What do you think of the 5% tax hike for those earning more than £150k - good or bad?

[soapbox]

????

The rich are always threatening to leave. Andrew Lloyd Webber. Paul Daniels. Both still here

TAP puts the question "Would the people earning their job still choose to work for £30K? Would anybody do the job for £30K? ( That is not a dig I don;t know) If not we need to pay the bigger wages."

Well for me definitely yes, because that would be half as much again as what I'm on now. More generally though - is the fact that someone is prepared to do a job for a low wage (and I don't think £30k is low by any measure btw) an excuse to exploit their good nature? I don't think so. You are right though - this is precisely the reason that public sector pay is so low. These people and public servants - they are not motivated by money and paying them more would not make them work any harder than they already do.

Basically all of we public sector people are mugs aren't we. But hey, at least we'll die knowing we did some good in our lifetimes.

habbibu
that was a joke

at DeborahBorr.

Yes, dahling, I WILL marry you!

CD? I'm confused? He doesn't drink wine? What did I say?

Twinklemegan I agree that 30K is not a low wage.

I don't think it is right to pay someone a low wage but £30K is enough to give a decent lifestyle in most places, so if people are willing to work hard for that wage it must be right.

I suppose we need to think if all things were equal ( and they never are) which job would you do for £30K the teaching job or the banker job. If you choose teaching then the banking job obviously needs to pay more in order to recruit talented staff.

I am just glad that there are people who choose to do both kinds of jobs.

deborahBorr - we obviously need to do a higher percentage, then surely those two will leave

LOL at the betrothal. "For poorer and for poorer, in sickness and in health (national of course)"

Ah well, at least we'll be happy together warming our cockles on our one piece of coal, tugging our forelocks in gratitude at those thrusting cads who keep us in nurses...

And on an almost completely unconnected but returning to excellent aphorisms, who was it said 'a fool and his/her money are soon married'?

I can't see Wilf's link (taking too long to load) but I know the one it is. Don't you think there would be a similar lack of insight if you interviewed a gang of teenage mothers on a council estate in Sunderland about the way the other half live?

Public sector workers often still get final salary pensions. My husband does. That is a benefit worth a lot and needs to be considered when comparing salaries with the private sector, where final salary pensions are now quite rare.

You could read to me from Roget's every night dahling

See that's another emotive response.

What I am saying is that the nurse should be valued by society but also the taxpayer who pays for one (or three) nurses should be valued as well.

Perhaps we should all value one another more?

mummpy - like you I used to bring home a lot of money. I worked hard for it. But unlike the people I worked with I still knew people who DIDN'T have a lot of money. And therefore I knew that some of them worked pretty hard too. Maybe they didn't work as hard as I did but did that justify the size of the difference in the amount of cash we had? Most people with money live isolated from humanity by their own arrogance.

Rich people don't work solely or even mainly for money. They work for position, for recognition, for power. You don't buy a yacht because you need it, you buy it because you want envy from other people and if it isn't there you have to imagine it. You need money because you are insecure.

WTF? Such generalised nonsense.

tatt - you are very silly if you really believe what you typed there.

Twinklemegan you speak the truth - speaking as one who worked in a very unrecognised sector of the NHS, so no high-profile pay-rises for us - £30k pa would have been great! It still would. But I didn't work in the NHS for the money (pmsl at the mere thought!) but because it was a job I enjoyed and wanted to do and felt like I was making a contribution somehow.
And before anyone asks, the reason I left was because the sheer stress of working in under-staffed and over-worked labs was killing me.

It's like the fox hunting ban really - simply socialist jealousy. It will help make labour popular with anyone who doesn't aspire to earn those types of sums. the higher tax goes up the lower the tax take, perversely because people just ensure they avoid it lawfully. When tax rates were reduced from 60% to 40% the amount of tax recovered was then more not less.

I was looking at a booklet here in my father's papers - single person's allowance 805 in 1977. Married man's allowance £1225

Child tax allowance being phased out but £365 child over 16 £334 11 - 16, £300 under 11.

And here are the tax rates

up to £6000 basic rate tax being reduced from 35% to 33%

Sound horrendous high rates.
40% £6 - £7k
45% £7k - £8k
50% £8k - £9k
55% £9k - £10k
60% £10k - £12k
65% £12k - £14k
70% £14k - £16k
75% £16k - £21k
83% Over £21,000

Investment income surcharge where income over £2k subject to a 15% extra charge.

It became not worth working extra long hours as most of what you earned was taken away. It was around that time that indeed some people did start to work abroad, pop stars had to have over 365 days abroad for concert tours etc.

The rmeoval of all personal allowances to for those who earn these amounts and the extra tax.. oops national insurance... of 0.5% on employer and employee for everyone earning over is it £50k? is another one too.

Some of us work to fund an ex partner in effect or post divorce debts.

£150k wouldn't pay my mortgage and school fees even. A pittance. But the 10% Bulgarian flat tax rate sounds attractive.

Xenia you are shockingly late to this thread. You have left me alone battling alone against the people who don't understand measures of central tendency.

By the way, can you actually practise law in Bulgaria? I mean the thought of living in Sofia instead of blighty would be enough to put me off. But there is the issue of actually being able to practise.

Or is the idea to move to Bulgaria and earn nothing? Ten percent of nothing is nothing, right? Woohoo, let's all go there. It's a zero percent tax rate for me ...

Xenia even you must know 150K is not a pittance.

You don;t have to have a huge house and private school fees.

So buy a cheaper house Xenia and send your children to a state school like the rest of us. Your pittance is 9 times my salary.

Flat tax is the way to go. If you earn more, you pay more (your fair share) and anyone arguing that it's only an extra 1% is missing the point. Making people pay disproportionately more of their income the more they earn is ridiculous especially when they aren't able to benefit from the services that their taxes go to providing.

Whilst I'm not in the enviable position of earning 150k, tax was one of the reasons we left the UK - unfortunately, although DH is out of the UK tax regime altogether, I'm not (but that's another thread). Progressive taxation and redistribution of wealth are the reasons we have such a burdensome bureaucracy. I resent the government's assumption that it knows better how to spend my hard-earned!

The entire tax system needs overhaul. Clearly tax on consumption disproportionately affects the lower paid which is why I think VAT should be a more reasonable 5%. But more fundamentally, we need to question how and on what the government spends tax revenue, leading to the obvious question "does the government really require that much tax revenue".

"does the government really require that much tax revenue". Of course they do. That's why the University I work in is falling apart at the seams.

I tend to think the obvious question is actually "do the wealthy really need all that money?"

I do think a philosophical discussion about the nature of need is where this thread needs to go next.

TiredExplorer - agree entirely with your post.
We are not in a position at the monemnt to move overseas, but we intend to give our DC every possible means and opportunity to be nmobile when they grow up, and we will not be encouragig them to to to uiversity in this country! - in the 10 yrs time when they get to that age UK universities will have lost their remaining credibility and any intellectual rigour they previously had will have been wiped out - they will be just another facet of state controlled failing education sinking ever more public funds into a bottomless pit This gvt has taken our money to vastly extend tghe public sector and thus buy itself a client base of sheep-like labour voters.