The wealthiest families should pay the Coronovirus bill

[WellDoneBridge]

Aibu to think this is VERY unfair the household incomes of £100k plus should be tax EVEN further?!

Ffs... Anneliese Dodds. What a joke!!!!

How do you know what the personal financial situation is of the hospital consultants??
They have studied and worked to achieve their careers. Having a high paying job does not equal independently wealthy.
Anyway- just because someone has money doesn’t mean you or anyone else is entitled to take it because they have more than you.

They are in a better position than most. Most people would not have the option of reducing hours to cope with extra tax. Many people rely on a full time wage and their employer would tell them to jog on anyway. I trained for 3 years to become a teacher and dont think I am hard done by on 32k and I work very hard. There came a point working full time was not worth it when paying childcare and I asked to go part time but was told no. If someone on a low wage has to pay extra tax the solution to them won't be oh I will just reduce my hours, it will be huge finanicial hardship.
Also the nurses trained and work just as hard for alot less money!

Overall my point is that everyone needs to contribute to recovery, including those who benefited and those who have broader shoulders, but in addition we need to find better ways than income tax to offset costs.

Yep

I think everyone middle class and up will be paying the Covid bill because it’s increased national debt enormously. That money has to be paid back with interest by the nation and the nations main revenues are through taxation. So in U.K., I’d would expect NI to go up for both employees and employers. VAT may also increase or be further banded so luxury items bought by rich are at a higher rate. Wages will continue to stagnate, perhaps even go down but in work benefits will be frozen.

Outside the EU, the U.K. can impose tariffs on imports to raise money but so expect your grocery & clothes shop to be more expensive as well.

I think there will also be more service cuts to education, NHS, social care, transportation, etc so local councils will of course increase council tax more.

This has impacted everyone. The government grants/furlough has benefited everyone even indirectly by keeping jobs and services open wherever possible.

Paying it back should be applied to everyone on a sliding scale. It shouldn't be a blanket target on one or two individual groups. It should be a bit from everything and everyone.

For starters this is not policy yet, just an idea the gutter press have floated to get everyone cross. I heard that they might stick 1p VAT on everything so the more you buy the more you pay. When it comes down to it many people want amazing services for their own individual circumstances but still want to keep all their bit of the pie. Which is unsustainable. Just pay more into your pension then you won't get taxed as much and can retire wealthier and earlier.

This thread is fucking hilarious in its hypocrisy.

Mn is very left-leaning, until its members are asked to open their purses, then “somebody else” should pay.

Let’s not forget the AMAZING NHS saints threatening to cut their hours so they don’t pay more tax - AND let down the people for whom they swear an oath.

FWIW I think Ragwort’s life sounds lovely. I remember being an arrogant arsehole at 26 and looking down upon the lives of others.

@Pixxie7 You really have no idea of the impact that the area you live in has on your disposable income. Let me give you an example. My brother, who lives in the Midlands, is a teacher and earns around £45k. When he divorced, he managed to buy a three bedroom detached house (cost was about £180k). Where I live in the SE, all he could have afforded is a one bedroom flat. Not much good when you have two kids. He wouldn’t earn any more where I live either as he would be on the same pay grade and no
London weighting. Even if he did, London weighting doesn’t cover the additional living costs.

I'd assume 2x 50k incomes in London come with long hours which means expensive childcare (possibly a nanny) unless you have local parents to cover after school pick ups.

You also have the trade off of travel time/cost/ reliability for decreased housing costs (further away = more likely to need a nanny/au pair)

50k isn't necessarily high powered enough to dictate working patterns either...

The consultant/GP tax trap was insane, it could potentially cost the consultant £6k to work a session, so income reduced by working more hours. There's a shortage of consultants, most are dedicated enough to work extra for minimal extra pay (like net £50), but would draw the line at paying to work.

Some jobs are not conducive to dodging childcare costs by working evenings/weekends... My DH is typical for his profession, working 1 (random) evening and overnight per week (having worked the days either side) and 1 (fortunately predictable) weekend in 4. Can't think of many jobs that give you that much time off - you'd pay so much more in weekend childcare that any saving would be lost!

We need people to work in low paid jobs so our society can function. Some (not all) high earners seem to imagine their high salaries confer moral superiority, but earning power is dependent on a multitude of things - to name a few, your basic level of intelligence and capability, the quality of your education, your health - 'working hard' is only a small component of 'success' as defined by income.

So, yes - the higher earners should pay more, so that the people cleaning their office or stocking their supermarket can carry on doing their jobs in peace - we are all in this together.

On a separate note, I agree with looking towards inherited wealth for contributions - I don't mean that of Mr and Mrs Average whose £175k house and a small savings account are split between their two children - I mean the sort of people who own half of London or vast estates with multiple tenancies that have been 'in the family' since the 15th century.

[quote WellDoneBridge]@hadenoughbleach

Thank you! Honestly, why should I work twice as hard to be taxed twice as much.

Might as well stay in my role. If I go up a pay level it's triple the work for not much more!![/quote]
How hard you work doesn’t necessarily have any correlation to how much you earn!
Me and my partner work hard and earn 100k + between us, but plenty of people work a lot lot harder for NWM.
I am ‘happy’ to pay more tax because I am in a privileged position & recognise that.
I wouldn’t worry the tories are more likely to slash public services & turbo-austerity to pay for this all than implement higher and fairer taxation

I love all the 100k households saying “we work hard therefore we shouldn’t pay more tax”....ok well then let’s only take 200k a year households, oh wait they work even harder than you!
And if it is such a struggle surviving on 100k in London then move out and earn 30k somewhere else in the country?!

Urgh! Why do they think that because you earn £50,000 a year each you're 'wealthy'
Because generally, you are far better off than someone struggling on minimum wage, as many people in this country are. We earn under £50k a year between us and consider ourselves to be reasonably well off. We manage to save every month. But, we don’t have new cars, don’t have a holiday abroad each year, and don’t have new gadgets every time they are released. We have friends who earn more than us who are apparently struggling To balance their budgets every month and can’t see the difference between our lifestyles (us not spending all our money on consumerism and them frittering away their entire disposable income on ‘stuff’).
Whilst I appreciate that housing costs differ massively in this country, not everyone lives in the south east and 50k a year for a household is quite enough to live on in the majority of the country if you don’t mortgage yourself up to the eyeballs and insist on spend, spend, spending.

Mn is very left-leaning, until its members are asked to open their purses, then “somebody else” should pay.

Let’s not forget the AMAZING NHS saints threatening to cut their hours so they don’t pay more tax - AND let down the people for whom they swear an oath.

This. Succinctly put.

I’ve noticed the same thing: many variants on ‘somebody else should pay, not me’. Multinational corporations! Anybody using so-called ‘loopholes’!

However, there’s a distinct lack of ideas about how this happy state of affairs should be brought about. Plenty of declarations that things “should be” different, though. Why not contribute your ideas about how Amazon should be forced to pay an extra £500m in corporation tax to the Treasury?

Re the hospital consultants: you do realise that these are people whose pension pots are each over £1 million, don’t you? If the consultants have spent their entire working life in the NHS (although many do private work on the side), that £1 million has been paid for by general taxation. The so-called ‘tax trap’ associated with working those extra shifts is the penalty for having more than £1 million in your own fund. For these people, it’s an NHS salary: defined benefit, so no risk to them whatsoever. Do you still feel sorry for them now?

When the NHS was being set up, a significant proportion of doctors objected to not being able to charge fees for individual consultations. The solution, put forward by Aneurin Bevan, the health minister at the time, was “stuff their mouths with gold”. Not much changes, does it?

Sorry, for these people it’s an NHS pension, not salary in that context.

Well I suppose that's one benefit of the pay cut I'm getting as a result of Covid. Really glad DH lost his job too

I think there should be a higher levy on 2nd homes & buy to let's. People from outside the country should pay a higher levy for 2nd homes & BTLs. Capital gains could be increased. I would look at inheritance tax loopholes for maybe 2m plus because it's a very unpopular tax.

@WellDoneBridge

Aibu to think this is VERY unfair the household incomes of £100k plus should be tax EVEN further?!

Ffs... Anneliese Dodds. What a joke!!!!

Well it was unfair that the poorest families had to pay for the mess the bankers left via austerity. They can't be asked to pay again while the rich get more tax cuts.

I'm not sure the way forward will be to tax the higher earners more.
Many are self employed with their own Ltd companies and only paid themselves a dividend. Therefore they were not entitled to claim any self-employed CV-19 grant, particularly if they had no premises, or just rented serviced office space.
Many employed higher earners had to take a pay cut so their companies could carry on paying those at the bottom of the tree full wage when furloughed, or had their hours cut and pay reduced accordingly (friend of mine is 1 day and 20% down - but cannot cash in her travel card so no savings to be made there).

Boris says he's going to spend his way out of this - but I'm not convinced he's announced any spend other than those already committed to (it'd be nice if he resurrected the long distance HS2 cycle path that was scrapped for instance). I also don't think people will return to wasting spending money on entertainment, going out, clothes shopping, takeaways, take out coffees, lunch from the shop when at work, holidays, days out at the rate they were as they have now realised it wasn't necessary and life can be OK without quite so much. So I'm not convinced he'll get his ££ back anytime soon.

but cannot cash in her travel card that’s odd, all my friends received a refund on their travel cards

@Maryann1975
@Iamthewombat

Because generally, you are far better off than someone struggling on minimum wage, as many people in this country are. We earn under £50k a year between us and consider ourselves to be reasonably well off

Firstly, ‘we earn X amount between us’ is very different than having one ‘high’ earner and one SAHP. Couples who have two incomes of 25k and juggle childcare between them are better off than couples where one works FT and the other cares FT. One of the many reasons being a SAHP is so often viewed as a cop out by our capitalist society.
Saying ‘well both can work so maybe they should’ is exactly the same as saying ‘well you could retain and become a high earner so maybe you should do that instead of claiming UC’ insensitive and unrealistic.

Secondly, some of those ‘struggling to get by’ on minimum wage live crazy lifestyles. Two friends of mine are low income, have kids, live with parents because they ‘can’t afford to move out shakes fist angrily at government’ but it’s funny how they both have nice cars on finance, designer accessories and a big foreign holiday each year huh ??? But no deposit for a house.

^These guys have their ‘low income’ topped up by UC and CB to the equivalent salary of around £40k so yes wow it must be sooooo hard for them, they deserve nothing but sympathy and tax breaks meanwhile junior Dr’s earning £36k and working 60 hour weeks for the privilege, well they’re just grabby arseholes who should be happy to do it for an apple and the feeling of good will! 😂

Whilst there are many low income families with good priorities who do struggle (I grew up in one) there are just as many idiots with awful money management and terrible priorities who shout loudly for sympathy about how it’s ‘everyone else’s fault’. The whole system is rotten to the core and rather than address it people just look to those earning decent salaries on paper to foot the bills as though it’s totally fair- well it’s not.

DH is an intensive care DR and you would be shocked at how many of his profession (pre covid) were shipping off to other counties like rats off a sinking ship- fed up of abusive patients, unsociable shifts, dwindling resources and being villainized by society for earning a wage somewhat representative of the skills they have.
So fed up of the type of attitudes on this thread they sod off to Australia or Newzealand and take with them the hundreds of thousands the NHS has invested in training them

This country needs Dr’s and Nurses more than they need this country, maybe people should stop slagging them off.

This thread is full of so much negative bias towards high earners.

The high earners (not the people rich with inheritance tax and privilege of birth), are already paying an enormous amount.
People who earn
The top 5% those earning over 75 thousand per year are paying over 50% of all income tax in this country.

43% of adults in the UK don’t pay income tax at all!

The top 1% so those earning over £160 thousand are paying 27% of tax.

And let me tell you, these people do work fucking hard and many of them believe in paying into the system and supporting our economy but they can’t be held responsible for everybody.
If they keep getting squeezed they’ll just all fuck off elsewhere and take their jobs with them.

*please excuse the typos
Should be working....

@user1497207191

A better plan would be to properly tax the sports personalities, pop stars, formula 1 drivers, and other "slebs" who use tax avoidance/evasion schemes or move abroad to tax havens to avoid UK taxes.

How naive is this comment? Don't you think every government has tried to do this incessantly...even paying whistleblowers and the leaked Columbia files. Even if they get them to pay, it is still a drop in the ocean. The vast majority of tax paid in this country is paid by middle income earners and a,ways will continue to be so as they form the largest part of the tax base.

So after 10 years of pain, expect some more added into it but this time the pensioners will cop it as well.

The reality is that as a country we have for years being living outside our means. Despite being classed as the 7th richest in the world, we are still spending far more than the economy generates and that is a simple fact. At some point it has to stop and it will do as we have already started sliding down the international credit ratings.

Was just coming on to say also that the NHS point is more about pensions than about salary.

Also, a wider and genuine question. Government bailouts have largely supported the job security and salary of people in lower paid work. Is there anyone on here in that position who received it as furlough or whose sector had been supported by bailouts that doesn’t think they should contribute something to paying it back? Not whether you couldn’t as that’s very subjective and applies to many people, but whether you shouldn’t?

@Pumpertrumper your post is bullshit. If your "friends" are living with parents they won't get that much in benefits. The only people who get topped up to the equivalent of £40k are those who have very high rental costs in London and the south east, which isn't applicable when you live with parents.