The Rich According to the Guardian

[Judy1234]

www.guardian.co.uk/money/2008/aug/04/workandcareers.executivesalaries

Oh Xenia you are so patronising. I can't work out if you mean to be cruel or are just stupid so sheltered you have never seen how some people have to live.

Unfortunately people do freeze to death. There is a story every winter about an OAP dying.

You can't just become a good artist painting with your feet, just as you can't become a good artist painting with your hands. You need to have some artistic talent.

I'm not. Depends how you define poor. Some people in work earn what people on benefits get. I do realise that.

Giles Coren wrote a column in the Times (on Saturday) about the ridiculousness of the Guardian article referred to in the OP. Also apparently the Guardian had to publish an apology for inaccuracies contained in Toynbee's argument. I laughed all the way down to the coast.

I haven't read the whole thread as I drifted off somewhere in the middle of the tax avoidance discussions. But this post jumped out - "I picked my job because I love what I do and I am a help to people. Not everybody is driven by money. I have no desire to do any extra education to further my 'career' and therefore earn more. This isn't a failing on my behalf, I just prefer to be happy."

I couldn't agree more Cocolepew. In the public sector (where I presume you work, or maybe the charity sector?) the only people who earn more than £39k are the managers. Most of us have no desire to enter that slimey, tedious world and are stuck earning 10 or 20k below that.

Pretty much anyone motivated by a public service ethic is forever doomed to be well outside that top 10% bracket, and very often well below the average wage as well. That is nothing to do with lack of hard work, lack of drive or lack of intelligence. In fact IME many public sector workers have considerably more of all three than many in the private sector, who appear to be motivated by money alone.

"Well, I would move if the tax burden got too high"

This is what I find astonishing TO HANG ON TO MORE OF THEIR MONEY. It's astonishing. It's just greed - plain and simple. I mean - exactly how much money to you need to have a good quality of life?

I live in London. It's seething here with people who think it's quite normal and reasonable to go out and spend £1200 on a handbag for christsakes. These are probably the same people who would complain like fuck if they were made to pay more tax. Personally I think the explosion in the market for luxury goods in the past ten years - shoes costing £500 a pair, knickers at £80, effing solid gold baby dummies, you name it - is proof perfect that there's something hideously wrong with out tax system. To have a country where large numbers of people spunk obscene amounts of money on complete crap, while other people are denied cancer treatments on the NHS. Well - it's just rubbish isn't it?

Should have read: "That rich people will uproot themselves and their children just so they can HANG ON TO MORE OF THEIR MONEY".

We just differ very fundamentally from each other. When my fairly modestly paid doctor father was taxed at over 80% on his Halifax savings in the 70s and 66% on his upper NHS pay people did want to move. Why would anyone want to work very hard if the state was taking 60% or 80% of it away? The incentive to work all day Sunday goes in that case. It's bad enough slaving away much harder than most people work to hand back 41% to Gordon Brown as it is but not too far over 40% comes a tipping point when you might as well knock off at 4, put your feet up and be idle because you don't keep enough of the extra to make the extra slog worthwhile.

Why people feel they need particular items is an interesting issue. I suspect it's embedded in our psyche. Even in a jungle you'll get one man or woman who wants to be king pin, have the biggest hut, the largest penis gourd etc We are a competitive race. It's why we survived and the neanderthals didn't. It's how we are made and I don't see why anyone would want to change that although most religions have tried at least to curb some of those instincts, although not particularly well.

If people want to earn a lot and buy badges of success whether that's the best jungle tattoos or in our society the £1,200 handbag, that's up to them. It has always been like this and will never change. I earn quite a lot. I ordered a handbag yesterday for £25. I have been using one my mother's from when she died but it's physically too small and things keep falling out but I've been putting off making that outlay for various financial reasons. Not all "rich" people spend lots of hand bags. It's very difficult to generalise about the top 1% of earners because they differ so much from one another. Yet I was happy to pay 5 sets of school fees and content the school uniform was second hand. We all make our own judgments. I was amused my sister felt patronised by another parent who was offering her second hand uniform last week. Instead she's bought it all new. Neither she nor I are right but even that was an interesting issue.

Would I uproot the children? I think they need stability. They have moved house a few times but not changed schools. I would be reluctant to move them so if I did move say to Bulgaria to pay 10-% tax or where the island is or to travel around or whatever I would imagine I would do it when they are older as I don't believe in boarding schools.

from my experience those buying the £1200 handbags are:

1. wealthy non British visitors
2. WAGs or similar spending money not earned by them / someone else's credit card
3. wannabe WAGS maxing out on their credit card who really can't afford it.

Rich people do not spend £1200 on a handbag. That is why they are still rich.

"We just differ very fundamentally from each other. When my fairly modestly paid doctor father was taxed at over 80% on his Halifax savings in the 70s and 66% on his upper NHS pay people did want to move. Why would anyone want to work very hard if the state was taking 60% or 80% of it away?"

Yes - you might ask that question of people on benefits: why get a job that will result in you taking home little more than you get from the state?

The answer is that you do it because work is an end in itself, and from a sense of communal responsibility.

The only difference with the rich who pay high taxes is that 1) they usually have interesting, fulfilling work and 2) even after they've paid an (in their view) disproportionately large amount of tax from their salary they still have enough left over to guarantee them an excellent quality of life.

It's just that's not enough for some people. They like being rich and having obscene amounts of money to spend on crap more than they like making a good contribution to the upkeep of the country.

The £1200 handbag. What a ridiculous thing.

Fabsmum, you have a nice turn of phrase - I love "spunk obscene amounts of money".

Good posts, nooka. I'm afraid I lost the will to live contribute to this debate some way back, but agree with everything you've said.

"I would be reluctant to move them so if I did move say to Bulgaria to pay 10-% tax or where the island is or to travel around or whatever I would imagine I would do it when they are older"

I personally would be reluctant to leave my home in order to avoid paying taxes because I am part of a community. I know the people at the corner shop, all my neighbors, the pastor at my local church, I sit on local committees, I have friends who live locally who I have established relationships with over many years.

Do you not feel part of any community Xenia, or is it that you don't value these bonds, that you're so willing to go into exile to guard your money?

I suspect that there are many well-off people who don't engage with the communities in which they live. Maybe that's why so many of them lack sympathy or understanding for people who are struggling financially.

just another pointer to highlight the supreme lack of logic in the moving to Bulgaria scenario - er, people in Bulgaria couldn't earn what you earn Xenia, legally, in a million years. What you earn is probably around a tenth of their national budget [not as huge an exaggeration as it may seem] So yes you get taxed 10%, but 10% on a maximum, in your line of work, of around 10k, of thereabouts. Still sound tempting?

"IME it is those who are very well off who benefit most from the idea of "community", certainly in rural areas such as the one I live in, because they have the time to cultivate local friendships and join in local activities that those who have to work 5 days a week do not have"

The people I mix with in my community are mostly sahm's and retired people, but I also know plenty of women who work part and full-time who do a lot of voluntary work.

Working life as a commuter is tough - dh is out the home for 12 hours a day, so I know where you're coming from. He's much less engaged in community life than I am.

I don't think your experience in this is necessarily typical smallwhitecat. Certainly in the rural community in Dorset where I grew up and where some of my family still live it is those on middle/low incomes that are at the heart of the community. Most of those on the very highest incomes work in London and are generally only there at weekends.

fabsmum's post was tremendously cathartic.

Swedes, are you really sure that you want to align yourself with Giles Coren? Did you read those emails he sent to his sub-editors? He sounds fabulously unpleasant and generally punchable.

"We can't all be nurses and teachers and other things the left finds morally laudable."

So very true.

If some on the left were to have their way, there wouldn't be any business at all. How then would we pay for all those teachers and nurses?

I don't think I understand precisely how the relocation to Bulgaria thing works for a lawyer. I mean you'd have to have a stash of capital (rather than a high income from employment, which would be taxed in the UK) for it to make financial sense. And how are you going to be a supportive grandmother in Sofia when family is in the UK?

Hello policy. What were the e-mails GC sent to his sub-editors? I read the column Swedes was referring to and certainly found him eminently punchable on that basis. The thrust of it seemed to be that Toynbee and Walker used a couple of unfortunate cliches in their book, and therefore the whole thing is rubbish and social division is just something made up by hacks at the Guardian. Seemed like a lot of vacuous petty bitching to me.