to think 51% tax is ridiculous, and already to be planning to move to Asia

[hedgiemum]

Namechanged. Married to someone who earns well in excess of £150,000 a year, though neither does he earn 7 figures.
He is still quite young in his career - a recent promotion to a senior position, but has not been earning this kind of money of long, so we still have a mortgage and haven't saved large amounts (what we have saved is through his pension which is no longer going to be particularly worth doing.)

He phoned me a minute after end of budget to say he'd watched it with his boss whose reaction was that he would move the company (not a bank, but in finance) to Asia. Probably Hong Kong - 12% tax rather than the 51% we'd be paying here.

Seems like a kneejerk reaction, and clearly we can afford to pay more, but boss doesn't feel he'll get good productivity from staff if they are getting to take home less than half their income. Plus it decreases ever-present risk of them being headhunted by companies in lower-tax economies.

AIBU to be PLEASED (I used to hate tax exiles.) Partly because it just does not seem fair. Partly because this country has been run so badly by New Labour of whom we had such high expectations, and the medical care we have received has been shite, the local schools are shite, the roads are insanely busy and yet is costs so much to live here.

Hmm Veggie I think it's been the lack of basic Maths that Sur Alun has been peeved at.
At the basic understanding that you make money when you buy something not when you sell it, the raw material costs are the biggest factor in terms of making a profit in any company.

vezzie - great post. Very true

I agree with Litchick that the sales people couldn't do it without the backroom people.

Having worked in a service industry the sales team are the ones who hook the business in, and very important they are too, but it is the backroom people who deal with the customer and keep them happy after the sales person has moved on to the next sale. Without the backroom people there would be no business.

It would be interesting to come back to this thread in a month or 6 mths to see whether any of those who reckon they will move abroad actually go.

I suspect that once the dust has settled they will realise that uprooting your life for the sake of a few thousand is not really worth it. In reality, how many people really earn £150k let alone £200k or more? Does anybody have any idea?

Cory - quite likely but she probably works for BUPA

CoteDAzur on Thu 23-Apr-09 16:59:13
"Equal opportunity is a good thing. But once people have made their choices re education, career, working hard etc it is totally unreasonable to expect their compensation to be equal."

But surely only X no of people will be accepted on the law course? only x no of people will find jobs at the end?

yes you could argue that any one of those individuals has the choice to work twice as hard as their colleagues and be the chosen one

but if twice as many apply as there are places, then they can't all get one, even if they are all as motivated and clever as one another

prospective bosses will still have to make a choice if they only need one employee

consequently it is a little misleading to pretend that everybody has a choice to get that top job

if you and Xenia got the whole nation ghalvanised into training for top careers, there wouldn't be places for them all at university, and a lot of them would still end up in less qualified jobs because the nation needs more nurses and bin men than top lawyers

Sorrento on Fri 24-Apr-09 11:42:52
"Cory - qute likely but she probably works for BUPA"

I didn't specify that she had to work for the NHS

my point was that she is a crucial factor in the money being generated

Someone raised the point, millions of pages ago on this thread, that the laws around inheritance tax are due to be changed, so that it only kicks in if the property is valued at £1mn or more.

This is very revealing about British culture: that if you earn the money yourself, expect to be taxed at a high rate, but if you inherit it, don't. I agree to an extent, that higher earners should "reach back" as it were, and help out the rest of the community. But, there is a lot of resentment in the UK as to how the money is spent, and whether or not paying high amounts in tax gets you any benefits. Schools and hospitals are under-funded and staffed, and weighed down with bureaucracy. Surely it would be more useful to use the money for increasing teachers and nurses salaries than to hire consultants to find out why children are failing and hospitals are falling apart? There seems to be a complete failure in logic.

My DM was a teacher, and I know many teachers as well. They hate the level of bureaucracy and the strict level of control over what you can teach. Stupid things like: having to come up with detailed lesson plans, specifying what questions you are going to ask. Who, with children, can predict on a minute by minute basis, what they're going to want to ask a question about? How much of their "free" time is taken preparing such wank? My teacher friends tend to spend all of Sunday marking, preparing lessons and so on, and were INCREDIBLY happy about the Snow Days, because they actually had more time to prepare. Same goes for social workers who have to spend on average 60% of their time on paperwork, rather than looking after the individuals and families they are assigned to. As we saw with the horrific Baby P case, in the social services, hard-working dedicated individuals are bullied and harassed, pushed out of their jobs.
I spoke to another person who was working as a consultant for a government agency, and he said that they would pay the consultancy firm £1mn to basically tell them what they already knew, and to do it in a way that they already knew.

What kind of crazy country are we living in?

Rant over.

cory - Of course there are limited places at universities and then limited job opportunities. It is a given that there are selection and elimination processes at various steps - the best and the most driven succeed.

Here in France, for example, young people aspiring to be doctors all take the same medical exams. The highest scorers get to choose their specialties, the ones under them get to be GPs, less successful get to be midwives (possibly why all MWs I've met are miserable cows who'd rather be elsewhere), and the least successful can be kinesitherapeuts (physio).

Still, everybody has the choice to make the effort - take the exams, study hard for many years, etc to enter a profession that will richly reward their work.

If someone chooses not to enter this race, and be a firefighter or car mechanic, great. However, they know for a fact from the onset that they will not be a high earner.

This is what I mean - there should be equal opportunities for all. But it is unreasonable to then expect all careers to pay off similar amounts, once the choices & selections have been made.

I do actually agree that it is unreasonable to expect all careers to pay the same.

But as a recent study has (yet again) shown, countries which have less of a steep divide between incomes score higher on child welfare, emotional wellbeing of children, less risk to children of violent crime.

SO yes, I'd like to see differences. But not quite such steep ones. Ah, what we need is a tax to sort this out

It's not just the divide between the people at the top and the bottom that matters, it's the way the people at the top get much bigger pay rises every year so the gap grows hugely all the time.

Someone reputable (forget who) did some research that showed in something like 07/08 the average chief exec of a large business (maybe FTSE 100, can't recall) got a 37 per cent increase while their staff got 3. That's indefensible, unless in the very remote case that the boss has made the company 40 times more profitable all on their own with no contribution by staff.

Remuneration committees are stuffed full of non-execs who are themselves directors of other firms, or have been. So it's in their own interest to award massive pay deals to each other. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Hong Kong is very polluted for children. Have you considered Kuala Lumpur (sp)? Its more child friendly

Neicie - I thought I saw from Quat on another thread that it was 350,000 who earned that. Another figure bandied was 1%.
I know that 10% of tax payers pay 50% of all collected tax...so common sense tells me we cannot afford for many of those to be made redundant or to leave the country.
It's a very risky business model if you think about it. If you rely on the minority you are in no position to pis them off even if you believe it's fair to do so.

That is assuming that the minority is irreplaceable, litchick.

as I keep saying, I have heard this argument re another tax-high country for the last 40 years. And they are still keeping afloat. Some people have flounced. It just turned out that they weren't (as they themselves thought) the only ones capable of keeping the economy going.

Well said Cory. I don't think anyone is saying all jobs should pay equally. I certainly didn't. There are very many highly skilled prefessionals that are unlikely to earn vast sums of of money - scientists like Rivens husband, engineers like myself. It's ridiculous to suggest that these jobs are not value added. An economy based on ridiculously paid bankers gambling with our money doesn't work. I think this recession is proving that.

But the difference in Sweden Cory is that differences in income were not so disparate were they? Thus the tax revenue was not so deeply reliant on such a few. The balance is too skewed here, no?

Yes, but that is surely a result of the tax system. Nothing forbidding employers to offer enormous salaries, except the knowledge that it is pointless because of the taxes.

Before the tax system was introduced, the economic divide was indeed horrendous: my grandfather could remember a time when people starved to death.

I see - I for one am loving all I'm learning about this.

Sorry, I thought this said "moving to Asda"!

If wages are comparative Cory - what possess people to go into the jobs that require a fourteen hour day? Or to risk everything on setting up a business?
Genuine question becuase won't people take the safe and less taxing options.

I don't think they'd need to be comparitive - just not quite so grossly unequal. There is a sensible middle gound.

i would venture that personality and learned work ethic play a big role.

i used to regularly work 11 or 12 hour days for a pretty average salary. i enjoy my work, and there are other payoffs. (recognition, etc.)

my DH works at least 12 hours every single day. he makes good money but i wouldn't even say he's motivated by it. (no lavish lifestyle here - bonuses, etc. just go into the retirement pot.)

Life's too short to work 12 hour days Chandellina. What's the point anyway - you wouldn't have time to spend the money!

Expecting to work reasonable hours and have work/life balance isn't a poor work ethic.

What makes you think people have a choice about their 12 hour days though. It tends to be the bottom and the top of the food chain that works those sorts of hours and the ones in the middle who whinge.

Am not sure Litchick. It is a fact that Scandinavians on the whole work far shorter hours than the British, so yes, you would expect this laziness to bring the economy to its knees. Except that it hasn't.

Is it possible that working uber-long hours simply isn't that efficient?

I really don't know.

And I agree with SJ: I don't think comparative is what we should really be looking at. YOu do need some financial incentive. And some recognition of the money that has gone into training a banker or a top lawyer.

People do have a choice if we are talking about highly paid jobs. Personally I would rather earn less and work less hours.

Obviously there are people who work 12 hours across 2 jobs for survival, but that isn't what this thread is about.