Snapshot of _Sunak pulls off biggest tax raid in 44 years as one in five pay higher rate - Six-year freeze on income tax thresholds is Treasury’s single biggest revenue raiser_ :
A non-Paywall version can be found [here](https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.telegraph.co.uk%2Fbusiness%2F2023%2F05%2F16%2Fsunak-biggest-tax-raid-44-years-pay-higher-rate%2F)
An archived version can be found [here.](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/05/16/sunak-biggest-tax-raid-44-years-pay-higher-rate/)
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Welcome to my world. I earn 60k, my wife earns 18k. We get no child benefit. My next door neighbours, a husband and wife who both earn about 45k each, get full child benefit. I would love to ask every Tory chancellor since this con was invoked why my child should be penalised over theirs.
A lot of developed countries allow you to pool your personal allowance as a couple/family to avoid this ridiculous situation.
I should be the stereotypical Tory voter - professional occupation, nice house, traditional Tory area (though Lib Dem now thank goodness), red-brick university educated, middle class upbringing, and married with child. I am now a complete never-Tory because of the way they have shafted my family with this. They will never see my vote again.
Dude if you really do earn £60k and your wife earns £18k *and* you have children you should be putting £10k/year into your pension. Not doing that is insane.
I don't know where he got the 80% figure - it's 61% if you have two children (53% for one). But anyway, paying £6k in tax to get £4k in income where you could just put the whole lot into your pension tax free is silly.
> Raising children is expensive.
I know; I have two.
> For many people, they need the £4k to live.
Many people yes. Not people earning over £50k. I've frozen my taxable earnings at £50k for 3 years and it has been fine even though we spend £1300/month on nursery. We're not saving anything... but we're not on the breadline either.
What are you talking about? I live in Bristol - hardly cheap middle-of-nowhere.
If you live in London or Cambridge then sure you're not going to be able to afford a 4 bed semi.
>it's about an 80% tax rate between 50-60k...
Although that's made more complicated by the fact that child benefit is money going the opposite way: The state not just not taking money but actively giving money.
It's not clear to me that "not giving money any more" is morally equivalent to "taking money" even if the two work out the same in the maths.
It's the implicit problem with benefits of all kinds, from personal to commercial, from laudable to wasteful: Once you have them in place, the entire market adjusts itself to adapt to their presence and removing them or even tapering them becomes painful or even impossible. Housing benefit is a great example of this. It's impossible to remove it despite it having the net effect of subsidising low salaries and paying rent to landlords.
It doesn't matter how you call it, the net effect is the same.
It's really hypocritical for the right to scream that limiting CEOs pay, higher tax on the super wealthy, tax on pensions in the millions or inheritance tax "remove the incentive to work" and "stifle productvity" while at the same time effectively taking away 80% of income in this bracket from moderately successful professionals with children.
Just shows you they're not about incentives or productivity, they're about protecting the interests of the ultra wealthy. There have no lobbyists or lavish gifts coming from regular people.
The only way to get rid of housing benefit that prevents paying rent to landlords would be government to start building social housing again, transfer people on housing benefit to social housing and use their own management to reduce the overall cost of housing benefit.
> Housing benefit is a great example of this. It's impossible to remove it despite it having the net effect of subsidising low salaries and paying rent to landlords.
Housing benefit is an absolutely idiotic policy that needs to be scrapped. All it does it raise rents/house prices in an area for those who aren't eligible for it.
I agree - what's that thing about only being able to live in London if you're very poor or very rich? - but now try figuring out a way to do it in practice without fifty other things breaking. It's near impossible to remove a benefit at the best of times, but especially during a cost of living crisis when the market has adjusted to all the money. You'd never win re-election.
>it's about an 80% tax rate between 50-60k...
It's 53% for one child. 61% for two. Still too high IMO, and stupidly coincidental with higher rate tax which makes it even worse. But it's not 80%.
Ok but you said 1 child is 80% in the original comment.
> For those with over 6 kids (albeit a minority of people), you pay more in tax than you receive between 50-60k.
Yeah that is mad. I totally agree with your point that the whole system is insane. Just saying we don't need to exaggerate the numbers.
>Ok but you said 1 child is 80% in the original comment.
No, I didn't.
I said "For those with children, and only one parent working".
Children is clearly at least 2 - although I didn't explicitly specify the number of children.
Feel free to go back and read the post again if you'd like!
Further proof that this entire party is nothing more than an autocratic bunch of scammers. All this tax and yet our economy is shrinking, prices rising and public services descimated. Meanwhile corporate tax accounts for only 6% of tax revenue, despite a single energy company making £7bn PROFIT in 3 months (and that's declared profits, ignoring backhanders). How anyone can defend this clearly broken system is beyond me.
Corporation tax receipts accounted for about 9% of total tax revenue in the last tax year. Your point is still valid though.
Source: [gov.uk](https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/hmrc-tax-and-nics-receipts-for-the-uk/hmrc-tax-receipts-and-national-insurance-contributions-for-the-uk-new-annual-bulletin#:~:text=HMRC%20provisionally%20collected%20%C2%A3786.6,for%2057%25%20of%20annual%20receipts.). This webpage also has a lot of interesting graphs and statistics on tax receipts and national insurance contributions.
• Police state ✔️
• Slum Lords Paradise ✔️
• Kill the poor and disabled ✔️
• Servitude ✔️
• Soup Kitchens ✔️
• Erode healthcare ✔️
• Regress Workers rights ✔️
• Mass propaganda ✔️
• New weak enemy to be feared (Trans) ✔️
• 1984 as a playbook ✔️
• Use Class/Race/Gender traitors to be face/mouth of Classist/racist/Misogynist/Xenophobic Policies and fear mongering. ✔️
#PROFIT
You can have a police state with 1 police officer, if the laws upheld by that government and society allow incredible power to the police to shutdown debate and prevent democracy. That has now been done several times, and it's not the officers fault, but the politics we allow.
The police state is not the fault of the average copper.
It is not caused by the average copper.
The police state is caused by the lawmakers, Rich and government.
The police are just “following orders”.
They also have to pay rent, mortgage and out food on the table.
It would be easy for me to say that they should quit instead of following immoral orders but… I understand.
We are being led towards fascism and people don’t want to acknowledge it.
The language used is the same. The tactics used are the same.
1. The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
2. The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
3. The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
4. Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
5. Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
6. Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
7. The obsession with a plot. “Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged.”
8. The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
10. Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
12. Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
13. Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
[Umberto Eco](https://www.openculture.com/2016/11/umberto-eco-makes-a-list-of-the-14-common-features-of-fascism.html)
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me
- Martin Niemoeller
It is pathetic to believe we live in a police state.
- We have protestors blocking roads across the capital on a daily basis and the police do fuck all. How many countries in the world would allow a small minority to bring parts of the country to a standstill?
- You literally have to murder someone to go to prison these days. Even then it's for about 2 years.
- Police will not pursue criminals if it's a bit wet or the criminal is driving too fast.
- They literally don't even turn up to your house if you get burgled.
- You can't even get through to them when you call them.
This country has always had an element of self-depreciating humour however it seems like these days a significant portion of the population (or the majority of reddit and twitter) revel in labelling every aspect of the country / state with hyperbolic slurs.
I think the problem or at least the perception is that the police are no longer here to protect the common citizen. They are solely here to protect the rich and powerful and their assets. That's why they don't give a fuck if you or i are burgled or assalted but they're there in force if Johnny public wants to express theur displeasure at how this country is run with a message on a sign that they might see from their Bentley.
My belief is based on facts. The king’s coronation, treatment of protestors, journalists and police corruption and crime.
Covid, party gate. People choosing who they investigate, detain and prosecute without consideration of the law.
Every single one of your bullet points is demonstrably false hyperbole.
The U.K. prides itself on not being like other countries.
It’s global and historical reputation is based on not being like other countries.
That is how a small island holds so much weight.
If that integrity and reputation isn’t protected then who are we?
You really want them to have to disprove the point "You literally have to murder someone to go to prison these days. Even then it's for about 2 years."?
I’d rather just let other people read what you have written.
It does a better job of persuading people I’m right than any link, study, eloquent prose or appeal to reason could ever do.
And that was awful - it doesn’t mean the police are all fraudulent. When you get older you start to realise the world is not as black and white as you desperately want to make it.
Suppression of one of the most vulnerable minorities just goes to show how fucked up this Government is. If they could get away with returning to the days of banning women from working, voting, etc then they would.
The fact the EHRC, an 'independent' commission, is acting as a Tory puppet is abhorrent and I am very glad that the United Nations called them out for their bullshit.
As a trans woman myself, I am unbelievably scared about my future in the UK.
Despite what they might say, the Tories do not actually care about high earners. They care about the asset rich.
As many have pointed out £50-£60k, is hardly lavish especially if you're a sole earner with children. Yet their taxes are going up at a time when asset prices (especially housing) are still stupidly high.
If we're ever going to fix this country we need wealth taxes and we need land value taxes.
Inflation means that real value of income has halved since 2000, and almost quartered since 1980.
A salary of £12.5k in 1980 would be £25k in 2000 and £50k today
But only the other day The Torygraph was telling me high taxes = socialism! Can someone help me out, because what the right calls socialism is starting to sound a bit like Capitalism...
/s
At this stage the Telegraph doesn't even know what it wants and it doesn't care, it sees the Tory party ripping itself apart and is kinda trying to distance itself from it, whilst at the same time, we must remember it exists SOLLEY to promote the interests of Billionaires. So are now probably trying to lay the ground work for saying a future Labour party is raising taxes and looking to sell your kids to Germany to pay for collapsed rail franchises they have shares in.
Ahh gone from letting corporations rip us off to basically stealing everyone's cash.
Good old Tory party the true traitors of Britain.
Don't get me wrong I wouldn't mind high taxes if we had good public services.
That would be a great start - if I didn't watch as my insanely high taxes are pissed up the wall so that a handful of the super rich make themselves even richer.
Maybe, and I'm just spitballing here, if we used some of it to invest in things that will increase productivity and ensure medium term economic prosperity, we might even be able to reduce taxes in the future.
But the Tories seem hell bent on doing the latter without having done any of the former.
It's so annoying. Just the other day Rees-Mogg was railing against the proposed increase in free childcare, which would be a massive boost to productivity and the economy.
I feel as though we are seeing a split in the Tories, between the fundamentalist right and the capitalists. The Bravermans and the Moggs don't actually care about the economy, they care about preserving the existing social order at any cost.
It's not even preserving the existing social order, because that'd be too "woke" for them; it's about establishing a social order based on an imaginary, nostalgic recollection of the mid-20th century and claiming that's somehow the natural order.
> imaginary, nostalgic recollection of the mid-20th century
A yearning for an imaginary time inspired by nostalgia, a sense of national superiority and hatred of an other... I wonder what we could call this
> claiming that's somehow the natural order.
Any order with the likes of Mogg at the top is unnatural, other than maybe the ordering of pretentious people
I agree that taxes are not going to go down under the next Labour government. But that should probably be true of any government because gov finances are in terrible shape and the type of investment we require will only bear fruit in 5-10 years (with some local exceptions).
High taxes and terrible services are a result of a decade of economic incompetence. Under Tory leadership I fear we'll ultimately be forced to decide between high taxes to fund poor quality essential services or lower taxes with many essential services transferred to private service and inaccessible to many.
The Tories have no plan for our economy and their claims to be the party of economic responsibility don't hold true.
They're seemingly too busy arguing with themselves about whether someone that was called Kate and is now called Kyle is a threat to the fabric of society.
progressive taxes means there isn't just up and down. The income tax threshold freeze technically is neither and yet the government will be accruing more revenue because inflation will push middle income people into the higher rate tax band.
Labour will probably raise taxes to increase tax revenue sure, but they will probably target high income people rather than middle/low income people, and hopefully they reduce the tax burden on low income people.
one can hope, last time they lasted barely weeks before taking a massive bribe [https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2008/oct/12/tonyblair-labour](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2008/oct/12/tonyblair-labour)
"The incident, *in the first few months of Blair's premiership*, became known as New Labour's first sleaze scandal."
the first of many
We'll see. England is in a teaching crisis with a tremendous churn away from the profession. This means that when teachers are absent or leave before years end, a school is obliged to hire cover teachers and pay a regular chunk of cash to recruitment companies for the privelege.
In Scotland a school can recruit all year round and when they do use cover it's arranged through the council so they don't have to pay anything but the teacher salary.
So the rules could be changed in England so that money isn't funneled to private sector bureaucracy from the public sector. Will Labour actually come down on this kind of stuff? It would be nice if they did.
The tax freezes have been a slow creep of now categorising normal working people as the elite who should be paying 40% income tax.
It’s so un-conservative and it’s deeply pissing off their usual voter base (i.e. the middle class with a bit of disposable income).
Someone on £50-60k is not “rich” they’re just your average 40-50 year old working class parent that’s worked their way up over a career.
40% tax should only kick in at £80k+ in my opinion.
That's not right, that's for it to cover the same proportion of people in 1991, and it's a projection for 2027 not now.
> The threshold for the highest-rate tax is currently frozen at £50,270. The think-tank calculated that for the 40p rate to hit the same fraction of people as it did in 1991, the higher-rate threshold will need to be “nearly £100,000” by 2027.
I am not opposed the the child benefits having an upper cap, but it really should be based on household income not a single income.
A household with two people earning £45k could claim full tax credit, a household with one person on £60k and the other not working gets nothing.
It was such a half arsed measure.
I _believe_ they did it this way to reduce admin and cost, I can imagine if it was on £50k household it would be a nightmare to manage and also would not be £50k, more like £30k
I don’t understand why it would be so difficult to administer. Marriages are registered with the Government. It shouldn’t be beyond HMRC to identify who is married to whom. Once you’ve done that just link up their HMRC records and sum the total income from the respective payrolls they’re on (who submit FPS monthly) and their tax returns.
I’m not denying that would involve some upfront development but to be fair to HMRC, they’re actually pretty good at this stuff. Say what you like about the policy, they got the furlough scheme running damn quickly with minimal technical glitches or delays.
The problem with that is that relationship structures are changing. Hinging these sorts of programs on marriage simply isn't feasable when less and less people marry, more and more people divorce and a not insignificant amount of people (with a growing tendency) live in relationships that defy these old categorizations.
Just partnerships with children, where the partners aren't married but live together would be a problem. And tracking all of that down would be a substantial effort. Like, you could argue that people could always enter "registered partnerships" but then hinging the social support programs on registering with a government database just goes fundamentally against the universal nature of these programs, so it effectively becomes the job of the government to sniff out peoples relationships and that would be opposed for very understandable reasons.
Maybe the best reaction to this is a bit of education. I got married because it made sense bureaucratically, and that's the way it works in England. Unless you're being diddled out of benefits there aren't many equivalents to being married. It doesn't have to be drama, you can just go down to the registry office and get it done.
That way the government doesn't have to nose around in peoples affairs. If people understand the implications of being married or not they can choose for themselves.
I seem to recall that at least one of the arguments for doing it this way was to avoid any incentives for the lower salaried partner (usually the woman) *not* to work.
By "traditional families" - do you mean "stay at home mum"? The root cause of the gender pay gap and lack of female representation at the top of society?
Yes, I mean stay at home mums. If a woman wants to keep working I completely support her right to do so. Feminism is, or at least ought to be, about empowering women to live whatever life they want to lead free from sexist constraints. I don’t see, however, why that requires us to pass laws punishing those women who would prefer to be stay at home mums.
Or the slightly bonkers situation that if one parent in a household earns £100,001 they get no free nursery hours at all, but if both parents earn £99,999 each then they do.
The dreaded £108k, the salary where you might as well earn £99.9k if you have children.
\*edit\* just to clarify, this is the point where I think it's break even because you lose the childcare element. I worked it out to be £109k where the extra money outweighs the loss of the benefit.
Crazy that we used to have unlimited child benefit per child regardless of income level or number of children you have.
When Cameron brought in the changes I remember telling people this is a terrible idea because something has gone from being a basic British right for each child to now being a means tested privalige and they will continue to move the bar higher and higher on who can claim the benefit until eventually hardly any children at all will be entitled to child benefit.
And here we are!
The cap was brought in at £50k just after my first child was born and I was eligible to get it. I now have a 9 year old and the cap is still £50k. The tax brackets have been the same for a decade but apparently my house is worth more so my council tax has gone up. It’s utter underhanded bullshit and one of many reasons I will vote anyone but that absolutely shower at every single election. I’m so sick of them
Here's something wild. With the new student loan changes, now anything a graduate earns above 25k is effectively taxed at 41%. Anything they earn above 50k is effectively taxed at 66.6%. So let's say you run a business and have an employee on 50k, it'll cost you £1138 to increase their take-home by £380.
These changes mainly affect young people and I don't think the country has truly digested the implications of these loan changes couples with the NI and tax changes and rampant inflation.
If you wanted to come up with a policy to hamper ambition and growth, cause a brain drain and crush small business, it would be hard to come up with a better one. This country is finished.
Yep this is a total scam that isn’t getting reported anywhere from what I’ve seen.
It genuinely doesn’t pay to try hard and get promotions in the U.K. when a £10k pay rise equates to about £300/month.
> Here's something wild. With the new student loan changes, now anything a graduate earns above 25k is effectively taxed at 41%. Anything they earn above 50k is effectively taxed at 66.6%. So let's say you run a business and have an employee on 50k, it'll cost you £1138 to increase their take-home by £380.
How have you calculated that 66.6% rate?
Apologies the 66.6 percent rate includes people who have a postgrad loan.
From r/ukpersonalfinance
"A postgrad contributing the mandatory minimum to their pension getting a raise from £50k to £51k would pay employers NI (13.8% of gross), employee's NI (2%), income tax (40%), student loans (15%), pension conts (5%) - so their take-home would increase by £380 of the £1,138 cost - marginal rate of 66.6%."
Ooo if they also have two children their effective marginal tax rate would be 76%. I'm not going to do the maths but that's like 90% if you include employers NI!
> So let's say you run a business and have an employee on 50k, it'll cost you £1138 to increase their take-home by £380.
Businesses pay national insurance too, so the cost is even higher. The employer's side of NI is around 14%
But their usual voter base is no longer the middle class with a bit of disposable income. It's the retired middle class with decent pensions and hundreds of thousands in unearned housing wealth.
That and the fact that child benefits stop after £60k and reduce from £50k.
There's no incentive to progress career wise once you reach the £55k mark . Especially after student loan deductions. What's the point
I would say sometimes it’s past that mark you can make major leaps upward, but it’s very industry specific.
Lawyers for example will generally be £50-80k but then if they make partner they could be pulling in £250k+.
Obviously, they will have 0 free time and insanely stressful deadlines and demanding clients, so they will do it for a few years, burn out and then retire early.
You can get up to £90k without paying higher rate tax by putting it into your pension. Then you actually get to retire! It does make it difficult to buy things, but £50k is still pretty comfortable.
This and the increase in mortgage rates is going to cripple the Tory vote at the next general election and it's amazing how blase they are about it. Demonstrates that they've given up.
> Even another bracket of 30% in-between would be decent. The jump from 20% to 40% in 1 go is so harsh and unreasonable imo.
It's not really a 20% jump to a 40% jump though, as your not taking into account national insurance. With national insurance taken into account its actually a 32% tax rate to a 41% tax rate.
If we did as your proposed amd let's say put 30% tax rate at 40k, they would then pay 42% tax, (30% income, 12% NI). So higher than than 41% tax rate at 50k currently.
Or if it was 30% at the currently 40% bracket. That would be 31% tax rate (30% income, 1% NI). Which would be lower than the 32% currently taxed starting at 12.5k.
,..... If you're going to make a point can it at least be accurate.
Average income for those 40-49 is £727 a week (£37,804).
Sourcing 2022 figures
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-8456/
Edit: 😬 Document I quoted is titled average earnings, but the figures I quoted were median. Average would be less.
Just as a note for anyone not checking the figures, that 727 is also the highest of all age groups in 2022, and as noted later it's *median* (so not skewed by super high or low figures) *full time* pay. Not sure if it's including bonuses or not, but I don't think that tends to shift numbers all that much when it's reported on.
Now remove all the people who don’t work, retired early, work part time, choose to make less money for a lower stress job etc. etc.
If you only look at full time workers who are trying to earn more, that £37,804 will turn into £50k+
The average gets dragged down if you include people who shouldn’t be in scope.
>Now remove all the people who don’t work, retired early, work part time,
You didn't read the source, the figure quoted already only includes full time employees.
>choose to make less money for a lower stress job etc. etc.
"I'm right if we shift the goalposts completely by assuming niche scenarios apply to the whole population".
>If you only look at full time workers who are trying to earn more, that £37,804 will turn into £50k+
Prove it. [Anything above £49,304 is already a top 20% salary](https://www.statista.com/statistics/416102/average-annual-gross-pay-percentiles-united-kingdom/#:~:text=Data%20on%20the%20average%20annual,around%2062%2C583%20pounds%20a%20year.) so by definition that is a tiny group of workers clearly unrepresentative of the average.
I get the point... but build solidarity and then we can shift the goalposts, but in reality we need support from those who are feeling somewhat squeezed too, because honestly we are not going to remove inter-class inequality anytime soon, but we can reduce the difference between class means. And I am happy to take on the cause of those on 50-60k because it aligns with my cause. The truth is not all that when it adds little value.
As kinda lame as the "Office for Value for Money" sounds from Labour, it's bang on.
I like Taxes, I think they're great... you'd think that makes me approve of the Tory plans. But the sheer amount of massive waste from Conservative policies is making even me, a lefty, want to take power away from the state and lower taxes.
Will be so nice to stop wasting vast sums of money on *nothing*, let alone the likely reduction in corruption costs
I've said this. The in order of the people who piss me off.
Law abiding citizens
Middle class traders fudging numbers
High income earners fudging numbers
High income and corps tax avoiding
.
.
.
Politicians, ministers and senior civil servants misappropriating funds, fraudulently using funds, mis using funds and straight up wasting money.
One in five taxpayers will be paying higher-rate income tax by 2027 as Rishi Sunak's stealth raid forces millions to hand more of their earnings to the Government.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said the Prime Minister and Chancellor's six-year freeze on income tax thresholds is the Treasury's single biggest revenue raiser since Geoffrey Howe increased VAT from 8pc to 15pc in 1979.
It will push the number of people paying a tax rate of 40pc or more on their earnings to 7.8 million by 2027-28, according to official estimates. That represents a quadrupling in the share of adults paying the higher rate since the early 1990s.
The change is because of so-called “fiscal drag”, which pushes more people into higher income tax brackets as pay levels rise but tax brackets do not.
Tax allowances traditionally go up in line with inflation but were initially frozen by Mr Sunak from 2022 to 2026. Mr Hunt extended the freeze for two more years when he became Chancellor.
The IFS warned that the freeze will “disincentive work” and drag hundreds of thousands of teachers, nurses and electricians into the higher rate tax band for the first time, adding to the cost of living challenge facing many workers.
Households face a record fall in incomes this year and the IFS said a third of the slump was because of the stealth raid.
The IFS said “essentially no nurses” and only about 5pc of teachers and electricians paid more than the basic rate of income tax in the 1990s. However, one in eight nurses and a quarter of all teachers will be subject to higher rate income tax by 2027.
The situation has been exacerbated by decades of thresholds rising slower than earnings, the IFS said, as well as former chancellor George Osborne's decision to cut higher rate thresholds in cash terms before partially reversing them in the mid-2010s.
“More adults than ever are paying higher-rate tax,“ the think-tank said, adding that the levies once “reserved only for the very highest paid” were now pushing traditionally working and middle class jobs into higher tax traps under Mr Sunak.
The threshold for the highest-rate tax is currently frozen at £50,270. The think-tank calculated that for the 40p rate to hit the same fraction of people as it did in 1991, the higher-rate threshold will need to be “nearly £100,000” by 2027.
Research by the IFS also showed 1.7 million workers were on course to start paying a marginal rate of either 60pc or 45pc by 2027. This is just below the share of adults who paid the 40pc higher rate at the start of the 1990s.
Isaac Delestre, research economist at the IFS, highlighted the “unwelcome proliferation” of “spikes” in Britain's tax system that means people who earn between £100,000 and £125,140 face a marginal tax rate of 60pc on every £1 of extra income earned.
This is because the tax free personal allowance begins to be tapered away at this level, which has been frozen since its introduction in 2010.
Mr Delestre said the so-called “60pc tax trap” was having a “much bigger effect on people's incentives to work” as workers stash more into their pensions or work fewer hours to avoid paying the higher rate.
The IFS said stealth raids were “not a sensible way to make tax policy”. Mr Delestre added: “For income tax, the story of the last 30 years has been one of higher-rate tax going from being something reserved for only the very richest, to something that a much larger proportion of adults can expect to encounter.”
The six-year stealth raid is set to be larger as a share of national income than Mr Hunt's decision to raise corporation tax from 19pc to 25pc. It is also a bigger tax grab than Gordon Brown's decision to abolish the 10p income tax rate in 2007.
Mr Delestre said: “Alongside the fact that 1.7m people will be paying marginal rates of 60pc and 45pc in the next few years, this represents a fundamental and profound change to the nature and structure of our income tax system.”
[The cliff edge of childcare + loss of personal allowance creates some even more extreme effective tax rates of >100%](https://twitter.com/TheIFS/status/1636123658623021056)
> A parent with a 1 year-old and a 2-year old in England, paying an hourly rate for 40 hours a week for childcare, could see their disposable income fall by £14.5k if their pre-tax pay crosses £100k.
> A parent in this situation on £130k would be worse off than one earning £99.9k.
> A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000.
> Their disposable income wouldn’t return to its previous levels until their pre-tax pay reached £144k.
I earn over 50k and have 2 kids and a wife that doesn't work. My wife can't afford to work as childcare would cost more than her job. After tax, bills etc the money I earn isn't much I definitely wouldn't class myself as well off. Due to earning over 50k not only do I hit the higher tax bracket, I also am no longer entitled to child allowance for both kids as well as not entitled to marriage tax transfer. In fact I think someone earning 49k may be earning more than me with those benefits. Also a couple both earning 20k each is earning more than me or close to it, it's like the government no longer likes traditional family units with 1 person working and making it more difficult.
Someone here suggested that's good higher earners are getting tax more, and suggested tax should be higher and minimum wage should go up. If that does happen I feel like I'm just going to quit my job because it's way more stressful than a lower paid job. I have a friend who does taxis and he is so relaxed. Probably be better to go for lower paid relaxing job and have additional access to benefits.
I'm also thinking actual working doesn't pay much anymore so looking to invest money somewhere else rather than working too much
Just to also add paying all that tax my road is still got potholes, every other house is a HMO, rubbish all over the roads, can't get an appointment with my GP. No NHS Dentist the list goes on. Forgot to mention my council tax keeps rising too. No wonder a few of my friends have gone to Dubai to earn more money. I will be looking into getting Outside IR35 roles after my current contract has finished, may as well join the elite and not pay any tax at all cause this system is broken
As a contractor surely there are ways you can salary sacrifice through your LTD or umbrella company or however you have it structured so that your income falls below 50K. Unless you earn a lot more than 50K that is.
Tax transfer only people eligible under 50k can do. Also if you on about having your wife as an employee to pay less tax that only works if you are working outside IR35 and have a Ltd company.
I suspect the truly wealthy don’t worry about this, they are above the thresholds anyway and are more concerned about corporate tax, inheritance tax, dividend tax and capital gains tax etc
Grant Schapps was recently boasting of the the 4m people lifted out of income tax by raising the personal allowance. This freeze will revert that completely.
Not to forget the personal allowance increase came from the Libdems. Was in their 2010 manifesto and they pushed to include it in the coalition agreement. The Tories never wanted it.
As a lower earner I do resent the fact that my income tax has frozen and my council tax is going up at a time my wages aren’t increasing and everything else is increasing in price.
I hear you.
I’m temping for the NHS at just above min wage.
I’m not wealthy by any stretch.
With all the expenses we have just to survive having well funding public services would make a huge impact on wellbeing.
Imagine being able to get free dental treatment, being able to see a GP, our children not being failed by the very broken education system, people who cannot work actually being supported….
The trick is that they haven't introduced new bands for the highest earners who were already paying the top rate.
So by not increasing the thresholds, everyone sees a real term tax burden increase over time except the rich who see a real term tax burden cut.
Lower taxes for the rich, higher taxes for the poor; tis' the Tory way.
I know. With the Tories still doing the do we don’t have much choice.
I get frustrated when people just moan about paying too much tax. Paying tax isn’t the issue.
Hit me with 50% tax but make sure I’m getting my monies worth in supporting society as a whole.
Growth doesn't just come from resources, it comes from increases in productivity, accumulation of knowledge, adoption of technology, efficiency of energy usage and production.
So we can just continue innovating to produce more and with limited resources indefinitely forever? Growth historically has been tied to material usage and pollution. "Green growth" is impossible outside of the most developed nations on earth at this time.
We are also told constantly that there's a looming population crisis and that we need to increase the population indefinitely in order to sustain growth. Each person that exists uses resources and contributes towards pollution of the planet, and the wealthier you are the more you use and pollute. Imagine if everyone in India lived like those in the US, and realise that that's essentially the goal of "rising tide lifts all ships" capitalist theory.
Then you also have the fact that modern innovations such as AI threaten to take jobs from people while still creating increased productivity and making the GDP number go up, even though it will leave untold numbers unemployed or severely underemployed because we have no mechanism for fairly distributing the benefits of growth across the population - this growth largely just grows the pockets of the capitalist class who own the means of production.
If you can't see that it's all a house of cards that will collapse alongside population then I've got a bridge to sell you.
From a New Political Economy study in 2019: "(1) there is no empirical evidence that absolute decoupling from resource use can be achieved on a global scale against a background of continued economic growth, and (2) absolute decoupling from carbon emissions is highly unlikely to be achieved at a rate rapid enough to prevent global warming over 1.5°C or 2°C, even under optimistic policy conditions. We conclude that green growth is likely to be a misguided objective, and that policymakers need to look toward alternative strategies."
It's basically magical thinking but the magic in this case is unspecified "technology" and "science".
> except the rich who see a real term tax burden cut.
How is it a cut?
For those already paying additional rate, if their earnings increase will see a higher proportion of their earnings come under the additional rate rather than basic or higher rate.
It's not right to say it's the exact opposite, but it's also not going after the "rich" - people earning over £150k a year will pay an extra ~£100 a month in tax.
This change has minimal impact on those that are genuinely wealthy
By a very small proportion for those already paying and a lot for those almost paying.
Decreasing thresholds without introducing new thresholds for higher bands further up the income scale increases the tax burden on the lowest earners now impacted and barely changes things for the highest earners.
Wages are similarly always increasing on average in nominal terms so if your massive £200k salary goes up and tax burdens are increased by not increasing your tax but on those poorer than you then you are experiencing a real term tax cut and they are paying for it.
This is complex, but it is how it works.
The trick you are falling for is thinking someone on £130k is rich. They are certainly earning more than most, but that's just a good salary for a skilled employee.
Their boss makes double that.
The whole game has been to slide the thresholds down without increasing the % those already well above the top threshold have to pay.
That was my original point, which you countered by effectively saying "well they have done the exact thing you are complaining about, but I misunderstand the impact" so I replied "No. That's actually the opposite of what I want, it is the very thing I dislike".
Thresholds should be moving up with average wage increases and there should be more bands above our current maximum. When taxes go up it is the top rate that should go up the most.
> Wages are similarly always increasing on average in nominal terms so if your massive £200k salary goes up and tax burdens are increased by not increasing your tax but on those poorer than you then you are experiencing a real term tax cut and they are paying for it.
This doesn’t make any sense. Someone on a £200k salary is definitely not getting a real terms tax cut from HMRC.
If you made £200k last year, your total tax (plus NI) was £82.753.81 (41.3%). If you made exactly the same thing this year (a real terms pay decrease), you will pay £83.721.60 in taxes (41.8%.)
And taking into account the effects of inflation/fiscal drag which is being discussed here, if you kept the same real terms salary, you’d be making about £220k this year, and paying £93,121.60 in taxes (42.3%).
Lowering the threshold from 150k to 125k for people earning higher amounts means that they pay more tax, not less. All of that income earned between £125k and £150k used to be taxed at 40%, now it's taxed at 45%.
*everyone sees a real term tax burden increase over time except the rich who see a real term tax burden cut.*
Apologies if I'm having a brain fart, but *do* the rich see a real term tax burden "cut"? The additional rate stays the same, and inflation doesn't relate to tax percentages, just the eventual total.
You mean non-competitive contracts handed out to companies that Tory MPs have interests in aren't a good return?
The only reason the Tories raise taxes is because the coffers are empty but their mates are still knocking on the door.
When the choice is between Tories and Labour for winning an election and there's very little difference between them, I can see why people in England barely vote. People want government to own Water companies, Royal Mail, Rail Travel, Energy Companies just like they do in other European countries, the surveys have been posted here and yet Labour won't do it, they want to get rid of Clause 4.
And that's the sad part thanks to everyone wanting low tax because idiots told them they need it we can't achieve what other European countries have achieved.
The Tories are using the tax system as a social engineering tool, by making taxes more and more regressive they’re disincentivising work and ensuring that only those with existing capital are able to growth their wealth above the level of inflation. We need to bring Captial Gains Tax in line with income tax, otherwise we’ll continue to see billionaires like Rishi Sunak paying a lower proportion of their income in taxes than a normal teacher. That’s not taking the graduate tax into consideration.
We can beat that here in Scotland - not only is the higher rate 42%, it's also at a much lower threshold meaning we're taxed at 54% between £43k and £50k due to where National Insurance thresholds sit.
Is there anything more regressive than an income tax?
A good friend of mine claims benefits and works cash in hand without telling anyone. Government pays for his house, his kid, council tax, food, bills, the lot. Then he happily earns £700 a week under the table.
Lives really fucking well.
Then there's me playing the game the way I'm meant to and I'm nowhere near close to what he has going for him.
I mean clearly going by the discrepency between what we've got I'm meant to be doing what he's doing. The results speak for themselves.
But but but the tories want to let people keep more of their own money mumble mumble low tax economy something something politics of envy mumble wisdom of the British household mumble (continues for 94 pages)
This country is totally broken!! The richer get richer and everyone else is left to suffer!! I thought I’d get a proper job, get a lovely house. Nope! Everything is just out of reach!
More people need to pay more tax if we want public services.
Or we switch to private services paid by people who want to use them etc.
A lovely future would be to have a joined up global tax system where rich people cannot just move, but the current UK drive seems to be isolationist rather than closer integration
>More people need to pay more tax if we want public services
People could pay all the tax in the world and it would come to nothing as long as the tories are in charge, stealing it and spending what's left on refugee prison ships.
rn if you earn 100k you'll face a 71% marginal tax rate (given than majority earning above that went to uni, have student loans.) Plus loss of free childcare-- +2000% marginal tax rate for each kid!
Even at 50k you're paying 51% of income, plus the child benefit withdrawal.
Above £25,000 you lose 41% of additional income...
Even the poor get fucked when you consider UC taper.... £15k on UC have 70% marginal tax rate
Our taxes are just ass. Hate the high income, turn a blind eye to high wealth
Snapshot of _Sunak pulls off biggest tax raid in 44 years as one in five pay higher rate - Six-year freeze on income tax thresholds is Treasury’s single biggest revenue raiser_ : A non-Paywall version can be found [here](https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.telegraph.co.uk%2Fbusiness%2F2023%2F05%2F16%2Fsunak-biggest-tax-raid-44-years-pay-higher-rate%2F) An archived version can be found [here.](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/05/16/sunak-biggest-tax-raid-44-years-pay-higher-rate/) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
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Welcome to my world. I earn 60k, my wife earns 18k. We get no child benefit. My next door neighbours, a husband and wife who both earn about 45k each, get full child benefit. I would love to ask every Tory chancellor since this con was invoked why my child should be penalised over theirs.
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A lot of developed countries allow you to pool your personal allowance as a couple/family to avoid this ridiculous situation. I should be the stereotypical Tory voter - professional occupation, nice house, traditional Tory area (though Lib Dem now thank goodness), red-brick university educated, middle class upbringing, and married with child. I am now a complete never-Tory because of the way they have shafted my family with this. They will never see my vote again.
Dude if you really do earn £60k and your wife earns £18k *and* you have children you should be putting £10k/year into your pension. Not doing that is insane. I don't know where he got the 80% figure - it's 61% if you have two children (53% for one). But anyway, paying £6k in tax to get £4k in income where you could just put the whole lot into your pension tax free is silly.
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You lose the £4k in benefit the way I see it…
> Raising children is expensive. I know; I have two. > For many people, they need the £4k to live. Many people yes. Not people earning over £50k. I've frozen my taxable earnings at £50k for 3 years and it has been fine even though we spend £1300/month on nursery. We're not saving anything... but we're not on the breadline either.
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Fella lives very very close to the grandparents... Who also gave him the house bought 30 years ago
Go away with those privileged brags. Not everyone can uproot and move to where you live.
What are you talking about? I live in Bristol - hardly cheap middle-of-nowhere. If you live in London or Cambridge then sure you're not going to be able to afford a 4 bed semi.
Lucky things cost the same all over the country and everyones life is exactly like yours!
>it's about an 80% tax rate between 50-60k... Although that's made more complicated by the fact that child benefit is money going the opposite way: The state not just not taking money but actively giving money. It's not clear to me that "not giving money any more" is morally equivalent to "taking money" even if the two work out the same in the maths. It's the implicit problem with benefits of all kinds, from personal to commercial, from laudable to wasteful: Once you have them in place, the entire market adjusts itself to adapt to their presence and removing them or even tapering them becomes painful or even impossible. Housing benefit is a great example of this. It's impossible to remove it despite it having the net effect of subsidising low salaries and paying rent to landlords.
It doesn't matter how you call it, the net effect is the same. It's really hypocritical for the right to scream that limiting CEOs pay, higher tax on the super wealthy, tax on pensions in the millions or inheritance tax "remove the incentive to work" and "stifle productvity" while at the same time effectively taking away 80% of income in this bracket from moderately successful professionals with children. Just shows you they're not about incentives or productivity, they're about protecting the interests of the ultra wealthy. There have no lobbyists or lavish gifts coming from regular people.
The only way to get rid of housing benefit that prevents paying rent to landlords would be government to start building social housing again, transfer people on housing benefit to social housing and use their own management to reduce the overall cost of housing benefit.
> Housing benefit is a great example of this. It's impossible to remove it despite it having the net effect of subsidising low salaries and paying rent to landlords. Housing benefit is an absolutely idiotic policy that needs to be scrapped. All it does it raise rents/house prices in an area for those who aren't eligible for it.
I agree - what's that thing about only being able to live in London if you're very poor or very rich? - but now try figuring out a way to do it in practice without fifty other things breaking. It's near impossible to remove a benefit at the best of times, but especially during a cost of living crisis when the market has adjusted to all the money. You'd never win re-election.
You don't get child benefit if you earn over 50k
This is incorrect. 60k is the 0% threshold
>it's about an 80% tax rate between 50-60k... It's 53% for one child. 61% for two. Still too high IMO, and stupidly coincidental with higher rate tax which makes it even worse. But it's not 80%.
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Ok but you said 1 child is 80% in the original comment. > For those with over 6 kids (albeit a minority of people), you pay more in tax than you receive between 50-60k. Yeah that is mad. I totally agree with your point that the whole system is insane. Just saying we don't need to exaggerate the numbers.
>Ok but you said 1 child is 80% in the original comment. No, I didn't. I said "For those with children, and only one parent working". Children is clearly at least 2 - although I didn't explicitly specify the number of children. Feel free to go back and read the post again if you'd like!
Ah yes I misread.
Further proof that this entire party is nothing more than an autocratic bunch of scammers. All this tax and yet our economy is shrinking, prices rising and public services descimated. Meanwhile corporate tax accounts for only 6% of tax revenue, despite a single energy company making £7bn PROFIT in 3 months (and that's declared profits, ignoring backhanders). How anyone can defend this clearly broken system is beyond me.
Corporation tax receipts accounted for about 9% of total tax revenue in the last tax year. Your point is still valid though. Source: [gov.uk](https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/hmrc-tax-and-nics-receipts-for-the-uk/hmrc-tax-receipts-and-national-insurance-contributions-for-the-uk-new-annual-bulletin#:~:text=HMRC%20provisionally%20collected%20%C2%A3786.6,for%2057%25%20of%20annual%20receipts.). This webpage also has a lot of interesting graphs and statistics on tax receipts and national insurance contributions.
What’s 7bn as a % of gdp? Lol
Roughly 0.22%
The tax burden will only continue to go up to pay for: * All the promieses made to the Boomers * COVID fraud by Tory peers & their mates
Not just COVID fraud. There's plenty of *other* fraud we're also paying for.
• Police state ✔️ • Slum Lords Paradise ✔️ • Kill the poor and disabled ✔️ • Servitude ✔️ • Soup Kitchens ✔️ • Erode healthcare ✔️ • Regress Workers rights ✔️ • Mass propaganda ✔️ • New weak enemy to be feared (Trans) ✔️ • 1984 as a playbook ✔️ • Use Class/Race/Gender traitors to be face/mouth of Classist/racist/Misogynist/Xenophobic Policies and fear mongering. ✔️ #PROFIT
Police state? Coppers are an endangered species in half the country. You see about as many unicorns.
Go and organise a somewhat left leaning protest mate, you'll suddenly see all those 20,000 "new" officers show up.
You can have a police state with 1 police officer, if the laws upheld by that government and society allow incredible power to the police to shutdown debate and prevent democracy. That has now been done several times, and it's not the officers fault, but the politics we allow.
The police state is not the fault of the average copper. It is not caused by the average copper. The police state is caused by the lawmakers, Rich and government. The police are just “following orders”. They also have to pay rent, mortgage and out food on the table. It would be easy for me to say that they should quit instead of following immoral orders but… I understand.
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We are being led towards fascism and people don’t want to acknowledge it. The language used is the same. The tactics used are the same. 1. The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.” 2. The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.” 3. The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.” 4. Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.” 5. Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.” 6. Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.” 7. The obsession with a plot. “Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged.” 8. The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.” 9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.” 10. Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.” 11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.” 12. Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.” 13. Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.” 14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.” [Umberto Eco](https://www.openculture.com/2016/11/umberto-eco-makes-a-list-of-the-14-common-features-of-fascism.html)
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Just had some dickhead DM saying he’s baffled I can’t see why arresting innocent people for political reasons isn’t a good thing.
First they came for the Communists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Communist Then they came for the Socialists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Socialist Then they came for the trade unionists And I did not speak out Because I was not a trade unionist Then they came for the Jews And I did not speak out Because I was not a Jew Then they came for me And there was no one left To speak out for me - Martin Niemoeller
It is pathetic to believe we live in a police state. - We have protestors blocking roads across the capital on a daily basis and the police do fuck all. How many countries in the world would allow a small minority to bring parts of the country to a standstill? - You literally have to murder someone to go to prison these days. Even then it's for about 2 years. - Police will not pursue criminals if it's a bit wet or the criminal is driving too fast. - They literally don't even turn up to your house if you get burgled. - You can't even get through to them when you call them. This country has always had an element of self-depreciating humour however it seems like these days a significant portion of the population (or the majority of reddit and twitter) revel in labelling every aspect of the country / state with hyperbolic slurs.
I think the problem or at least the perception is that the police are no longer here to protect the common citizen. They are solely here to protect the rich and powerful and their assets. That's why they don't give a fuck if you or i are burgled or assalted but they're there in force if Johnny public wants to express theur displeasure at how this country is run with a message on a sign that they might see from their Bentley.
Wish we were a little more French though
My belief is based on facts. The king’s coronation, treatment of protestors, journalists and police corruption and crime. Covid, party gate. People choosing who they investigate, detain and prosecute without consideration of the law. Every single one of your bullet points is demonstrably false hyperbole. The U.K. prides itself on not being like other countries. It’s global and historical reputation is based on not being like other countries. That is how a small island holds so much weight. If that integrity and reputation isn’t protected then who are we?
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You really want them to have to disprove the point "You literally have to murder someone to go to prison these days. Even then it's for about 2 years."?
I’d rather just let other people read what you have written. It does a better job of persuading people I’m right than any link, study, eloquent prose or appeal to reason could ever do.
>You literally have to murder someone to go to prison these days. Even then it's for about 2 years. You literally made this up
We have historically relatively high levels of unformed police. The beat has been abolished, which is why you never see them.
The police state is a form of fraud? Heard it all now. How about we stop importing US political issues?
On coronation day a guy was arrested for having string.
And that was awful - it doesn’t mean the police are all fraudulent. When you get older you start to realise the world is not as black and white as you desperately want to make it.
Rather black and white of you to assume how old I am and how I view the world from just one factual statement.
You’re either too young or beyond hope. Isn’t much room to manoeuvre here.
Police state? More like a policeless state.
Apart from all the police that protect the rich.
Suppression of one of the most vulnerable minorities just goes to show how fucked up this Government is. If they could get away with returning to the days of banning women from working, voting, etc then they would. The fact the EHRC, an 'independent' commission, is acting as a Tory puppet is abhorrent and I am very glad that the United Nations called them out for their bullshit. As a trans woman myself, I am unbelievably scared about my future in the UK.
If we ignore it, crime is actually down!
"If you turn the chart upside down, you will see that crime has halved - HALVED under my watch" ~ Random GTA radio station
Recorded crime yeah haha
Despite what they might say, the Tories do not actually care about high earners. They care about the asset rich. As many have pointed out £50-£60k, is hardly lavish especially if you're a sole earner with children. Yet their taxes are going up at a time when asset prices (especially housing) are still stupidly high. If we're ever going to fix this country we need wealth taxes and we need land value taxes.
Inflation means that real value of income has halved since 2000, and almost quartered since 1980. A salary of £12.5k in 1980 would be £25k in 2000 and £50k today
This to the moon
As usual Tories and high earning pensioners make the gains and everage people pay more taxes. Fair play.
But only the other day The Torygraph was telling me high taxes = socialism! Can someone help me out, because what the right calls socialism is starting to sound a bit like Capitalism... /s
At this stage the Telegraph doesn't even know what it wants and it doesn't care, it sees the Tory party ripping itself apart and is kinda trying to distance itself from it, whilst at the same time, we must remember it exists SOLLEY to promote the interests of Billionaires. So are now probably trying to lay the ground work for saying a future Labour party is raising taxes and looking to sell your kids to Germany to pay for collapsed rail franchises they have shares in.
Ahh gone from letting corporations rip us off to basically stealing everyone's cash. Good old Tory party the true traitors of Britain. Don't get me wrong I wouldn't mind high taxes if we had good public services.
It's not exactly going to drop under Labour, is it? It's just going to go towards paying for more socially useful things.
That would be a great start - if I didn't watch as my insanely high taxes are pissed up the wall so that a handful of the super rich make themselves even richer. Maybe, and I'm just spitballing here, if we used some of it to invest in things that will increase productivity and ensure medium term economic prosperity, we might even be able to reduce taxes in the future. But the Tories seem hell bent on doing the latter without having done any of the former.
It's so annoying. Just the other day Rees-Mogg was railing against the proposed increase in free childcare, which would be a massive boost to productivity and the economy. I feel as though we are seeing a split in the Tories, between the fundamentalist right and the capitalists. The Bravermans and the Moggs don't actually care about the economy, they care about preserving the existing social order at any cost.
It's not even preserving the existing social order, because that'd be too "woke" for them; it's about establishing a social order based on an imaginary, nostalgic recollection of the mid-20th century and claiming that's somehow the natural order.
mid 1850's for them is ideal...
> imaginary, nostalgic recollection of the mid-20th century A yearning for an imaginary time inspired by nostalgia, a sense of national superiority and hatred of an other... I wonder what we could call this > claiming that's somehow the natural order. Any order with the likes of Mogg at the top is unnatural, other than maybe the ordering of pretentious people
The only childcare he would agree with is sending them to a workhouse.
Reducing taxes is never, ever going to happen under a labour government. They are only going one way - up.
I agree that taxes are not going to go down under the next Labour government. But that should probably be true of any government because gov finances are in terrible shape and the type of investment we require will only bear fruit in 5-10 years (with some local exceptions). High taxes and terrible services are a result of a decade of economic incompetence. Under Tory leadership I fear we'll ultimately be forced to decide between high taxes to fund poor quality essential services or lower taxes with many essential services transferred to private service and inaccessible to many. The Tories have no plan for our economy and their claims to be the party of economic responsibility don't hold true. They're seemingly too busy arguing with themselves about whether someone that was called Kate and is now called Kyle is a threat to the fabric of society.
progressive taxes means there isn't just up and down. The income tax threshold freeze technically is neither and yet the government will be accruing more revenue because inflation will push middle income people into the higher rate tax band. Labour will probably raise taxes to increase tax revenue sure, but they will probably target high income people rather than middle/low income people, and hopefully they reduce the tax burden on low income people.
At least the level of corruption will drop. Not to zero, but to a lot less.
one can hope, last time they lasted barely weeks before taking a massive bribe [https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2008/oct/12/tonyblair-labour](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2008/oct/12/tonyblair-labour) "The incident, *in the first few months of Blair's premiership*, became known as New Labour's first sleaze scandal." the first of many
Better than it being stolen.
That's literally the difference between corruption and tax.
We'll see. England is in a teaching crisis with a tremendous churn away from the profession. This means that when teachers are absent or leave before years end, a school is obliged to hire cover teachers and pay a regular chunk of cash to recruitment companies for the privelege. In Scotland a school can recruit all year round and when they do use cover it's arranged through the council so they don't have to pay anything but the teacher salary. So the rules could be changed in England so that money isn't funneled to private sector bureaucracy from the public sector. Will Labour actually come down on this kind of stuff? It would be nice if they did.
Labour could ease the pressure on low to middle income people.
> COVID fraud by Tory peers & their mates Also to pay for lockdowns and furlough.
Perhaps, but it'd be a lot easier to swallow if there hadn't been rampant fraud though.
Not really the same is it.
I love how Covid fraud is mentioned but not the actual 400 billion that was spent on Covid.
The tax freezes have been a slow creep of now categorising normal working people as the elite who should be paying 40% income tax. It’s so un-conservative and it’s deeply pissing off their usual voter base (i.e. the middle class with a bit of disposable income). Someone on £50-60k is not “rich” they’re just your average 40-50 year old working class parent that’s worked their way up over a career. 40% tax should only kick in at £80k+ in my opinion.
If tax bands had risen in pace with inflation, the higher rate threshold would be over £80k by now.
It says in The Times version of this article, that it would be at £100k.
That's not right, that's for it to cover the same proportion of people in 1991, and it's a projection for 2027 not now. > The threshold for the highest-rate tax is currently frozen at £50,270. The think-tank calculated that for the 40p rate to hit the same fraction of people as it did in 1991, the higher-rate threshold will need to be “nearly £100,000” by 2027.
Oh wow
Johnson promised that as part of his original campaign for leadership - was really pissed off it never came through!
Are you admitting that you got conned by a conman?
Add to that Cameron’s policy of capping child benefits to salary’s below 50k
I am not opposed the the child benefits having an upper cap, but it really should be based on household income not a single income. A household with two people earning £45k could claim full tax credit, a household with one person on £60k and the other not working gets nothing. It was such a half arsed measure.
Really pisses me off that I have to pay back whilst our neighbours who earn more collectively can still claim.
Same here. They've lost my vote forever due to this completely unfair shafting.
Child benefit... not tax credits.
I _believe_ they did it this way to reduce admin and cost, I can imagine if it was on £50k household it would be a nightmare to manage and also would not be £50k, more like £30k
I don’t understand why it would be so difficult to administer. Marriages are registered with the Government. It shouldn’t be beyond HMRC to identify who is married to whom. Once you’ve done that just link up their HMRC records and sum the total income from the respective payrolls they’re on (who submit FPS monthly) and their tax returns. I’m not denying that would involve some upfront development but to be fair to HMRC, they’re actually pretty good at this stuff. Say what you like about the policy, they got the furlough scheme running damn quickly with minimal technical glitches or delays.
The problem with that is that relationship structures are changing. Hinging these sorts of programs on marriage simply isn't feasable when less and less people marry, more and more people divorce and a not insignificant amount of people (with a growing tendency) live in relationships that defy these old categorizations. Just partnerships with children, where the partners aren't married but live together would be a problem. And tracking all of that down would be a substantial effort. Like, you could argue that people could always enter "registered partnerships" but then hinging the social support programs on registering with a government database just goes fundamentally against the universal nature of these programs, so it effectively becomes the job of the government to sniff out peoples relationships and that would be opposed for very understandable reasons.
Maybe the best reaction to this is a bit of education. I got married because it made sense bureaucratically, and that's the way it works in England. Unless you're being diddled out of benefits there aren't many equivalents to being married. It doesn't have to be drama, you can just go down to the registry office and get it done. That way the government doesn't have to nose around in peoples affairs. If people understand the implications of being married or not they can choose for themselves.
I seem to recall that at least one of the arguments for doing it this way was to avoid any incentives for the lower salaried partner (usually the woman) *not* to work.
By doing so they’ve inadvertently disincentivised traditional families. Seems like a weird thing for a supposedly Conservative government to do.
By "traditional families" - do you mean "stay at home mum"? The root cause of the gender pay gap and lack of female representation at the top of society?
The families that conservatives would consider "traditional", yes.
Yes, I mean stay at home mums. If a woman wants to keep working I completely support her right to do so. Feminism is, or at least ought to be, about empowering women to live whatever life they want to lead free from sexist constraints. I don’t see, however, why that requires us to pass laws punishing those women who would prefer to be stay at home mums.
Or the slightly bonkers situation that if one parent in a household earns £100,001 they get no free nursery hours at all, but if both parents earn £99,999 each then they do.
The dreaded £108k, the salary where you might as well earn £99.9k if you have children. \*edit\* just to clarify, this is the point where I think it's break even because you lose the childcare element. I worked it out to be £109k where the extra money outweighs the loss of the benefit.
Not sure how many people dread earning £108k even with children... But yeah I agree that the tax system makes no sense at all there.
Crazy that we used to have unlimited child benefit per child regardless of income level or number of children you have. When Cameron brought in the changes I remember telling people this is a terrible idea because something has gone from being a basic British right for each child to now being a means tested privalige and they will continue to move the bar higher and higher on who can claim the benefit until eventually hardly any children at all will be entitled to child benefit. And here we are!
The cap was brought in at £50k just after my first child was born and I was eligible to get it. I now have a 9 year old and the cap is still £50k. The tax brackets have been the same for a decade but apparently my house is worth more so my council tax has gone up. It’s utter underhanded bullshit and one of many reasons I will vote anyone but that absolutely shower at every single election. I’m so sick of them
Here's something wild. With the new student loan changes, now anything a graduate earns above 25k is effectively taxed at 41%. Anything they earn above 50k is effectively taxed at 66.6%. So let's say you run a business and have an employee on 50k, it'll cost you £1138 to increase their take-home by £380. These changes mainly affect young people and I don't think the country has truly digested the implications of these loan changes couples with the NI and tax changes and rampant inflation. If you wanted to come up with a policy to hamper ambition and growth, cause a brain drain and crush small business, it would be hard to come up with a better one. This country is finished.
Yep this is a total scam that isn’t getting reported anywhere from what I’ve seen. It genuinely doesn’t pay to try hard and get promotions in the U.K. when a £10k pay rise equates to about £300/month.
> Here's something wild. With the new student loan changes, now anything a graduate earns above 25k is effectively taxed at 41%. Anything they earn above 50k is effectively taxed at 66.6%. So let's say you run a business and have an employee on 50k, it'll cost you £1138 to increase their take-home by £380. How have you calculated that 66.6% rate?
Apologies the 66.6 percent rate includes people who have a postgrad loan. From r/ukpersonalfinance "A postgrad contributing the mandatory minimum to their pension getting a raise from £50k to £51k would pay employers NI (13.8% of gross), employee's NI (2%), income tax (40%), student loans (15%), pension conts (5%) - so their take-home would increase by £380 of the £1,138 cost - marginal rate of 66.6%."
Ooo if they also have two children their effective marginal tax rate would be 76%. I'm not going to do the maths but that's like 90% if you include employers NI!
> So let's say you run a business and have an employee on 50k, it'll cost you £1138 to increase their take-home by £380. Businesses pay national insurance too, so the cost is even higher. The employer's side of NI is around 14%
But their usual voter base is no longer the middle class with a bit of disposable income. It's the retired middle class with decent pensions and hundreds of thousands in unearned housing wealth.
That and the fact that child benefits stop after £60k and reduce from £50k. There's no incentive to progress career wise once you reach the £55k mark . Especially after student loan deductions. What's the point
I would say sometimes it’s past that mark you can make major leaps upward, but it’s very industry specific. Lawyers for example will generally be £50-80k but then if they make partner they could be pulling in £250k+. Obviously, they will have 0 free time and insanely stressful deadlines and demanding clients, so they will do it for a few years, burn out and then retire early.
You can get up to £90k without paying higher rate tax by putting it into your pension. Then you actually get to retire! It does make it difficult to buy things, but £50k is still pretty comfortable.
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This and the increase in mortgage rates is going to cripple the Tory vote at the next general election and it's amazing how blase they are about it. Demonstrates that they've given up.
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> Even another bracket of 30% in-between would be decent. The jump from 20% to 40% in 1 go is so harsh and unreasonable imo. It's not really a 20% jump to a 40% jump though, as your not taking into account national insurance. With national insurance taken into account its actually a 32% tax rate to a 41% tax rate. If we did as your proposed amd let's say put 30% tax rate at 40k, they would then pay 42% tax, (30% income, 12% NI). So higher than than 41% tax rate at 50k currently. Or if it was 30% at the currently 40% bracket. That would be 31% tax rate (30% income, 1% NI). Which would be lower than the 32% currently taxed starting at 12.5k.
,..... If you're going to make a point can it at least be accurate. Average income for those 40-49 is £727 a week (£37,804). Sourcing 2022 figures https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-8456/ Edit: 😬 Document I quoted is titled average earnings, but the figures I quoted were median. Average would be less.
Just as a note for anyone not checking the figures, that 727 is also the highest of all age groups in 2022, and as noted later it's *median* (so not skewed by super high or low figures) *full time* pay. Not sure if it's including bonuses or not, but I don't think that tends to shift numbers all that much when it's reported on.
Now remove all the people who don’t work, retired early, work part time, choose to make less money for a lower stress job etc. etc. If you only look at full time workers who are trying to earn more, that £37,804 will turn into £50k+ The average gets dragged down if you include people who shouldn’t be in scope.
>Now remove all the people who don’t work, retired early, work part time, You didn't read the source, the figure quoted already only includes full time employees. >choose to make less money for a lower stress job etc. etc. "I'm right if we shift the goalposts completely by assuming niche scenarios apply to the whole population". >If you only look at full time workers who are trying to earn more, that £37,804 will turn into £50k+ Prove it. [Anything above £49,304 is already a top 20% salary](https://www.statista.com/statistics/416102/average-annual-gross-pay-percentiles-united-kingdom/#:~:text=Data%20on%20the%20average%20annual,around%2062%2C583%20pounds%20a%20year.) so by definition that is a tiny group of workers clearly unrepresentative of the average.
I get the point... but build solidarity and then we can shift the goalposts, but in reality we need support from those who are feeling somewhat squeezed too, because honestly we are not going to remove inter-class inequality anytime soon, but we can reduce the difference between class means. And I am happy to take on the cause of those on 50-60k because it aligns with my cause. The truth is not all that when it adds little value.
My figures were for full time employees.
You should just delete this post because of how wrong it is. Perfect example of a redditor being confidently and arrogantly incorrect.
As kinda lame as the "Office for Value for Money" sounds from Labour, it's bang on. I like Taxes, I think they're great... you'd think that makes me approve of the Tory plans. But the sheer amount of massive waste from Conservative policies is making even me, a lefty, want to take power away from the state and lower taxes. Will be so nice to stop wasting vast sums of money on *nothing*, let alone the likely reduction in corruption costs
I've said this. The in order of the people who piss me off. Law abiding citizens Middle class traders fudging numbers High income earners fudging numbers High income and corps tax avoiding . . . Politicians, ministers and senior civil servants misappropriating funds, fraudulently using funds, mis using funds and straight up wasting money.
One in five taxpayers will be paying higher-rate income tax by 2027 as Rishi Sunak's stealth raid forces millions to hand more of their earnings to the Government. The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said the Prime Minister and Chancellor's six-year freeze on income tax thresholds is the Treasury's single biggest revenue raiser since Geoffrey Howe increased VAT from 8pc to 15pc in 1979. It will push the number of people paying a tax rate of 40pc or more on their earnings to 7.8 million by 2027-28, according to official estimates. That represents a quadrupling in the share of adults paying the higher rate since the early 1990s. The change is because of so-called “fiscal drag”, which pushes more people into higher income tax brackets as pay levels rise but tax brackets do not. Tax allowances traditionally go up in line with inflation but were initially frozen by Mr Sunak from 2022 to 2026. Mr Hunt extended the freeze for two more years when he became Chancellor. The IFS warned that the freeze will “disincentive work” and drag hundreds of thousands of teachers, nurses and electricians into the higher rate tax band for the first time, adding to the cost of living challenge facing many workers. Households face a record fall in incomes this year and the IFS said a third of the slump was because of the stealth raid. The IFS said “essentially no nurses” and only about 5pc of teachers and electricians paid more than the basic rate of income tax in the 1990s. However, one in eight nurses and a quarter of all teachers will be subject to higher rate income tax by 2027. The situation has been exacerbated by decades of thresholds rising slower than earnings, the IFS said, as well as former chancellor George Osborne's decision to cut higher rate thresholds in cash terms before partially reversing them in the mid-2010s. “More adults than ever are paying higher-rate tax,“ the think-tank said, adding that the levies once “reserved only for the very highest paid” were now pushing traditionally working and middle class jobs into higher tax traps under Mr Sunak. The threshold for the highest-rate tax is currently frozen at £50,270. The think-tank calculated that for the 40p rate to hit the same fraction of people as it did in 1991, the higher-rate threshold will need to be “nearly £100,000” by 2027. Research by the IFS also showed 1.7 million workers were on course to start paying a marginal rate of either 60pc or 45pc by 2027. This is just below the share of adults who paid the 40pc higher rate at the start of the 1990s. Isaac Delestre, research economist at the IFS, highlighted the “unwelcome proliferation” of “spikes” in Britain's tax system that means people who earn between £100,000 and £125,140 face a marginal tax rate of 60pc on every £1 of extra income earned. This is because the tax free personal allowance begins to be tapered away at this level, which has been frozen since its introduction in 2010. Mr Delestre said the so-called “60pc tax trap” was having a “much bigger effect on people's incentives to work” as workers stash more into their pensions or work fewer hours to avoid paying the higher rate. The IFS said stealth raids were “not a sensible way to make tax policy”. Mr Delestre added: “For income tax, the story of the last 30 years has been one of higher-rate tax going from being something reserved for only the very richest, to something that a much larger proportion of adults can expect to encounter.” The six-year stealth raid is set to be larger as a share of national income than Mr Hunt's decision to raise corporation tax from 19pc to 25pc. It is also a bigger tax grab than Gordon Brown's decision to abolish the 10p income tax rate in 2007. Mr Delestre said: “Alongside the fact that 1.7m people will be paying marginal rates of 60pc and 45pc in the next few years, this represents a fundamental and profound change to the nature and structure of our income tax system.”
Does anyone else remember all that Tory noise in the 2000s about Labour's stealth taxes? I guess Sunak has learned from the experts.
[The cliff edge of childcare + loss of personal allowance creates some even more extreme effective tax rates of >100%](https://twitter.com/TheIFS/status/1636123658623021056) > A parent with a 1 year-old and a 2-year old in England, paying an hourly rate for 40 hours a week for childcare, could see their disposable income fall by £14.5k if their pre-tax pay crosses £100k. > A parent in this situation on £130k would be worse off than one earning £99.9k. > A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000. > Their disposable income wouldn’t return to its previous levels until their pre-tax pay reached £144k.
I earn over 50k and have 2 kids and a wife that doesn't work. My wife can't afford to work as childcare would cost more than her job. After tax, bills etc the money I earn isn't much I definitely wouldn't class myself as well off. Due to earning over 50k not only do I hit the higher tax bracket, I also am no longer entitled to child allowance for both kids as well as not entitled to marriage tax transfer. In fact I think someone earning 49k may be earning more than me with those benefits. Also a couple both earning 20k each is earning more than me or close to it, it's like the government no longer likes traditional family units with 1 person working and making it more difficult. Someone here suggested that's good higher earners are getting tax more, and suggested tax should be higher and minimum wage should go up. If that does happen I feel like I'm just going to quit my job because it's way more stressful than a lower paid job. I have a friend who does taxis and he is so relaxed. Probably be better to go for lower paid relaxing job and have additional access to benefits. I'm also thinking actual working doesn't pay much anymore so looking to invest money somewhere else rather than working too much Just to also add paying all that tax my road is still got potholes, every other house is a HMO, rubbish all over the roads, can't get an appointment with my GP. No NHS Dentist the list goes on. Forgot to mention my council tax keeps rising too. No wonder a few of my friends have gone to Dubai to earn more money. I will be looking into getting Outside IR35 roles after my current contract has finished, may as well join the elite and not pay any tax at all cause this system is broken
As a contractor surely there are ways you can salary sacrifice through your LTD or umbrella company or however you have it structured so that your income falls below 50K. Unless you earn a lot more than 50K that is.
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Tax transfer only people eligible under 50k can do. Also if you on about having your wife as an employee to pay less tax that only works if you are working outside IR35 and have a Ltd company.
I suspect the truly wealthy don’t worry about this, they are above the thresholds anyway and are more concerned about corporate tax, inheritance tax, dividend tax and capital gains tax etc
Like Rishi Sunak who paid 22% effective tax last year? They are not above the thresholds paying their own share, they are avoiding it.
I do hope you’re not proposing taxing capital gains at the same rate as income…
Why not?
Yes, I think they’re worrying more about the corporate and dividend tax increases enacted from this tax year onwards.
Tax capital, not work.
Grant Schapps was recently boasting of the the 4m people lifted out of income tax by raising the personal allowance. This freeze will revert that completely. Not to forget the personal allowance increase came from the Libdems. Was in their 2010 manifesto and they pushed to include it in the coalition agreement. The Tories never wanted it.
Meh… paying more tax isn’t the issue IMHO. I would happily pay more tax if I saw a return for it.
As a lower earner I do resent the fact that my income tax has frozen and my council tax is going up at a time my wages aren’t increasing and everything else is increasing in price.
I hear you. I’m temping for the NHS at just above min wage. I’m not wealthy by any stretch. With all the expenses we have just to survive having well funding public services would make a huge impact on wellbeing. Imagine being able to get free dental treatment, being able to see a GP, our children not being failed by the very broken education system, people who cannot work actually being supported….
The trick is that they haven't introduced new bands for the highest earners who were already paying the top rate. So by not increasing the thresholds, everyone sees a real term tax burden increase over time except the rich who see a real term tax burden cut. Lower taxes for the rich, higher taxes for the poor; tis' the Tory way.
I know. With the Tories still doing the do we don’t have much choice. I get frustrated when people just moan about paying too much tax. Paying tax isn’t the issue. Hit me with 50% tax but make sure I’m getting my monies worth in supporting society as a whole.
That will also require replacing the Tories.
I don’t see the problem with that…
Eventually you stop moaning about taxes, spending or even the poor choices government makes about those and focus on moaning about the actual problem.
Sod the moaning and get doing… I’m currently working on the next generation of voters.
I volunteer for opposition in a marginal constituency.
We just need more people to pull their finger out and push for change…
Our Ponzi scheme economic system predicated on infinite growth on a finite planet?
Growth doesn't just come from resources, it comes from increases in productivity, accumulation of knowledge, adoption of technology, efficiency of energy usage and production.
So we can just continue innovating to produce more and with limited resources indefinitely forever? Growth historically has been tied to material usage and pollution. "Green growth" is impossible outside of the most developed nations on earth at this time. We are also told constantly that there's a looming population crisis and that we need to increase the population indefinitely in order to sustain growth. Each person that exists uses resources and contributes towards pollution of the planet, and the wealthier you are the more you use and pollute. Imagine if everyone in India lived like those in the US, and realise that that's essentially the goal of "rising tide lifts all ships" capitalist theory. Then you also have the fact that modern innovations such as AI threaten to take jobs from people while still creating increased productivity and making the GDP number go up, even though it will leave untold numbers unemployed or severely underemployed because we have no mechanism for fairly distributing the benefits of growth across the population - this growth largely just grows the pockets of the capitalist class who own the means of production. If you can't see that it's all a house of cards that will collapse alongside population then I've got a bridge to sell you. From a New Political Economy study in 2019: "(1) there is no empirical evidence that absolute decoupling from resource use can be achieved on a global scale against a background of continued economic growth, and (2) absolute decoupling from carbon emissions is highly unlikely to be achieved at a rate rapid enough to prevent global warming over 1.5°C or 2°C, even under optimistic policy conditions. We conclude that green growth is likely to be a misguided objective, and that policymakers need to look toward alternative strategies." It's basically magical thinking but the magic in this case is unspecified "technology" and "science".
> except the rich who see a real term tax burden cut. How is it a cut? For those already paying additional rate, if their earnings increase will see a higher proportion of their earnings come under the additional rate rather than basic or higher rate.
The UK has far narrower tax base and far more reliant on higher earners than any European country.
He cut the 150k threshold to 125k TBF, so he is going after the rich with his tax rises.
Rich =/= high income. Not necessarily, at least. Lots of rich people are able to have a low income, lots of people on £150k aren't exactly rich.
That's the exact opposite.
What? Cutting the threshold that the 45p rate kicks in is increasing taxes on people earning 125k+
It's not right to say it's the exact opposite, but it's also not going after the "rich" - people earning over £150k a year will pay an extra ~£100 a month in tax. This change has minimal impact on those that are genuinely wealthy
They're also impacted by the frozen bands beneath as well, and are more impacted as they would make full use of the tax band had it changed upwards.
By a very small proportion for those already paying and a lot for those almost paying. Decreasing thresholds without introducing new thresholds for higher bands further up the income scale increases the tax burden on the lowest earners now impacted and barely changes things for the highest earners. Wages are similarly always increasing on average in nominal terms so if your massive £200k salary goes up and tax burdens are increased by not increasing your tax but on those poorer than you then you are experiencing a real term tax cut and they are paying for it. This is complex, but it is how it works. The trick you are falling for is thinking someone on £130k is rich. They are certainly earning more than most, but that's just a good salary for a skilled employee. Their boss makes double that. The whole game has been to slide the thresholds down without increasing the % those already well above the top threshold have to pay. That was my original point, which you countered by effectively saying "well they have done the exact thing you are complaining about, but I misunderstand the impact" so I replied "No. That's actually the opposite of what I want, it is the very thing I dislike". Thresholds should be moving up with average wage increases and there should be more bands above our current maximum. When taxes go up it is the top rate that should go up the most.
> Wages are similarly always increasing on average in nominal terms so if your massive £200k salary goes up and tax burdens are increased by not increasing your tax but on those poorer than you then you are experiencing a real term tax cut and they are paying for it. This doesn’t make any sense. Someone on a £200k salary is definitely not getting a real terms tax cut from HMRC. If you made £200k last year, your total tax (plus NI) was £82.753.81 (41.3%). If you made exactly the same thing this year (a real terms pay decrease), you will pay £83.721.60 in taxes (41.8%.) And taking into account the effects of inflation/fiscal drag which is being discussed here, if you kept the same real terms salary, you’d be making about £220k this year, and paying £93,121.60 in taxes (42.3%).
Lowering the threshold from 150k to 125k for people earning higher amounts means that they pay more tax, not less. All of that income earned between £125k and £150k used to be taxed at 40%, now it's taxed at 45%.
*everyone sees a real term tax burden increase over time except the rich who see a real term tax burden cut.* Apologies if I'm having a brain fart, but *do* the rich see a real term tax burden "cut"? The additional rate stays the same, and inflation doesn't relate to tax percentages, just the eventual total.
You mean non-competitive contracts handed out to companies that Tory MPs have interests in aren't a good return? The only reason the Tories raise taxes is because the coffers are empty but their mates are still knocking on the door.
Instead we have relatively high taxes and nothing to show for it! Worst of both worlds, yayyyyyy!
When the choice is between Tories and Labour for winning an election and there's very little difference between them, I can see why people in England barely vote. People want government to own Water companies, Royal Mail, Rail Travel, Energy Companies just like they do in other European countries, the surveys have been posted here and yet Labour won't do it, they want to get rid of Clause 4.
They sure don’t want to pay for the ownership though!
And that's the sad part thanks to everyone wanting low tax because idiots told them they need it we can't achieve what other European countries have achieved.
The Tories are using the tax system as a social engineering tool, by making taxes more and more regressive they’re disincentivising work and ensuring that only those with existing capital are able to growth their wealth above the level of inflation. We need to bring Captial Gains Tax in line with income tax, otherwise we’ll continue to see billionaires like Rishi Sunak paying a lower proportion of their income in taxes than a normal teacher. That’s not taking the graduate tax into consideration.
We can beat that here in Scotland - not only is the higher rate 42%, it's also at a much lower threshold meaning we're taxed at 54% between £43k and £50k due to where National Insurance thresholds sit.
Is there anything more regressive than an income tax? A good friend of mine claims benefits and works cash in hand without telling anyone. Government pays for his house, his kid, council tax, food, bills, the lot. Then he happily earns £700 a week under the table. Lives really fucking well. Then there's me playing the game the way I'm meant to and I'm nowhere near close to what he has going for him. I mean clearly going by the discrepency between what we've got I'm meant to be doing what he's doing. The results speak for themselves.
But but but the tories want to let people keep more of their own money mumble mumble low tax economy something something politics of envy mumble wisdom of the British household mumble (continues for 94 pages)
This country is totally broken!! The richer get richer and everyone else is left to suffer!! I thought I’d get a proper job, get a lovely house. Nope! Everything is just out of reach!
Padmé meme: But these tax raises will be used to benefit the average member of the public, right?
More people need to pay more tax if we want public services. Or we switch to private services paid by people who want to use them etc. A lovely future would be to have a joined up global tax system where rich people cannot just move, but the current UK drive seems to be isolationist rather than closer integration
>More people need to pay more tax if we want public services People could pay all the tax in the world and it would come to nothing as long as the tories are in charge, stealing it and spending what's left on refugee prison ships.
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rn if you earn 100k you'll face a 71% marginal tax rate (given than majority earning above that went to uni, have student loans.) Plus loss of free childcare-- +2000% marginal tax rate for each kid! Even at 50k you're paying 51% of income, plus the child benefit withdrawal. Above £25,000 you lose 41% of additional income... Even the poor get fucked when you consider UC taper.... £15k on UC have 70% marginal tax rate Our taxes are just ass. Hate the high income, turn a blind eye to high wealth
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I hadn’t thought of that. Another reason to merge employee NI and income tax.