To be sick of politicians using 'fairness' as justification for tax rises?

[Itchthescratch]

Fairness is completely subjective and I notice that this is often shorthand for giving more money to those that contribute the least.

Of course there will always be those that can't contribute much due to factors outside of their control, but we are kidding ourselves if we pretend that there aren't already lots of people that are scraping by doing the bare minimum (sometimes even less) and making completely irresponsible decisions knowing the state will ultimately insulate them from the consequences.

I personally know people that have had lots of children that they can't afford and can't parent properly simply because they wanted to. They are now on an incredible amount of money as the two child cap has been lifted. I know people that have stopped working because they weren't much better off than being on benefits and they couldn't be bothered with the hassle. I know young people that are already planning to stay on disability benefits their whole lives for mental health issues as they want to stay home and game.

Is it really 'fair' to charge the rest of us more to subsidise all of this?

Nobody is a '50% taxpayer' in the UK. The top rate is currently 45%. I suspect you would know that if you were a genuinely highly paid exec.

But it’s getting to the point where we know more and more people like this. We see these
people, we know these people, they are our neighbours, friends, family. I can’t stand the fact that we can’t discuss what we can see with our own eyes on so many subjects now!

"cover our own costs" So a child free couple/individual don't need to cover the costs of other people's kids?

Oh, toxic as well as irrelevant and intrusive.

Yes that’s really the point of my post 🤨 I’m simply telling you the tax I lose. 45% income tax bracket is hardly unbelievable, it’s not even high in 2026 cost of living terms.

I am now starting to wonder how far ‘fairness’ will go, in terms of ramping up taxes on the net-contributor middle classes.

I think a lot of people are feeling ‘what’s the point’ in terms of increasing their earnings, or working full time, or setting up their own business, as the net benefit to them gets steadily smaller

My biggest tax/benefit bugbear is the removal of the personal allowance and the removal of childcare support (which is worth ~£15k net for me, for one child).

The suggestion that the personal allowance will increase… merely increases the income threshold over which I pay an effective 62% tax rate, and increases the amount I need to earn to make it ‘worth’ not claiming free childcare / needing to adjust my income to be able to claim it.

Where is the fairness in this? Seemingly it is of no relevance because I am not living in poverty - that cannot be the only driver in how the UK develops its policies however.

Who is going to be paying for all this support if those earning £50k+ are so heavily incentivised to work less and avoid paying tax because of various punitive rates and cliff edges?

Yet nothing will be done as it will be ‘helping the rich’. Fairness indeed.

A child is a human in their own right. They should look to cover their costs from cradle to grave if they can. That way you aren't a burden on society. Do you think that's wrong? Why should this be all our aim?

You’ll be a bit fucked if you get cancer or get into a serious car crash though.

We all see it.

My aunt is disabled through her weight. Gets weight loss injections for free but eats through the feeling of fullness to maintain her weight. Doesn’t control her sugars and her diabetes and then wonders why she’s always unwell. She’s not worked in about fifteen years. Her weight gain was slow and she had multiple opportunities to stop it, but she didn’t.

The top rate is actually 62% between £100-125k, caused by the 40p rate plus NI plus loss of the personal allowance.

Straight to the insults then. Thanks for your input.

I understand the marginal tax rate is higher. My point is though that the exec with the piss easy job was probably not an exec at all but someone trying to pretend that all high earners have it easy and that the mum that's had three kids on the council estate (of her own choosing) has it harder.

Yeah, but the central problem with your argument is that it rests on the idea of meritocracy, i.e. people being rewarded based on their positive contributions. If all these highly paid professionals were really positively contributing, then the country wouldn't be in the shitter.

So, in terms of fairness, what would we have as a metric? Does your job make the world a better place? Does your job provide a better future for people? Does your job actually need to be done? If we use that metric, then nurses, for example, would be on £150,000 a year and bankers would be on £30,000 a year. Yeah. I think that would be fairer.

A fair one.

Where my work is not taxed and the tax then wasted.

The OP knows a strange variety of people.

Nope I am indeed, real. You have no reason to think I’m not, apart from you are struggling to believe a real person earns £150k 🙄 however, most people I know earn in this region. It happens.

You don’t work hard then, as you are often on here.

Did you read my post? That’s literally what I said. How eager are you to jump in with what you think is a smart comment?! 🤣

Indeed.

Do we want one where health care is free, speedily available to all; where our children are educated in quality schools; where those with addiction problems have proper support; where people are not sleeping on the streets in the depths of winter?

This is the real comparison - not the one with the few people who are taking the piss out of the benefits system.

And fairness demands that those with the most give the most to create a peaceful and civilised society that benefits us all.

If those at the bottom of the pile start to rise up the ladder and have decent lives, housing and jobs, then they in their turn will contribute to the economy in ways that benefit the "haves" as well as the "have nots" so in the long term it is in everyone's interests to tackle these social injustices.

The right wing press-led idea that taxing the rich is for the purpose of propping up the feckless is nonsense and we do well not to be led by the nose by these media charlatans and be taken in by this simplistic narrative. Taxing the rich is to make a fair society from which the rich will also benefit.

I’m all for people paying their taxes and have a personal aversion to the black economy and tradesmen saying “We don’t want the taxman to get it, do we?” While requesting cash in hand.

But I don’t think the Labour government should squeeze the hard-working middle any further. They need to look at where money can be saved, and I’m glad they’re finding money from other sources (digital ID) than just increasing taxes again.

No, my argument is that there isn't an objective 'fair' amount of tax that any of us should be paying in the way that the politicians like to imply. It's a fallacy and completely subjective. Even your argument about bankers and nurses is completely subjective. Bankers are an important part of the economy and vital in the global economy we live in. The nurse may make an impact to individuals but a banker can bring in investment and economic growth that can impact many more lives. What do you think we fund the NHS and nurses salary with? How do we generate this money? Financial Services make up 10% of our GDP and we need skilled people to work in this sector.

You randomly deciding that a nurse should get paid 5x more than a banker based on your own moral judgement is bonkers. It sounds

We need to tax more to boost services and the economy though. I’m happy to pay more to have an NHS etc

I’m not sure the 2 child cap lifting has had the impact you’re describing, for many people?

My brother and his partner are lifestyle benefit claimants.

They don’t get a single extra penny for their third (and youngest) because they were already at the benefit cap, so it goes on and then immediately gets taken back off.

The two child cap lifting had literally no impact on their benefit claim.

Why grind away in a minimum wage job when you can get a similar standard of living on benefits? Except society needs these jobs to be done.

There is, of course, a very simple way to encourage people to work in minimum wage jobs and not claim benefits. That is to increase the minimum wage to a point where working really does pay substantially more.

There's no appetite for that though. There's an irony that the people complaining loudest about those choosing benefits over work are almost always the very people who complain the most bitterly about NMW increases.

Yes that was a nonsense post.