Jeremy Corbyn at Glastonbury ugh

[LivingOnAnIsland]

What a creep!

lessworried that feed the five thousand joke has been doing the rounds on fb since Saturday evening

Still funny, though.

Oh hello, pigeondujour. I notice you never answered my question upthread. Much more fun to snark and try to make people out to be liars, isn't it?

Agree OP

Pelvic is right.We very few higher earners do pay a lot of tax. Some people seem to think everyone who earns a lot evades tax (yet in fact loads have it deducted at source under PAYE and even if not under PAYE we still pay loads of tax). I don't know where they think all the tax comes from! Those who earn a fair bit have been squeezed quite a bit with higher taxes recently (we have never paid so much of the tax take) and we are fairly mobile.

I just need a PC to work at and my youngest children leave school next week. I like the UK and I like my house here but if Labour taxes including higher income tax and also the property/land value tax came in I might well move. Good riddance a lot of lower earners would say. Plenty of them would much rather have much lower state benefits, no state pensions and the like and be rid of richer people - perfectly valid view point.

All psychological studies show if your colleague at work could have a £20k pay rise and you just £10k most people would they did not get the pay rise as their colleague would be getting so much.

Lucy, what does that mean? Is the study talking about people doing equivalent jobs and doing equally well at them or one person doing better and therefore given a greater reward? The latter happens all the time and the former taps into the concept of fairness. I don't know anyone who objects to better remuneration if the feel it is deserved. A lot of people object to paying more tax from their income to support those who they perceive as not working as hard as them which to me seems exactly the same thing.

Many of the top 1% are PAYE (we are) so pay lots of tax (we do).

People now seem to differentiate between the top 1% and the super rich (top 0.1% ?) - it's the super rich who tend to engage in legal tax avoidance - whether it's setting up offshore companies, or taking advantage of tax havens or whatever. Andrea Leadsome set up a nice property company based offshore, I believe.

Someone mentioned the Laffer Curve upthread - according to the Laffer Curve, tax revenue drops after tax rates of around 70%. At the moment, the top rate is 45% for earnings over £150K. Plus it's pretty controversial, and often used to justify tax cuts to the super rich, eg, in Bush's government, which really never seem to benefit lower earners - it's right up there with trickle down economics IMO.

U.K. income tax rates on higher earners are relatively low by recent historical standards. They were higher in the recent past (eg under Thatcher) and are higher in much of Europe.

But it is right that you can only squeeze higher earners so far, and this is why the U.K. needs to look again at how it taxes assets and income from assets. For example, some European countries tax capital gains at your marginal income tax rate. Many European countries have land taxes. These are not "socialist" ideas.

I think the attitude among the high earners is often what can they get with their money and how will it benefit them directly. It can be hard to understand how little everyone in this country gets for their money, even those who pay much less tax or no tax at all. The difference is that those with lower incomes often lack any real alternatives such as private healthcare or private school and can be right at the edge of poverty. We're none of us doing well so something needs to change.

"At the moment, the top rate is 45% for earnings over £150K"

mmm well 47% as I don't see why you don't include the upper 2% National Insurance and if you are at the point of losing the single person allowance your rate (around £100k of income?) is about 62% and if you arep aying the 9% graduate tax 71%. That's a lot of income to lose at your upper marginal rate particularly if you are paying £30k a year for full time childcare for a baby on top of that.

There are very few super rich ( eg see the Amstrad man who showed his January cheque for his rather large tax amount and Caldwell who used to say he paid more tax than anyone.

Above £100k is when the personal allowance starts being reduced at a rate of £1 for every £2 earned so by £110k it's down to £5,250. It's completely gone at £123k.

Sorry, at £110k it's down to £5,750.

Has any party said they will introduce a graduate tax?

There was a discussion of graduate tax in today's Times. But the main editorial piece, entitled Stay the Coursework made interesting points.

1. Permitting universities to charge fees has increased access to university for the less privileged. "Between 2006 and 2015 the cap on fees trebled to £9000 in England and the number of school leavers from the poorest parts of the country rose by three-quarters. That is twice as fast as in the rest of the UK, where devolved governments held the cap down."

2 "Scrapping fees would amount to a colossal subsidy of middle class children by taxpayers at large, more than 60% of whom have not themselves had the benefit of university education. ... Intergeneration resentment ... is only made worse by making those who do not go to university subsidise better life chances for those who do."

1. "The relevant comparison is not 2017 to the 1970s, but Britain with the US. The best universities in both countries offer the best education in the world, but Britain's do so at roughly a third the price of America's"

I've re-typed it and the TImes's words are in quotation marks, as the article is behind the pay wall.

My larger point is that JC and Momentum are kidding themselves if they think the high earners will stick around to be fleeced. Talent, education and ambition are highly mobile, and the golden geese have no need to stay in the UK, much less the UHNW individuals who are the clients and beneficiaries of the tax avoidance industry. If you pay for private healthcare and education in London, then there's not a lot of reason not to pay for private healthcare and education in Singapore or Switzerland.

If these people think it's going to be class war again (unless you're 55+ you won't remember that under Denis Healey's the top rate of tax on unearned income was 98%) they will leave the country for a friendlier regime. The rich have far more choices than the poor. Tony Blair's genius was to make Labour feel pragmatic enough to not frighten the middle class. Arguably, they also stopped being a socialist party. Jeremy Corbyn is the backlash.

the FT found a 1; 12 ratio of income difference between rich and poor but that that came down to 1:4 when the low waged's benefits were fed in and the rich's very high personal taxes, lack of personal allowance was taken off. www.ft.com/content/320c7482-2b57-11e7-bc4b-5528796fe35c?mhq5j=e1

The better off are more mobile than other people. I don't want to leave teh UK but higher tax rates already mean now the children are getting older I do a bit less because what's the point when 50% goes to the state in direct tax never mind even more of that if you add on indirect taxes including insurance premium tax and my £3k council tax plus what I pay the children for university costs.