No we do not have a £1m pension pot and the real question is why do you think we should pay more tax than everyone else? We certainly do.
You’re not being asked to pay more tax than ‘everybody else’. You’re ranting because you don’t think that you should pay as much tax as other people on the same income level as you because, according to your earlier posts, you have children, have student loans, live in an expensive part of the country and consider that you are special in some way.
- we pay more tax than low income earners!
Shock! Well-paid people pay more tax than poorer people. What an injustice.
- we pay more tax than households with the same income as us but distributed more evenly!
So your husband is working but you’re not? Isn’t that a choice? If you worked, you could take advantage of your personal allowance.
- DH pays more tax than someone earning the exact same wage as him, because his fees and student loan aren’t accounted for.
How do you work that out? Do you think he should get a discount on his income tax for his student loan, ie that his student loan should come out before tax as a pension contribution would? Don’t be silly. That is not how income tax works.
This is rather like shooting fish in a barrel frankly, but let’s continue:
As has been pointed out several time’s in this thread medics pay one of the highest professional fees of any industry out of their own pocket.
And? You must have known that before you trained, right? You can set the professional fees against tax, which I note that you haven’t mentioned. If your husband earns £65k, as you suggest upthread, that’s a 40% discount.
Other professions have to pay high professional membership fees too. Anybody working as a contractor will have to pay hefty indemnity insurance, for example. Are you suggesting that anyone in a high status field requiring membership of a professional body should be given special tax concessions? Or just your husband and people in his profession?
This is not typical of the majority of other professions most of which have fees paid or heavily subsidised by their company (I used to work in law and this was always the case)
Sorry to rain on your parade, but it is not always the case.
...so yes, medics are a special case’
Because you have to pay professional fees, which are tax deductible? You’ll have to make a better argument than that. I’m starting to see why you left the legal profession.
I can’t decide whether you’re a communist or being intentionally obtuse.
No, Jux is the communist. Do keep up! I’m the one who thinks that you should pay your share of tax, like everyone else has to.
By your logic, isn’t it poor peoples own fault they are poor, why should they consider themselves a ‘special case’?
That’s not my logic, sorry! I don’t think that. I do think that people who earn a good salary should pay more tax, proportionally, than poorer people. A concept that clearly outrages you, judging by your dismay at paying more tax than low earners (see above).
We certainly don’t need our money less than they do so why expect us to pay and not them.
Because you are relatively wealthy. That is how tax works.
More than that, as you yourself pointed out upthread (when you were threatening that doctors would flounce to the antipodes if they didn’t get what they wanted), the country has paid hundreds of thousands of pounds to train your husband as a medic, a career that will pay him well until he retires on a generous pension, also funded by other taxpayers. Do you see that that makes you net beneficiaries of taxation? Which means that any argument for special tax treatment for you is spurious to say the least.
Every level of society can stand to be poorer, unless you’re living on the streets. What you’re saying is ‘Your income exceeds my income so you should give your extra to pay our debt!’ And that’s communist bullshit
I’m not saying that, no. I am certain that my income exceeds yours, but I’m not sulking and complaining about paying more tax because I happen to earn more. Nor should you be.
If you went for a meal with a lower income friend and when the bill came they angrily pushed it toward you and said ‘well you have a better
Job, you should be happy to pay for me’ how would that sit with you?
You really are priceless. That is how taxation works. Have you never worked that out? Nobody likes paying tax, but, to borrow from somebody else, you should be proud to pay it because with it, you buy civilisation. What’s the alternative? Poor people dying in the streets? How would that ‘sit with you’?