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

[soapbox]

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Thanks Catissleepy! I knew I wasn't making it up.

No need to be so rude/patronising Cote. No, I don't have a great understanding of who's who in the financial world and what rigorous training they undertook to get there because frankly I couldn't give a toss

However, I do know people who, as I said, earn a great deal of money in the City and who are essentially school leavers who've worked their way up. No, they're not clerks or cashiers.

The chief reason that remuneration for work in the financial sector has been so grossly out of proportion with the rest of the economy is neither because the jobs are harder nor because they are more valuable to society or the economy. It is because people who manipulate money for a living are in a much better position to manipulate it into their own salaries and bonus packages than doctors, nurses, teachers, architects etc, and they have been allowed to do so through governments' failure to regulate.

What Iore said

You don't have to work in the financial sector to earn 150K +, though...

Willself - I'm sorry but your preferred philosophy just doesn't work. People don't act to benefit all mankind. They act to benefit (1) themselves, and (2) their loved ones. Then (3) others, if and only if this doesn't conflict with 1 and 2.

Game Theory works on precisely these principles and has been shown to work in a wide variety of circumstances, from prison interrogations to vaccine uptakes and international conflicts.

I have to go now, but would be happy to continue this later if you really feel you can't find examples on your own.

CoteDazur. I trained as a nurse. Prior to becoming a nurse I had a degree in another field. Nursing school was a lot harder.

The majority of my class had previous degrees and they all said the same thing. You have to remember that not everyone who works in a hospital caring for patients is actually a nurse. The majority of the women working on my ward, in uniform and caring for the patients are NOT nurses.

In order to actually do nurse training and get to the point where you are legally allowed to call yourself a nurse you have to go through academic hell. This is because of changes and advances in healthcare. It is very different now than it was in the 50's when nurses could learn their trade by working in a hospital cleaning bed pans. The kind of stuff nurses are responsible for now requires a good background in science. The sciences are always tougher than the arts.

quite right Iorek
last time i looked NHS is not a big money-spinner-I think that is the main reason nurses and most NHS employees barring top consultants etc are not well-paid
nothing to do with demand or value

Anna I earned very nearly 100K as a registered nurse in the USA and had better benefits than my dad who has an MBA and runs a bank. The reason it isn't like that here in the UK is because of the wealth distribution crap.

Cote d'Azur - it isn't that simple. Eg people's choices are hugely skewed by cultural perceptions of what is morally right/wrong and these are often quite irrational.

Iorek - That is a bizarre misunderstanding of renumeration in financial sector - everyone manipulates everyone else better

In reality, they are better paid because they are instrumental in making enormous amounts of money for a bank. Just five people working in Corporate Finance can make several hundred millions of pounds for the bank. They are accordingly paid quite high salaries and even higher bonuses which depend on the money they bring in.

So, cote, where exactly are these enormous amounts of money now, post Lehman Brothers? Because it's looking very much as though it never actually existed.

I'm finding all these posts about nurses not being paid well because there is not much demand for them utterly ridiculous. I know quite a few nurses in the UK, France and Switzerland. They are all pretty much able to pick and choose where they want to work because there is so much demand.

I know of quite a few people who have left nursing despite loving their profession because they were so sick of the bad pay, lack of respect, bad conditions and being treated like crap by doctors. I know of two psychiatric nurses who have left their jobs after being repeatedly attacked by patients and being told that it was an 'occupational hazard'.

Nurses are in demand but as somebody else pointed out people don't always want to do the work because it is hard and poorly paid. Also nursing is traditionally a female dominated profession and therefore has suffered from lack of equality in payment and recognition terms.

And perhaps THAT is the crux of it - people who earn money for their employers tend to be better paid whether they are bankers, lawyers, doctors, accountants or whatever. People who provide a service that is seen as value add (and please note I am saying "seen as" not that I necessarily agree), do not get paid the same way.

A banker who brings a client to the bank that then leads to the bank making millions, can and would expect to get a chunk of that. A highly skilled (non NHS) surgeon who is chosen by a patient because of his/her expertise and reputation is bringing money in for him/herself and/or the hospital so earns a bigger chunk.

However a secretary at a bank might earn slightly more than a secretary at say a hospital, but as she doesn't directly impact the bank's earnings, she won't earn huge salaries. Ditto, a nurse in a hospital, while her job is absolutely essential, does not personally attract patients to that hospital (I note that the overall reputation of the nursing care at a hospital might have an impact, but that's a different discussion).

And this applies to a greater or lesser extent in all professions - I assume the plumber who has contacts and referrals earns more than than the person who takes the calls and sets up the appointments for him?

Anna - Morals and ethics deal with right/wrong and will guide one's actions to a certain degree (Stealing is wrong, but you will steal bread if hungry), but they are not the main drivers of our actions nor does having good morals/ethics mean you will always do what is best for humanity, rather than your own.

Cote you are simply talking out of you arse if you believe that nurses would be paid more if there were fewer of them. It is precisely BECAUSE they are paid so poorly that there IS a shortage of them and that they are being shipped in from overseas to cover the shortages.

And you WERE patronising when you said this:
Nurses, florists, painters, etc make a conscious decision when they enter their chosen profession, knowing that they will most probably never be high earners.

"Maybe they thought mathematics was too hard, or that law, management, finance etc was boring."

or maybe they wanted to do something for perfectly valid reasons, not because (as you imply) that they are non-mathematical airheads.

"Each profession is important to society, but at any given time there is more demand for one and less for the other, and hence a nurse earns less than a banker."

Oh yes, because nurses are in such high supply and so unnecessary. And bankers do such a great job for the health of the nation.

"All this is rather obvious, [patronising] but perhaps needs to be repeated as there are some on this thread who feel nurse works as hard as banker and thus should earn the same. It just doesn't work that way, and both new this when choosing their professions."

Of COURSE they knew that they wouldn't get paid as much as they are worth - that is why fewer people do it, because they know that they will be working evil hours for much less than they deserve.

Get out of your glass tower, please, and recognise that people who HAVE worked in the NHS understand this much better than you ever could.

The NHS doesn't want to pay nurses. They are refusing to hire nurses. Instead they hire people off the streets, give them uniforms and call them healthcare assistants. The public thinks that these people are nurses. We are in dire need of nurses but that doesn't mean the they are going to give nurses jobs. They are going to let patients die instead.

So yes and no about the demand for nurses.

Iorek - These enormous amounts of money are still being made.

You are talking about only one very small portion of the financial system: credit derivatives and more specifically, mortgage backed securities. That is where Lehman Brothers lost all that money.

Iorek is spot on. It is very easy to generate huge profits when you are risking someone else's money. Likewise it is very easy to lose huge amounts of money as we see now.

I once went to an auction and the auctioneer asked the attendees who would start off the bidding at £5 for "a box of contents"...... this is basically what was going on in the City.

If you get a huge salary surely you use some of that as pension provision? I have 12 years of a final salary pension locked away but once the scheme got closed I had to get a defined contribution pension (it was optional and my employer does contribute) but I have to choose the percentage of my salary that goes into that. BUT that is counted as part of my salary and surely there are very few pensions these days that are non-contributary?

another very different reason they are paid a lot is to do with the fluidity of the financial labour market. because the city is in, well, the city, individuals can move from bank to bank with great ease - so they get paid more to stay put. although this doesn;t apply quite so strongly at this precise moment when redunancies have affected supply and demand and it's become more of an employers' market. but in general - compared with most other businesses and industries the financial sector is staggeringly concentrated in a tinsy area (so much so that offices in Mayfair or Canary Wharf are considered "out" of the core centre) and this pushes wages up.

'Wages of nurses, bankers, architects etc are determined by the market - i.e. the free will of all buyers and sellers of a service. Buyer wants to pay less, seller wants to get more. The equilibrium is the determined wage.'

but the equilibrium is completely skewed as the state pays for NHS nurses where as bankers are in the free-market.

But Cote if we follow your argument to its conclusion then all these city types have been gallantly beavering away in order to make money for the economy as a whole right?

That is why they are so well paid right?

In the case, where is the money?

Is it in the economy making us all better off or is it in the coffers of certain individuals who manipulated a system in order to better themselves?

CoteD - Who is still making huge amounts of money? Name one UK company still making huge amounts of money?

and also nurses have been unpaid as it is traditionally a woman's job. Where as traditionally a man's job.

While I disagree with Cote that it was "a very small portion of the financial system" and would argue that it hasn't stopped at credit derivatives and MBS - equities have had it tough, particularly derivatives for example - her point is valid that while there have been massive losses - and ltos of the people who were responsible for those losses have lost their jobs and won't find anything new for the foreseeable future - there are still lots of parts of banks making money.

And a LOT of people in our society benefit from those people making money - you wouldn't have a pension fund, or insurance or a mortgage without those people. You try saving up enough to buy a house outright or protecting yourself financially when the house floods.

And... as a few people have been trying to remind us, it's not just bankers who earn more than 150k. Lots of people do who have nothing to do with finance.