maximum loan. We self funded our pg degrees.

There's numerous help now with career planning. Google is there. Chatgpt is there.

Please, MNHQ, can we have a new button that acknowledges complete drivel? A little Darwin statue perhaps?

But apparently people are entitled to it so it's theirs.

husband is on 60k but I can only work a few hours in a crap job now because of the needs of our sen child and mr caring responsibilities for my disabled mum. We have no family help in any shape or form. He basically turns down offers of overtime and bonuses because it would mean him losing 70% of it after tax and insurance and would also mean us paying child benefits back. This is why people complain it deincetivives people

@tutuland how is working in McDonald’s harder than going to university?? They are both hard but in very different respects, they CANNOT be compared like for like!
Although, I worked throughout attending university, I must be fucking superwoman so!

@tutuland but you forget an important component in your argument which is EFFORT. The money high earners earn is not donated to them for a low effort relaxed job. It’s for a stressful high stakes job with long hours and personal sacrifices. If everyone did this then everyone could be high earners. But they choose not to. Which gives them no right to ask for disproportionate earnings by taxing the high earners.
I am all in favour of a flat rate of tax - say 45% for everyone. Why not?

And skill.

We’ve been conditioned to see university as “harder” in some superior way but its not objective. The difference isn’t effort, it’s reward and prestige.

We just give value the work that leads to elite degrees and that shapes what we see as “hard.”

I think most people who disagree with you understand that not everyone who is high-earning comes from a privileged background.

In a world where people can become millionaires from being an influencer and posting videos of their lives (or their feet/ or their private) and most people with a degree struggle to find work in their field, education is barely relevant.

I am high-earning and the only diploma I have is my high-school diploma and I come from the least privileged side of society (food banks, social services involved, lots of sexual and physical abuse, the whole bingo card. I am a woman, I am black and I am gay and born poor to a teenage mother. I work since I am 17 though, I was also always saving any birthday or Xmas money I had and even developed a small business at 13 (that was going quite well). I have seen my family live off of benefits, and my mom have more kids than she could afford and I have seen her be accustomed to pick not losing benefits over earning more/working more and I have seen two of my siblings follow that path (working the system rather than working).

Plenty of low-earning folks are hard-working, the great majority even, but it doesn’t take away the fact that our current society doesn’t reward work. It currently squeezes you if you work and pass it down to not only people who need it or can’t afford to work but also to all those who chose not work while the great majority of workers (which would be your low-income or average-income earners are hanged to dry) struggling to pay bills and navigating a collapsed system where rent are astronomical, health is a luxury and education is supbar (and not even a guarantee of a good job anymore.)

You seem to the see world from solely your own prism and seem to believe in only one reality. The reality is that many high-earning folks aren’t privileged, many are self-made with humble background and likely from families who worked hard and needed benefits at some point, so understand the system and didn’t initially begrudge paying taxes when they started earning well. Most do now because we simply aren’t getting what we pay for.

Our system need a revamp and everyone who think the revamp should be taxing even more the rich (as if they can’t afford to move away) don’t really grasp why that’s not the smartest idea.

Currently people on benefits believe that high-earner are both the problem and should also be the solution. When really no system should rely on a small chunk of the population to sustain it, and no one who can work should be sustained by the system either (more than temporarily).

So take a data coder on 200K and a nurse on 30K. What has the tech guy sacrificed?

The nurse endures night shifts, being on their feet all day, illness, death, bodily fluids, stressed families. That’s intense and high stakes. The high stakes of tech is just will you make more money if you pull this off.

A nursing degree is also demanding academically and emotionally heavy.

The pay difference isn’t about who worked harder or studied more. It’s about what the market values and what makes money.

We reward what generates profit. We undervalue what keeps society running.

Because they are the skills that are in most demand. If we paid the toughest job best we’d pay carers the most, but caring is a job with few scarce skills and lots of people can do it so wages are low. I worked in a highly niche professional services role. Companies need my skills, so I can command a high wage. It’s like an auction. Companies compete for a dwindling pool of potential employees. And if a company doesn’t get an employee like me they know they’ll have to turn to law firms to fill the gap which will cost them a fortune.