to think a flat tax of 25% for all on everything would be much fairer?

[peapodlovescuddles]

51% is ridiculous. People shouldn't be penalised for working hard their entire life (and I know this will be controversial) and being much better than average at what they doI know the economy is in trouble but surely alienating the richest portion of society is a stupid idea?
£150,000 isn't a ridiculous salary, there are plenty of middle class professionals who aren't living a lavish lifestyle earning that much.

Phoenix

eh?

And to add - I really don't buy the argument that people paying school fees/buying private medical insurance etc are not "getting their money's worth" or whatever.

People who opt out of society in this way actually make it harder for the rest of us (just think of the private schools thing - in many parts of France they are banned for this very reason).

So the idea that people who opt out should pay less tax is, frankly, grotesque.

And whoever said that a flat tax is the fairest thing is also utterly misguided. Everything costs the same, no matter what you earn. Until we introduce a system whereby you pay what you can afford for things (including houses/cars etc), which doesn't seem particularly workable to me, then a flat tax remains completely unfair.

Dollius could you clarify why independent schools make it harder for the rest if us please?

And please read the rest of my post about how a flat tax system should work. Minimum wage/pension/disability benefits etc should be a LOT higher imo.

Because they remove large numbers of the supported, middle class children from the state sector, thereby lowering the bar for everyone else.

If the middle classes were forced to participate in the state system (ie private schools were abolished), then the education system would be better for everyone.

So there is even an argument for people opting out of public services to pay more tax, not less. A form of compensation, perhaps.

Just read any thread on faith schools for this argument.

As I said, many parts of France have banned private schools because they promote this sort of social inequality.

But this isn't the thread to discuss this, I guess.

And I have read your post.

I agree that if we had a much larger personal allowance (what is the point in taxing people who earn £6,500??) then a simpler tax system could work.

But it is completely wrong to say that it is "fair" for someone earning £200,000 to pay the same proportion of income in tax as someone earning £20,000.

There would still have to be some grading the further up the salary ladder you went.

As I said before, we are all part of society, and we all rely to some degree on the state and on the poorly-paid people who support it.

If you are a fund manager, then the companies you invest in depend on the poorly-paid consumers and taxpayers who make it profitable.

and of course France is such a wonderful example of social harmony

Actually I think abolishing private schools would simply fuel more parents to pay over the odds to buy a house in the catchment area of a "good" school, pricing out the less well off into areas where the schools aren't so good.

I am also very about the idea that highly paid people work harder. I have a very wide range of friends, from university friends working in the city, to friends here who work 50+ hours a week at a mix of cleaning/ waitressing/ shop work on minimum wage or a little over. I certainly wouldn't say that they worked less hard for their £1200 a month than my city trader friends for their telephone no salaries, especially as one partner is often having to work unsocial hours so that they don't have to pay for childcare.
FWIW the one person I would say who has notably long hours and hard job (though reasonably well paid) is my BiL who is a hospital doctor doing lots of night shifts, long on call hours over & above his normal working week and clearly a very stressfull situation, and when I said this to him he looked at me strange and said 'but its a fantastic job'.
And I don't suppose his work is any worse than a nurse in the same hospital, come to think of it.

"I do not see how a system where some people pay a higher proportion can be fair. We do not live in a Marxist society- why shpuld wealth redistribution be our aim?"

Jesus wept.

To start with, a proper flat tax wouldn't have a personal allowance as some people are suggesting. That's why it's a flat tax. "Personal allowance" is actually a name for a zero-rated tax band. Remove banding, remove personal allowance.

As to this argument per se - the aim of a British style redistributive tax system ("Marxist" societies don't really need a tax system - as the state pays all the wages, they can just keep what they want and effectively pay everyone net, so you don't percieve tax at all) is that everyone pays a similar proportion of their "spare" money. This reflects the fact that landlords and shops do not operate a "flat price" system where, say, your rent is 33% of your wages and a loaf of bread is 0.01% - the rent and prices are set and you pay it or leave it. So the tax system attempts to take a similar chunk of what's left after the essentials.

It's not perfect - with any banding there will be winners and losers at certain key points, and the rich still don't pay enough - but it's a start.

YABVVU, if DH was to be taxed 25% we would have to sell our house and never eat. We barely makes ends meet as it is as his wage is what he calls (and I) pathetic.

Ok, here's a different slant.

How about everybody gets paid exactly the same amount for each hour they work, whatever they do? Then we can all be taxed the same.

Or two levels, one for those with certain qualifications and one for those without.

Or how about those with well paid jobs just be thankful for the breaks that they have been lucky enough to have and pay an extra tiny percentage of their salary to contribute to a economy of a Country, that when all is said and done, is not that bad a place to live.

Oh God - that would be utterly crap Tabitha. Perhaps we should be all wear grey and address each other as 'Comrade' too? No, let's just stick with graduated tax with a higher tax banding for the wealthy...

Ah, I see you were tongue in cheek (phew!)

But its all about supply and demand, there are very few people who can play premiership level football. There are an awful lot of people who enjoy watching premiership football, hence thoser who can play it can demand an astronomical amount of money for what they do.
There are more people who have the skills needed to become a Dr but they are still a small minority, most people simply aren't clever enough, you need AAB/AAA in biology and chemistry (most of the time) as well as the right demeanor and personality. As this combination is relatively rare they can demand salaries of £100,000ish.
Very few people are bright enough to get a place at Oxbridge (or even LSE, UCL, Imperial, Durham, St Andrew's etc) so when those that do graduate they have already proven themselves to be far above average so can get jobs that pay more than average.

While not everyone would necessarily want to work as a care support worker the VAST manjority of people have the intrinsic skills to do so, hence carers cannot demand a six figure salary.

If you take away the incentives to work hard and get a well paid job then no-one will bother. Why bother jumping through the hoops at school, taking the right GCSEs, the right A Levels, applying to the right universities and spending a decade of your life studying and being examined if you're not going to have anything extra to show for it than those who spent their teens and early twenties disrupting the class, never doing homework and being off their face on cider, vodka and beer?

(And of course your hard work means you can afford to send your own children to a school where you can avoid the aforementioned hence bettering their chances of following in your upper-middle class footsteps)

Its not a fair system but its as fair as we can get.

loving the idea that opting out of state education and state health care means you're not so expensive therefore shouldn't pay tax the same way! Never walked on a pavement? Driven on a road? Used street lighting, had your rubbish collected, known you could call 999 in an emergency? Cos all taxes pay for is schools, hospitals and useless beurocrats, yes?

The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. They find it difficult to get food, and the greater part of their little revenue is spent in getting it. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess.

A tax upon house-rents, therefore, would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of inequality there would not, perhaps, be anything very unreasonable. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.

peapodlovescuddles I hate to say this but really I think you are talking utter rubbish.

I went to Oxbridge, while none of the rest of my extended family have been to university at all (and probably have about 3 O levels between them).

I am no brighter than the rest of them - if you had met me and my cousins when we were children you probably would have picked out my oldest cousin as the 'bright' one of the lot of us.

I am just lucky - I am the only child of older parents who struggled to have children, and so invested a lot of time and energy in me when I was a child. Whereas my cousins were part of a large family in struggling circumstances and had a family breakdown to deal with in their teenage years. Basically they had no option but to leave school at 16 & get a job.

And doing A levels & going to Oxbridge wasn't hard work - I was having a fantastic time studying something that I enjoyed while my oldest cousin was getting up at 5am to work in a car factory.

"work as a care support worker the VAST manjority of people have the intrinsic skills to do so,"

• I beg to differ - I have met many people who would make dreadful care workers, and indeed have worked with some dreadful care workers too.

I think statements like that only further the general belief that "anyone" can be a care worker and simply belittle care worker role in soceity.

Because of course anyone can be a care worker so that's ok to pay them minimum wage for a 10hr night shift.

"Economic equity is sometimes used to argue against progressive taxation, on the grounds of representation being out-of-proportion to taxation: While the top 5% in income in most countries pay over half the taxes they only have 5% of the voting weight. This argument can be reversed into the plutocratic case that if tax is to be progressive it should be accompanied by greater say in elections for those who contribute most."

How scary is THAT thought?

I agree FAQ. DH worked as a care worker for adults with learning difficutlties for a few years and in many cases it was hard to justify the job titles of his colleagues, both the 'care' and the 'worker' bit

He got out. Pay was crap and it was so demoralising to see the way most of them treated the residents - not abuse, not even neglect, but the casual indifference and lack of respect. Very sad. But it's a low paid job with little kudos and the bar is set very low for entry.

and the attitude towards paid care workers also then extends to the informal care sector - those people who save the Government (and tax payers) £65billion (I think there are newer figures that this that put the figure much higher at closer to £85 bilion) a year - "well you know anyone can be a care worker so I don't see what's so hard about caring for you sick/disabled child/parent".

Peapod - I agree with your post overall but throw the following into the discussion.

I have those qualifications, the good A-levels, the degree plus other fairly high grade qualifications (and I work hard) and yet the job I do does not pay anywhere near the higher rate tax band let alone £150,000.

I do not have the skills to be a Doctor, footballer or a care worker, I do have excellent analytical skills - yet I have never had the opportunity to apply for/ know where to start to get a high paid job and would guess it has a lot to do with who you know and lucky breaks. I imagine there are an awful lot of people like me.

Looking at people I was in education with - the people who have made money (from a working class background) have all had some sort of break over and above the working hard ethic.

Sorry to go off topic, as a fairly new poster I am unsure of the netiquette of posting this here or posting as a new subject but as it follows from peapod's post I thought I would leave it here.

I am genuinely interested in MN'ers opinions of this observation.

I couldn't be a care worker. I would not be able to do the job. I take my hat off to people who can - just as I do to teachers, teaching assistants, nurses and the carers who look after my grandmother in her home three times a day. These are all jobs that I know I could not do. And I think it is scandalous that these jobs that are of obvious and evident importance to society are so poorly remunerated.

Crap pay in the public sector does have a knock on effect. My grandmother currently seems to have very good carers but in the past there have been shocking examples of poor care given as a result of the difficulty that agencies have recruiting committed and interested staff to look after the elderly for example. Hence the recent dispatches programme and outcry in the press about the neglect of the elderly.

No it wouldn't be fair to have a 25% flat tax rate on earnings, because other taxes such as VAT, fuel duty, road tax and council tax are the same no matter what your earnings, so lower earners would end up paying proportionally more tax than higher earners.

'Very few people are bright enough to get a place at Oxbridge (or even LSE, UCL, Imperial, Durham, St Andrew's etc) so when those that do graduate they have already proven themselves to be far above average so can get jobs that pay more than average.'

See i'dargue about that (well about most things really but that right now LOL )

I've had terrible jobs; receptionist,carer, etc etc. right now I live on carers benefit (H working but looking at redundancy, just offered place at Uni).

A few years back I went to college to do an Access. Whilst I was there Bristol invited me to apply for a place on the Social Policy course and when I chose to do something else, offered me that palce (Theology) without an interview, on references from my Tutor.

now, my understanding of Psych is that IQ is alrgely stable so I didnt gain IQ, I just had the oppourtunity to use it. Most of the people on my course as mature students (not at bristol in the end, but only because rent there for a family was too high / schools relatively poor compared to where we ended up- my sacrifice in status being the right decision to boost boys chances) were very bright indeed, but life in its wonderful ways had relegated them to crap jobs and incomes: childhood poverty being a major factor.

Your argument would work if we had a level playing field from birth but we dont and never will have. Plenty of people underachieve for a great many reasons.