IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. 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. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
I don't want to subsidise them out of some big love of higher earners (I am not one) but because my (admittedly untested) belief is that the country will be better off if we can get higher earners earning (and paying tax). I would expect the benefit to cost ratio of paying for childcare for higher earners to be greater than 1 (indeed, it probably has a higher BCR than for medium earners).
At over £100k a year they can afford child care out of their taxed income. Just as I did when paying private school fees. There are some who cannot earn because the absurd cost of child care in this country is higher than what they can hope to receive. People earning over £100k are not in that category and we need to focus the limited funds available to those who are.
But it doesn't make any sense that someone earning £130k would be better off in practice, in terms of take home pay etc, reducing their salary to £100k, which is what this situation effectively is. It is total madness.
I've been based in London with work recently and think that these people, earning £100k, are not even vaguely rich in this context, where a terraced house costs £700k. If you are earning £5k per month (after pensions) a large chunk of money would go servicing a mortgage, it is not like school/nursery fees are just a trivial expense, you can't actually afford to pay them.
The system is creating bizarre incentives, ie to work less, or to move out of London and the south east; this has caused a lot of problems within the public sector.
Indeed, people forget London stretches to Barking and Dagenham, Havering, Bexley, Orpington and Uxbridge it is not just Zone 1 and Zone 2, indeed some of the Outer suburbs of London even voted for Brexit!
Indeed! Uxbridge is so far from Central London that it’s citizens voted for Johnson. It’s part of the red wall!
Kensington, Cities of London and Westminster and Chelsea and Fulham also voted for Johnson in 2019, don't think they are red wall, in fact they even look down on the rest of the blue wall let alone the red wall!!!
Again, all you end up doing is creating a disincentive for the highest earners to work full time. You can call them as many names as you like, think of them as unpatriotic, call them tax dodgers or whatever but they are rational. Someone earning £100k getting a £10k payrise gets to keep £3.8k or just over £300 quid a month, a marginal rate of 62%, if they have kids under 5 the marginal rate goes up over 80% and sometimes over 100%.
On the flip side, the same person can choose to work a 4 day week and drop down to £88k per year, they lose £500 quid a month in net salary but they gain 52 days off per year for it and 3 day weekends. The day rate for that additional day per week is just under £200, which for someone in that position just isn't worth it. I think the specific maths for someone without kids is a ~40% drop in the day rate for that additional day worked when looking at the marginal gain.
Faced with those numbers, the possibility of spending more time with the family, being able to take them to zoo, park, long weekends away with the wife and daughter vs grinding out an additional day so the government can claim over 60% of it.
No, it's completely idiotic to have these marginal rates and this was the budget to get rid of them, a proper Tory government would have done so already because it is a barrier to growth.
So some well-off people do less work, but if there is still work to be done maybe some people who are freed up by affordable childcare can now pursue that work? It's certain more complex than just considering the downside for the few, the upside for the many will likely be much larger.
That's not how it works, almost all of the time people working these roles are highly skilled and if they don't work it just doesn't get done the NHS waiting list is the bes example of this, or consultancies who take on fewer clients because they have fewer available workdays and collectively there's just less work being done. It is one of the reasons we have such poor productivity.
Though medicine is unusual in the extent to which expensive training gets embodied in individual people and can't be rapidly transferred into someone else.
I'm not saying that NHS consultants are like MRI scanners and should therefore be kept running 24/7 to get the maximum benefit from the upfront cost, but the logic probably works on a spreadsheet.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. 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. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
I don't want to subsidise them out of some big love of higher earners (I am not one) but because my (admittedly untested) belief is that the country will be better off if we can get higher earners earning (and paying tax). I would expect the benefit to cost ratio of paying for childcare for higher earners to be greater than 1 (indeed, it probably has a higher BCR than for medium earners).
At over £100k a year they can afford child care out of their taxed income. Just as I did when paying private school fees. There are some who cannot earn because the absurd cost of child care in this country is higher than what they can hope to receive. People earning over £100k are not in that category and we need to focus the limited funds available to those who are.
But it doesn't make any sense that someone earning £130k would be better off in practice, in terms of take home pay etc, reducing their salary to £100k, which is what this situation effectively is. It is total madness.
I've been based in London with work recently and think that these people, earning £100k, are not even vaguely rich in this context, where a terraced house costs £700k. If you are earning £5k per month (after pensions) a large chunk of money would go servicing a mortgage, it is not like school/nursery fees are just a trivial expense, you can't actually afford to pay them.
The system is creating bizarre incentives, ie to work less, or to move out of London and the south east; this has caused a lot of problems within the public sector.
Indeed, people forget London stretches to Barking and Dagenham, Havering, Bexley, Orpington and Uxbridge it is not just Zone 1 and Zone 2, indeed some of the Outer suburbs of London even voted for Brexit!
Indeed! Uxbridge is so far from Central London that it’s citizens voted for Johnson. It’s part of the red wall!
Kensington, Cities of London and Westminster and Chelsea and Fulham also voted for Johnson in 2019, don't think they are red wall, in fact they even look down on the rest of the blue wall let alone the red wall!!!
Again, all you end up doing is creating a disincentive for the highest earners to work full time. You can call them as many names as you like, think of them as unpatriotic, call them tax dodgers or whatever but they are rational. Someone earning £100k getting a £10k payrise gets to keep £3.8k or just over £300 quid a month, a marginal rate of 62%, if they have kids under 5 the marginal rate goes up over 80% and sometimes over 100%.
On the flip side, the same person can choose to work a 4 day week and drop down to £88k per year, they lose £500 quid a month in net salary but they gain 52 days off per year for it and 3 day weekends. The day rate for that additional day per week is just under £200, which for someone in that position just isn't worth it. I think the specific maths for someone without kids is a ~40% drop in the day rate for that additional day worked when looking at the marginal gain.
Faced with those numbers, the possibility of spending more time with the family, being able to take them to zoo, park, long weekends away with the wife and daughter vs grinding out an additional day so the government can claim over 60% of it.
No, it's completely idiotic to have these marginal rates and this was the budget to get rid of them, a proper Tory government would have done so already because it is a barrier to growth.
So some well-off people do less work, but if there is still work to be done maybe some people who are freed up by affordable childcare can now pursue that work? It's certain more complex than just considering the downside for the few, the upside for the many will likely be much larger.
That's not how it works, almost all of the time people working these roles are highly skilled and if they don't work it just doesn't get done the NHS waiting list is the bes example of this, or consultancies who take on fewer clients because they have fewer available workdays and collectively there's just less work being done. It is one of the reasons we have such poor productivity.
This is just rubbish. Very, very, very people are that indispensible.
Surgeons, medical consultants, some kinds of engineers, some kinds of research scientists, high level data scientists or ML/AI engineers. All of these roles are in extremely high demand and will be in these pay brackets with many, many of them working 4 day weeks with the companies (or NHS) just having lower output.
Sure ... they are not indispensible though. Plenty of people have those skills & experience.
And plenty more have the potential to do those jobs ... they just need the opportunity.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. 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. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
I don't want to subsidise them out of some big love of higher earners (I am not one) but because my (admittedly untested) belief is that the country will be better off if we can get higher earners earning (and paying tax). I would expect the benefit to cost ratio of paying for childcare for higher earners to be greater than 1 (indeed, it probably has a higher BCR than for medium earners).
At over £100k a year they can afford child care out of their taxed income. Just as I did when paying private school fees. There are some who cannot earn because the absurd cost of child care in this country is higher than what they can hope to receive. People earning over £100k are not in that category and we need to focus the limited funds available to those who are.
But it doesn't make any sense that someone earning £130k would be better off in practice, in terms of take home pay etc, reducing their salary to £100k, which is what this situation effectively is. It is total madness.
I've been based in London with work recently and think that these people, earning £100k, are not even vaguely rich in this context, where a terraced house costs £700k. If you are earning £5k per month (after pensions) a large chunk of money would go servicing a mortgage, it is not like school/nursery fees are just a trivial expense, you can't actually afford to pay them.
The system is creating bizarre incentives, ie to work less, or to move out of London and the south east; this has caused a lot of problems within the public sector.
Indeed, people forget London stretches to Barking and Dagenham, Havering, Bexley, Orpington and Uxbridge it is not just Zone 1 and Zone 2, indeed some of the Outer suburbs of London even voted for Brexit!
I think what you're describing is Greater London.
London itself, that great teeming metropolis, filled with the greatest brains of their generation, stretches from the Thames in the South, to Hampstead in the North, and from Richmond in the West to Tower Bridge in the East.
Good to see Richmond resident Zac Goldsmith and Hampstead resident Liam Gallagher are apparently amongst the greatest brains of their generation!
Smoking related diseases/cessation services cost the NHS £2.6bn/year.
Following todays budget, the treasury rakes in over £10bn/year in tobacco tax.
Whether you take the left wing position that smokers are victims of the tobacco industry and the government should ban the sale of tobacco products and/or have an obligation to use all the tax duties to provide effective cessation services - or the conservative/libertarian position that stresses free agency and that the government shouldn’t tax above the cost of providing health services to smokers (preferably no tax at all - and health would be privatised) - surely we can all agree that government using smokers - who cluster around the lowest socioeconomic groups - as a cash cow - is utterly immoral?
Paying, on average, £1666 in tax, per smoker, per year - and getting £433 per person, per year back in nhs/cessation services? Smokers are getting a shit deal.
The tories moral compass needs recalibrating.
(apologies for the possibly the longest sentence ever written, btw)
Smokers seem to get a lot of benefit in being increasingly discouraged from self-extermination:
Not actually sure how much faster we could be reducing those numbers by throwing money around.
The one that surprised me is that petrol/diesel tax is being cut in real terms yet again, whilst bus fares are being allowed to rise. That's bizarre.
I think that last may be an attempted Hail Mary pass for the election.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. 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. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
That's completely beside the point: the tax and benefits system should not have cliffs where the marginal tax rate shoots up well above 100%.
We should be encouraging Casino to work, and to generate value and tax revenues.
The impact of this move is to discourage a large portion of the population from working.
Madness.
... a large portion ... guffaws.
How many people are affected? A very tiny portion of the UK earn over 100k per annum, and they only need childcare for a very small portion of their working life.
How many people are affected by cliff edges and tax and benefits rates shooting upto around 100%?
Many millions of people actually.
For starters anyone on UC paying IC and NI is already at 70% marginal tax rate even before anything else. These cliff edges exist throughout our NYC skyline tax code and it is damaging.
Of course, cliff edges are bad. The question is why pb.com is fixated on this cliff edge.
It is weird. The purpose of this measure is to avoid child poverty, which has sadly grown under this government, where parents can't afford to look after their children properly.
No-one earning £100 000 a year is remotely in this bucket.
"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
It is completely perverse to accept any decline in living standards. It is absolutely being inflicted deliberately by an ideologically-crazed minority peddling climate alarmism, and we are badly in need of a counter-narrative.
There are dozens of reasons for accepting declining living standards. We all have our hobbyhorses. I would, for example, accept a future where I was poorer - let's say one in which I need to work for another 12 months before retirement to retire on the same level of comfort - in return for a UK less trewn with graffiti and litter and with more trains. Others will have different priorities for what the state might do which might not equal 'living standards', or at least easily measurable ones.
If for example we suddenly had no smartphones or streaming tv would people be less happy. Probably not. Technology has made a small number of uber nerds rich but as time goes on its contribution to human happiness becomes less and less. Would i want to live without a refrigarator..hell no. Could i live without streaming tv. Of course.
That was, I'm sure, the argument of Communists in eastern Europe.
If people in the UK didn't have smartphones, and people in France did, I think people would notice.
Thats the point. In eastern europe they did have unreliable cars and lacked basic consumer goods. that hasnt been true in the west since at least the 60s or 70s. And im talking of a situation where no country has a smartphone not one does one doesnt. Do you think smartphones have been major beneficiaries for humanity because i could certainly live without them.
Every generation can look back at life 25 years ago and say "hey, life was pretty good back then because we had [y] and do we really need new fangled [x]".
So, people in the 1930s could have said "Life in the 1910s was pretty good; I mean we didn't have cars yet, with all that nasty pollution and the risk of getting knocked over. And who actually needs to go to the cinema anyway?"
And people in the 1950s could say "Life in the 1930s was pretty good. They already the cinema and cars, which is all you really need to lead a modern life. Do we really need jetplanes? And you used to be able to send your washing out for almost nothing. Is it really an improvement to have an unreliable and expensive machine and to do it yourself?"
Then people in the 1970s would say "Life in the 1950s was great. Already you innovations like washing machines and fridges than make home care simple. And the railway system was great - you could get anywhere in the UK cheaply. All there is today is colour TV and ridiculously expensive VCRs and the shows are exactly the same!"
Etcetera. Etcetera.
If we didn't advance technologically and France did. People would notice. And they would be spitting mad.
The difference is the tech elite actually shield their kids from tablets and smartphones. They know. The point is as im sure you will understand the marginal benefit of each wave of technological development is less and less and the associated costs more and more negative so that at some point the costs outweigh the benefits. We are arguably close to this point now which is why the dreams of silicon valley uber nerds will remain dreams,
Absurd assertions without evidence.
And as a member of the tech elite, I can assure you that I teach my kids how to use tech, I don't shield them from it.
ok an example. Social media like facebook and twitter. Have they contributed to the sum of human happiness in the same way as the invention of the automobile or refrigarator. I think not.
You honestly think that Facebook and Twitter are even in the top 10,000 innovations of this century?
Here's a question: has that modern (Communist and post-Communist) China had made no significant technological advancements/innovations that have significantly changed the world? Computers, the Internet, GNSS/GPS, many medical advances and drugs, all came from the west.
China have been very good at copying/productionising, but what major things have they invented? Widening it out, what major scientific breakthroughs have they made?
I'm not saying there are not any; I just can't immediately think of any.
An interesting and provocative point.
There's probably some - but, as you say, hard to think of any.
It was said that the Japanese were just imitators, now?
I can't believe that the Chinese are any different to the West creatively. Really their creative minds were just being used to catch up. (Not that they needed to do too much, as the wests great industries sent or sold them our IP anyway.)
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. 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. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
I don't want to subsidise them out of some big love of higher earners (I am not one) but because my (admittedly untested) belief is that the country will be better off if we can get higher earners earning (and paying tax). I would expect the benefit to cost ratio of paying for childcare for higher earners to be greater than 1 (indeed, it probably has a higher BCR than for medium earners).
At over £100k a year they can afford child care out of their taxed income. Just as I did when paying private school fees. There are some who cannot earn because the absurd cost of child care in this country is higher than what they can hope to receive. People earning over £100k are not in that category and we need to focus the limited funds available to those who are.
But it doesn't make any sense that someone earning £130k would be better off in practice, in terms of take home pay etc, reducing their salary to £100k, which is what this situation effectively is. It is total madness.
I've been based in London with work recently and think that these people, earning £100k, are not even vaguely rich in this context, where a terraced house costs £700k. If you are earning £5k per month (after pensions) a large chunk of money would go servicing a mortgage, it is not like school/nursery fees are just a trivial expense, you can't actually afford to pay them.
The system is creating bizarre incentives, ie to work less, or to move out of London and the south east; this has caused a lot of problems within the public sector.
Again, all you end up doing is creating a disincentive for the highest earners to work full time. You can call them as many names as you like, think of them as unpatriotic, call them tax dodgers or whatever but they are rational. Someone earning £100k getting a £10k payrise gets to keep £3.8k or just over £300 quid a month, a marginal rate of 62%, if they have kids under 5 the marginal rate goes up over 80% and sometimes over 100%.
On the flip side, the same person can choose to work a 4 day week and drop down to £88k per year, they lose £500 quid a month in net salary but they gain 52 days off per year for it and 3 day weekends. The day rate for that additional day per week is just under £200, which for someone in that position just isn't worth it. I think the specific maths for someone without kids is a ~40% drop in the day rate for that additional day worked when looking at the marginal gain.
Faced with those numbers, the possibility of spending more time with the family, being able to take them to zoo, park, long weekends away with the wife and daughter vs grinding out an additional day so the government can claim over 60% of it.
No, it's completely idiotic to have these marginal rates and this was the budget to get rid of them, a proper Tory government would have done so already because it is a barrier to growth.
So some well-off people do less work, but if there is still work to be done maybe some people who are freed up by affordable childcare can now pursue that work? It's certain more complex than just considering the downside for the few, the upside for the many will likely be much larger.
That's not how it works, almost all of the time people working these roles are highly skilled and if they don't work it just doesn't get done the NHS waiting list is the bes example of this, or consultancies who take on fewer clients because they have fewer available workdays and collectively there's just less work being done. It is one of the reasons we have such poor productivity.
This is just rubbish. Very, very, very people are that indispensible.
Surgeons, medical consultants, some kinds of engineers, some kinds of research scientists, high level data scientists or ML/AI engineers. All of these roles are in extremely high demand and will be in these pay brackets with many, many of them working 4 day weeks with the companies (or NHS) just having lower output.
I'm a research scientist, you could call me a data scientist, doing some work in ML/AI. I'm a professor. I'm a long way off earning £100k. There are some professors who do earn that, although they've generally got very grown up children!
I agree that marginal rates can be an issue, I'm not supporting this budget, but I think you may have an erroneous view of the high earners with young children affected by this issue.
"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
200 AD/CE? Leastways south (enough) of Hadrian's Wall.
Bit shit if you were a slave. And as a peasant being north of the Military Zone was possibly an improvement on being under Roman control.
Must say your viewpoint is quite woke - what a surprise!
There’s a fair amount of historical evidence that the end of the Roman empire wasn’t seen as a disaster by quite a few people living in parts of it.
Indeed, the peasants took back the land and means of production, abandoning the cities and commercial world in favour of subsistence agriculture as soon as the troops left. Without brute force to maintain it, people didn't want the Roman world.
Again, all you end up doing is creating a disincentive for the highest earners to work full time. You can call them as many names as you like, think of them as unpatriotic, call them tax dodgers or whatever but they are rational. Someone earning £100k getting a £10k payrise gets to keep £3.8k or just over £300 quid a month, a marginal rate of 62%, if they have kids under 5 the marginal rate goes up over 80% and sometimes over 100%.
On the flip side, the same person can choose to work a 4 day week and drop down to £88k per year, they lose £500 quid a month in net salary but they gain 52 days off per year for it and 3 day weekends. The day rate for that additional day per week is just under £200, which for someone in that position just isn't worth it. I think the specific maths for someone without kids is a ~40% drop in the day rate for that additional day worked when looking at the marginal gain.
Faced with those numbers, the possibility of spending more time with the family, being able to take them to zoo, park, long weekends away with the wife and daughter vs grinding out an additional day so the government can claim over 60% of it.
No, it's completely idiotic to have these marginal rates and this was the budget to get rid of them, a proper Tory government would have done so already because it is a barrier to growth.
So some well-off people do less work, but if there is still work to be done maybe some people who are freed up by affordable childcare can now pursue that work? It's certain more complex than just considering the downside for the few, the upside for the many will likely be much larger.
That's not how it works, almost all of the time people working these roles are highly skilled and if they don't work it just doesn't get done the NHS waiting list is the bes example of this, or consultancies who take on fewer clients because they have fewer available workdays and collectively there's just less work being done. It is one of the reasons we have such poor productivity.
Though medicine is unusual in the extent to which expensive training gets embodied in individual people and can't be rapidly transferred into someone else.
I'm not saying that NHS consultants are like MRI scanners and should therefore be kept running 24/7 to get the maximum benefit from the upfront cost, but the logic probably works on a spreadsheet.
It's not just medicine, the UK is an information economy, we have a huge number of highly specialised jobs and people. Roles which are very difficult to fill in the first place, finding someone to job share is going to be impossible.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. 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. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
I don't want to subsidise them out of some big love of higher earners (I am not one) but because my (admittedly untested) belief is that the country will be better off if we can get higher earners earning (and paying tax). I would expect the benefit to cost ratio of paying for childcare for higher earners to be greater than 1 (indeed, it probably has a higher BCR than for medium earners).
At over £100k a year they can afford child care out of their taxed income. Just as I did when paying private school fees. There are some who cannot earn because the absurd cost of child care in this country is higher than what they can hope to receive. People earning over £100k are not in that category and we need to focus the limited funds available to those who are.
But it doesn't make any sense that someone earning £130k would be better off in practice, in terms of take home pay etc, reducing their salary to £100k, which is what this situation effectively is. It is total madness.
I've been based in London with work recently and think that these people, earning £100k, are not even vaguely rich in this context, where a terraced house costs £700k. If you are earning £5k per month (after pensions) a large chunk of money would go servicing a mortgage, it is not like school/nursery fees are just a trivial expense, you can't actually afford to pay them.
The system is creating bizarre incentives, ie to work less, or to move out of London and the south east; this has caused a lot of problems within the public sector.
Indeed, people forget London stretches to Barking and Dagenham, Havering, Bexley, Orpington and Uxbridge it is not just Zone 1 and Zone 2, indeed some of the Outer suburbs of London even voted for Brexit!
I think what you're describing is Greater London.
London itself, that great teeming metropolis, filled with the greatest brains of their generation, stretches from the Thames in the South, to Hampstead in the North, and from Richmond in the West to Tower Bridge in the East.
I don't understand why Sadiq Khan is referred to as the mayor of London when he's actually the mayor of Greater London. The (Lord) mayor of London is a character from the middle ages inexplicably transported to 2023.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. 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. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
I don't want to subsidise them out of some big love of higher earners (I am not one) but because my (admittedly untested) belief is that the country will be better off if we can get higher earners earning (and paying tax). I would expect the benefit to cost ratio of paying for childcare for higher earners to be greater than 1 (indeed, it probably has a higher BCR than for medium earners).
At over £100k a year they can afford child care out of their taxed income. Just as I did when paying private school fees. There are some who cannot earn because the absurd cost of child care in this country is higher than what they can hope to receive. People earning over £100k are not in that category and we need to focus the limited funds available to those who are.
But it doesn't make any sense that someone earning £130k would be better off in practice, in terms of take home pay etc, reducing their salary to £100k, which is what this situation effectively is. It is total madness.
I've been based in London with work recently and think that these people, earning £100k, are not even vaguely rich in this context, where a terraced house costs £700k. If you are earning £5k per month (after pensions) a large chunk of money would go servicing a mortgage, it is not like school/nursery fees are just a trivial expense, you can't actually afford to pay them.
The system is creating bizarre incentives, ie to work less, or to move out of London and the south east; this has caused a lot of problems within the public sector.
Indeed, people forget London stretches to Barking and Dagenham, Havering, Bexley, Orpington and Uxbridge it is not just Zone 1 and Zone 2, indeed some of the Outer suburbs of London even voted for Brexit!
Indeed! Uxbridge is so far from Central London that it’s citizens voted for Johnson. It’s part of the red wall!
Kensington, Cities of London and Westminster and Chelsea and Fulham also voted for Johnson in 2019, don't think they are red wall, in fact they even look down on the rest of the blue wall let alone the red wall!!!
Again, all you end up doing is creating a disincentive for the highest earners to work full time. You can call them as many names as you like, think of them as unpatriotic, call them tax dodgers or whatever but they are rational. Someone earning £100k getting a £10k payrise gets to keep £3.8k or just over £300 quid a month, a marginal rate of 62%, if they have kids under 5 the marginal rate goes up over 80% and sometimes over 100%.
On the flip side, the same person can choose to work a 4 day week and drop down to £88k per year, they lose £500 quid a month in net salary but they gain 52 days off per year for it and 3 day weekends. The day rate for that additional day per week is just under £200, which for someone in that position just isn't worth it. I think the specific maths for someone without kids is a ~40% drop in the day rate for that additional day worked when looking at the marginal gain.
Faced with those numbers, the possibility of spending more time with the family, being able to take them to zoo, park, long weekends away with the wife and daughter vs grinding out an additional day so the government can claim over 60% of it.
No, it's completely idiotic to have these marginal rates and this was the budget to get rid of them, a proper Tory government would have done so already because it is a barrier to growth.
So some well-off people do less work, but if there is still work to be done maybe some people who are freed up by affordable childcare can now pursue that work? It's certain more complex than just considering the downside for the few, the upside for the many will likely be much larger.
That's not how it works, almost all of the time people working these roles are highly skilled and if they don't work it just doesn't get done the NHS waiting list is the bes example of this, or consultancies who take on fewer clients because they have fewer available workdays and collectively there's just less work being done. It is one of the reasons we have such poor productivity.
This is just rubbish. Very, very, very people are that indispensible.
Surgeons, medical consultants, some kinds of engineers, some kinds of research scientists, high level data scientists or ML/AI engineers. All of these roles are in extremely high demand and will be in these pay brackets with many, many of them working 4 day weeks with the companies (or NHS) just having lower output.
I'm a research scientist, you could call me a data scientist, doing some work in ML/AI. I'm a professor. I'm a long way off earning £100k. There are some professors who do earn that, although they've generally got very grown up children!
I agree that marginal rates can be an issue, I'm not supporting this budget, but I think you may have an erroneous view of the high earners with young children affected by this issue.
One of the three people I agreed to go down to a 4 day week was our ML engineer, he was due to go above the £100k mark and decided he wanted to spend more time with his wife who's on maternity leave with their kid. It's why I included it in the list!
This one is serious, CS is potentially too wide ranging an outfit not to have knock on effects if it goes south. Apparently the pressure on the Swiss from external forces, presumably the US, to act is seriously heavy right now.
The only luck is that CS have been a well trailed, slow moving problem case so you'd hope for others having done their containment planning some time ago.
Tech stocks in us already rallying on anticipation of less tight monetary policy next week. Financial stocks in sewer though.
This one is serious, CS is potentially too wide ranging an outfit not to have knock on effects if it goes south. Apparently the pressure on the Swiss from external forces, presumably the US, to act is seriously heavy right now.
The only luck is that CS have been a well trailed, slow moving problem case so you'd hope for others having done their containment planning some time ago.
Can anyone with greater understanding of these issues tell me if the Central Banking swerve into quantitive tightening - high interest rates, central banks selling Government bonds etc. has had a contributing effect here?
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. 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. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
I don't want to subsidise them out of some big love of higher earners (I am not one) but because my (admittedly untested) belief is that the country will be better off if we can get higher earners earning (and paying tax). I would expect the benefit to cost ratio of paying for childcare for higher earners to be greater than 1 (indeed, it probably has a higher BCR than for medium earners).
At over £100k a year they can afford child care out of their taxed income. Just as I did when paying private school fees. There are some who cannot earn because the absurd cost of child care in this country is higher than what they can hope to receive. People earning over £100k are not in that category and we need to focus the limited funds available to those who are.
But it doesn't make any sense that someone earning £130k would be better off in practice, in terms of take home pay etc, reducing their salary to £100k, which is what this situation effectively is. It is total madness.
I've been based in London with work recently and think that these people, earning £100k, are not even vaguely rich in this context, where a terraced house costs £700k. If you are earning £5k per month (after pensions) a large chunk of money would go servicing a mortgage, it is not like school/nursery fees are just a trivial expense, you can't actually afford to pay them.
The system is creating bizarre incentives, ie to work less, or to move out of London and the south east; this has caused a lot of problems within the public sector.
Indeed, people forget London stretches to Barking and Dagenham, Havering, Bexley, Orpington and Uxbridge it is not just Zone 1 and Zone 2, indeed some of the Outer suburbs of London even voted for Brexit!
I think what you're describing is Greater London.
London itself, that great teeming metropolis, filled with the greatest brains of their generation, stretches from the Thames in the South, to Hampstead in the North, and from Richmond in the West to Tower Bridge in the East.
I'm reading this as I cross the river heading south into civilisation.
Smoking related diseases/cessation services cost the NHS £2.6bn/year.
Following todays budget, the treasury rakes in over £10bn/year in tobacco tax.
Whether you take the left wing position that smokers are victims of the tobacco industry and the government should ban the sale of tobacco products and/or have an obligation to use all the tax duties to provide effective cessation services - or the conservative/libertarian position that stresses free agency and that the government shouldn’t tax above the cost of providing health services to smokers (preferably no tax at all - and health would be privatised) - surely we can all agree that government using smokers - who cluster around the lowest socioeconomic groups - as a cash cow - is utterly immoral?
Paying, on average, £1666 in tax, per smoker, per year - and getting £433 per person, per year back in nhs/cessation services? Smokers are getting a shit deal.
The tories moral compass needs recalibrating.
(apologies for the possibly the longest sentence ever written, btw)
No, legal but very highly taxed and alarming photos on the packets feels a good policy balance for me. Sorry smokers!
Why should the missing £7.4bn go into the general treasury pot instead of being spent on nhs/cessation services?
These are some of the very poorest and most vulnerable members of our society. Hunt has chosen to tax them to the eyeballs to subsidise tax cuts for - already very wealthy - senior doctors.
How is that moral?
Hm. Did you include
(a) disability costs, to central and local government? (b) illnesses to close relatives (passive smoking, effect on unborn children, chioldhood asthma, etc.)?
a) will be huge.
Smokers die younger - as smokers are reliably informed on the packet - saving the taxpayer huge amounts of money.
They’re an easy target for the tories.
Go after the vulnerable. That is their ideology.
Sickening.
Sin taxes, sickening? How about not smoking.
Putting revolting medical photographs on packets is in extremely poor taste.
The OBR states that 0.5% of the 2.0% growth expected going forward will be a result of immigration. It suggests they don't expect increasing workforce participation and productivity gains to make too much difference.
Smoking related diseases/cessation services cost the NHS £2.6bn/year.
Following todays budget, the treasury rakes in over £10bn/year in tobacco tax.
Whether you take the left wing position that smokers are victims of the tobacco industry and the government should ban the sale of tobacco products and/or have an obligation to use all the tax duties to provide effective cessation services - or the conservative/libertarian position that stresses free agency and that the government shouldn’t tax above the cost of providing health services to smokers (preferably no tax at all - and health would be privatised) - surely we can all agree that government using smokers - who cluster around the lowest socioeconomic groups - as a cash cow - is utterly immoral?
Paying, on average, £1666 in tax, per smoker, per year - and getting £433 per person, per year back in nhs/cessation services? Smokers are getting a shit deal.
The tories moral compass needs recalibrating.
(apologies for the possibly the longest sentence ever written, btw)
No, legal but very highly taxed and alarming photos on the packets feels a good policy balance for me. Sorry smokers!
Why should the missing £7.4bn go into the general treasury pot instead of being spent on nhs/cessation services?
These are some of the very poorest and most vulnerable members of our society. Hunt has chosen to tax them to the eyeballs to subsidise tax cuts for - already very wealthy - senior doctors.
How is that moral?
Hm. Did you include
(a) disability costs, to central and local government? (b) illnesses to close relatives (passive smoking, effect on unborn children, chioldhood asthma, etc.)?
a) will be huge.
Smokers die younger - as smokers are reliably informed on the packet - saving the taxpayer huge amounts of money.
They’re an easy target for the tories.
Go after the vulnerable. That is their ideology.
Sickening.
But they are also disabled for longer. So they don't save in that sense.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. 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. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
I don't want to subsidise them out of some big love of higher earners (I am not one) but because my (admittedly untested) belief is that the country will be better off if we can get higher earners earning (and paying tax). I would expect the benefit to cost ratio of paying for childcare for higher earners to be greater than 1 (indeed, it probably has a higher BCR than for medium earners).
At over £100k a year they can afford child care out of their taxed income. Just as I did when paying private school fees. There are some who cannot earn because the absurd cost of child care in this country is higher than what they can hope to receive. People earning over £100k are not in that category and we need to focus the limited funds available to those who are.
But it doesn't make any sense that someone earning £130k would be better off in practice, in terms of take home pay etc, reducing their salary to £100k, which is what this situation effectively is. It is total madness.
I've been based in London with work recently and think that these people, earning £100k, are not even vaguely rich in this context, where a terraced house costs £700k. If you are earning £5k per month (after pensions) a large chunk of money would go servicing a mortgage, it is not like school/nursery fees are just a trivial expense, you can't actually afford to pay them.
The system is creating bizarre incentives, ie to work less, or to move out of London and the south east; this has caused a lot of problems within the public sector.
Indeed, people forget London stretches to Barking and Dagenham, Havering, Bexley, Orpington and Uxbridge it is not just Zone 1 and Zone 2, indeed some of the Outer suburbs of London even voted for Brexit!
I think what you're describing is Greater London.
London itself, that great teeming metropolis, filled with the greatest brains of their generation, stretches from the Thames in the South, to Hampstead in the North, and from Richmond in the West to Tower Bridge in the East.
I'm reading this as I cross the river heading south into civilisation.
Again, all you end up doing is creating a disincentive for the highest earners to work full time. You can call them as many names as you like, think of them as unpatriotic, call them tax dodgers or whatever but they are rational. Someone earning £100k getting a £10k payrise gets to keep £3.8k or just over £300 quid a month, a marginal rate of 62%, if they have kids under 5 the marginal rate goes up over 80% and sometimes over 100%.
On the flip side, the same person can choose to work a 4 day week and drop down to £88k per year, they lose £500 quid a month in net salary but they gain 52 days off per year for it and 3 day weekends. The day rate for that additional day per week is just under £200, which for someone in that position just isn't worth it. I think the specific maths for someone without kids is a ~40% drop in the day rate for that additional day worked when looking at the marginal gain.
Faced with those numbers, the possibility of spending more time with the family, being able to take them to zoo, park, long weekends away with the wife and daughter vs grinding out an additional day so the government can claim over 60% of it.
No, it's completely idiotic to have these marginal rates and this was the budget to get rid of them, a proper Tory government would have done so already because it is a barrier to growth.
So some well-off people do less work, but if there is still work to be done maybe some people who are freed up by affordable childcare can now pursue that work? It's certain more complex than just considering the downside for the few, the upside for the many will likely be much larger.
That's not how it works, almost all of the time people working these roles are highly skilled and if they don't work it just doesn't get done the NHS waiting list is the bes example of this, or consultancies who take on fewer clients because they have fewer available workdays and collectively there's just less work being done. It is one of the reasons we have such poor productivity.
This is just rubbish. Very, very, very people are that indispensible.
Surgeons, medical consultants, some kinds of engineers, some kinds of research scientists, high level data scientists or ML/AI engineers. All of these roles are in extremely high demand and will be in these pay brackets with many, many of them working 4 day weeks with the companies (or NHS) just having lower output.
I'm a research scientist, you could call me a data scientist, doing some work in ML/AI. I'm a professor. I'm a long way off earning £100k. There are some professors who do earn that, although they've generally got very grown up children!
I agree that marginal rates can be an issue, I'm not supporting this budget, but I think you may have an erroneous view of the high earners with young children affected by this issue.
One of the three people I agreed to go down to a 4 day week was our ML engineer, he was due to go above the £100k mark and decided he wanted to spend more time with his wife who's on maternity leave with their kid. It's why I included it in the list!
There will be differences between the public sector and private sector! Perhaps, if you need some more manpower, you can hire one of my graduating students.
I had a look around for some actual data on this. Who are the people earning £100-130k? I found a list of highest paying jobs (1 lawyer, 2 CEO, 3 actuary, 4 marketing director, 5 managing director), but that doesn't tell us how many there are of those different roles. Maybe I am being snobbish, but I'm not convinced that the country's productivity will be too damaged if some marketing directors drop down to 4-day weeks.
If the purpose of removing the lifetime limit on tax free pension contributions is to encourage people to stay in work, it looks counterproductive to me.
You either have enough money to retire on or you don't. If you do, you won't be adding to your pension pot just so you can work for longer. You retire.
If you want to encourage people to work longer you should force them to build their pot slower, or maybe back-end it so they only get the biggest tax breaks at the end of their working life.
This one is serious, CS is potentially too wide ranging an outfit not to have knock on effects if it goes south. Apparently the pressure on the Swiss from external forces, presumably the US, to act is seriously heavy right now.
The only luck is that CS have been a well trailed, slow moving problem case so you'd hope for others having done their containment planning some time ago.
Can anyone with greater understanding of these issues tell me if the Central Banking swerve into quantitive tightening - high interest rates, central banks selling Government bonds etc. has had a contributing effect here?
Yes. Higher rates and falling government bond prices led to losses on SVB's bond portfolio, which were crystallised as it suffered an outflow of deposits and had to sell its assets. More broadly, higher rates lead to losses for investors who have bet that rates stay low (typically by taking on excessive levels of debt). Monetary tightening often leads to some financial blow-outs - indeed they are part and parcel of the tightening in financial conditions central banks want to see in order to slow the economy and tame inflation.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. 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. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
I don't want to subsidise them out of some big love of higher earners (I am not one) but because my (admittedly untested) belief is that the country will be better off if we can get higher earners earning (and paying tax). I would expect the benefit to cost ratio of paying for childcare for higher earners to be greater than 1 (indeed, it probably has a higher BCR than for medium earners).
At over £100k a year they can afford child care out of their taxed income. Just as I did when paying private school fees. There are some who cannot earn because the absurd cost of child care in this country is higher than what they can hope to receive. People earning over £100k are not in that category and we need to focus the limited funds available to those who are.
But it doesn't make any sense that someone earning £130k would be better off in practice, in terms of take home pay etc, reducing their salary to £100k, which is what this situation effectively is. It is total madness.
I've been based in London with work recently and think that these people, earning £100k, are not even vaguely rich in this context, where a terraced house costs £700k. If you are earning £5k per month (after pensions) a large chunk of money would go servicing a mortgage, it is not like school/nursery fees are just a trivial expense, you can't actually afford to pay them.
The system is creating bizarre incentives, ie to work less, or to move out of London and the south east; this has caused a lot of problems within the public sector.
Indeed, people forget London stretches to Barking and Dagenham, Havering, Bexley, Orpington and Uxbridge it is not just Zone 1 and Zone 2, indeed some of the Outer suburbs of London even voted for Brexit!
I think what you're describing is Greater London.
London itself, that great teeming metropolis, filled with the greatest brains of their generation, stretches from the Thames in the South, to Hampstead in the North, and from Richmond in the West to Tower Bridge in the East.
I'm reading this as I cross the river heading south into civilisation.
South of the river there be barbarians, I even hear some of them voted for Brexit down there!!
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. 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. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
I don't want to subsidise them out of some big love of higher earners (I am not one) but because my (admittedly untested) belief is that the country will be better off if we can get higher earners earning (and paying tax). I would expect the benefit to cost ratio of paying for childcare for higher earners to be greater than 1 (indeed, it probably has a higher BCR than for medium earners).
At over £100k a year they can afford child care out of their taxed income. Just as I did when paying private school fees. There are some who cannot earn because the absurd cost of child care in this country is higher than what they can hope to receive. People earning over £100k are not in that category and we need to focus the limited funds available to those who are.
But it doesn't make any sense that someone earning £130k would be better off in practice, in terms of take home pay etc, reducing their salary to £100k, which is what this situation effectively is. It is total madness.
I've been based in London with work recently and think that these people, earning £100k, are not even vaguely rich in this context, where a terraced house costs £700k. If you are earning £5k per month (after pensions) a large chunk of money would go servicing a mortgage, it is not like school/nursery fees are just a trivial expense, you can't actually afford to pay them.
The system is creating bizarre incentives, ie to work less, or to move out of London and the south east; this has caused a lot of problems within the public sector.
Indeed, people forget London stretches to Barking and Dagenham, Havering, Bexley, Orpington and Uxbridge it is not just Zone 1 and Zone 2, indeed some of the Outer suburbs of London even voted for Brexit!
Indeed! Uxbridge is so far from Central London that it’s citizens voted for Johnson. It’s part of the red wall!
Kensington, Cities of London and Westminster and Chelsea and Fulham also voted for Johnson in 2019, don't think they are red wall, in fact they even look down on the rest of the blue wall let alone the red wall!!!
If the purpose of removing the lifetime limit on tax free pension contributions is to encourage people to stay in work, it looks counterproductive to me.
You either have enough money to retire on or you don't. If you do, you won't be adding to your pension pot just so you can work for longer. You retire.
If you want to encourage people to work longer you should force them to build their pot slower, or maybe back-end it so they only get the biggest tax breaks at the end of their working life.
What percentage of people have gone over the limit? 1% 2%
Completely random, but there was a Supreme Court judgement released today in a case involving Ukraine, and irrespective of the issues at hand, and as I have thought vaguely before, but the Supreme Court website really is top notice. It's very easy to find cases, the press notices are thorough but concise on the issues and facts, the decision pages easily link to judgements and hearing videos. So many public institutions could learn a thing or two from them.
This one is serious, CS is potentially too wide ranging an outfit not to have knock on effects if it goes south. Apparently the pressure on the Swiss from external forces, presumably the US, to act is seriously heavy right now.
The only luck is that CS have been a well trailed, slow moving problem case so you'd hope for others having done their containment planning some time ago.
Can anyone with greater understanding of these issues tell me if the Central Banking swerve into quantitive tightening - high interest rates, central banks selling Government bonds etc. has had a contributing effect here?
Yes. Higher rates and falling government bond prices led to losses on SVB's bond portfolio, which were crystallised as it suffered an outflow of deposits and had to sell its assets. More broadly, higher rates lead to losses for investors who have bet that rates stay low (typically by taking on excessive levels of debt). Monetary tightening often leads to some financial blow-outs - indeed they are part and parcel of the tightening in financial conditions central banks want to see in order to slow the economy and tame inflation.
Inflation that they were spectacularly blasé about even when it was already well above target before Ukraine and they continued to pump money into the economy. To be followed swiftly by the current hack and slash approach when we're in the midst of an energy crisis. Our monetary policy is being conducted with all the finesse of an attack of dysentery.
If the purpose of removing the lifetime limit on tax free pension contributions is to encourage people to stay in work, it looks counterproductive to me.
You either have enough money to retire on or you don't. If you do, you won't be adding to your pension pot just so you can work for longer. You retire.
If you want to encourage people to work longer you should force them to build their pot slower, or maybe back-end it so they only get the biggest tax breaks at the end of their working life.
I think the point is that there's a very specific bottleneck with consultant doctors in their late 50's who have reached the pension cap and it does some specific odd things that make it pretty hard for them to justify continuing to work; @Foxy knows more about this I'm sure. And given the NHS backlog and the time it takes to get to consultant level, we really can't afford for them to retire. They hold, as the saying goes, all the cards (or perscription pads).
Whether this is the best solution, or a bit "you were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off" is another matter.
Smoking related diseases/cessation services cost the NHS £2.6bn/year.
Following todays budget, the treasury rakes in over £10bn/year in tobacco tax.
Whether you take the left wing position that smokers are victims of the tobacco industry and the government should ban the sale of tobacco products and/or have an obligation to use all the tax duties to provide effective cessation services - or the conservative/libertarian position that stresses free agency and that the government shouldn’t tax above the cost of providing health services to smokers (preferably no tax at all - and health would be privatised) - surely we can all agree that government using smokers - who cluster around the lowest socioeconomic groups - as a cash cow - is utterly immoral?
Paying, on average, £1666 in tax, per smoker, per year - and getting £433 per person, per year back in nhs/cessation services? Smokers are getting a shit deal.
The tories moral compass needs recalibrating.
(apologies for the possibly the longest sentence ever written, btw)
No, legal but very highly taxed and alarming photos on the packets feels a good policy balance for me. Sorry smokers!
Why should the missing £7.4bn go into the general treasury pot instead of being spent on nhs/cessation services?
These are some of the very poorest and most vulnerable members of our society. Hunt has chosen to tax them to the eyeballs to subsidise tax cuts for - already very wealthy - senior doctors.
How is that moral?
Hm. Did you include
(a) disability costs, to central and local government? (b) illnesses to close relatives (passive smoking, effect on unborn children, chioldhood asthma, etc.)?
a) will be huge.
Smokers die younger - as smokers are reliably informed on the packet - saving the taxpayer huge amounts of money.
They’re an easy target for the tories.
Go after the vulnerable. That is their ideology.
Sickening.
Sin taxes, sickening? How about not smoking.
Putting revolting medical photographs on packets is in extremely poor taste.
Whereas paying a fortune to slowly poison yourself is the height of good manners.
If the purpose of removing the lifetime limit on tax free pension contributions is to encourage people to stay in work, it looks counterproductive to me.
You either have enough money to retire on or you don't. If you do, you won't be adding to your pension pot just so you can work for longer. You retire.
If you want to encourage people to work longer you should force them to build their pot slower, or maybe back-end it so they only get the biggest tax breaks at the end of their working life.
A more radical way to keep people working is by creating enjoyable, well paid jobs with a high degree of professional satisfaction.
You could, of course, just make people eligible for UC not liable for Council Tax if they find work. I suspect that may increase the labour pool far more than pension changes But what do I know.
Again, all you end up doing is creating a disincentive for the highest earners to work full time. You can call them as many names as you like, think of them as unpatriotic, call them tax dodgers or whatever but they are rational. Someone earning £100k getting a £10k payrise gets to keep £3.8k or just over £300 quid a month, a marginal rate of 62%, if they have kids under 5 the marginal rate goes up over 80% and sometimes over 100%.
On the flip side, the same person can choose to work a 4 day week and drop down to £88k per year, they lose £500 quid a month in net salary but they gain 52 days off per year for it and 3 day weekends. The day rate for that additional day per week is just under £200, which for someone in that position just isn't worth it. I think the specific maths for someone without kids is a ~40% drop in the day rate for that additional day worked when looking at the marginal gain.
Faced with those numbers, the possibility of spending more time with the family, being able to take them to zoo, park, long weekends away with the wife and daughter vs grinding out an additional day so the government can claim over 60% of it.
No, it's completely idiotic to have these marginal rates and this was the budget to get rid of them, a proper Tory government would have done so already because it is a barrier to growth.
So some well-off people do less work, but if there is still work to be done maybe some people who are freed up by affordable childcare can now pursue that work? It's certain more complex than just considering the downside for the few, the upside for the many will likely be much larger.
That's not how it works, almost all of the time people working these roles are highly skilled and if they don't work it just doesn't get done the NHS waiting list is the best example of this, or consultancies who take on fewer clients because they have fewer available workdays and collectively there's just less work being done. It is one of the reasons we have such poor productivity.
The demand for skilled IT staff is insane. A contractor we used to use, whose work I'm still correcting, was recruited even after the interviewer googled the question he'd just asked and could read the exact answer the contractor was giving on the call. They weren't great, but they were better than nothing, and I've come across worse.
Smoking related diseases/cessation services cost the NHS £2.6bn/year.
Following todays budget, the treasury rakes in over £10bn/year in tobacco tax.
Whether you take the left wing position that smokers are victims of the tobacco industry and the government should ban the sale of tobacco products and/or have an obligation to use all the tax duties to provide effective cessation services - or the conservative/libertarian position that stresses free agency and that the government shouldn’t tax above the cost of providing health services to smokers (preferably no tax at all - and health would be privatised) - surely we can all agree that government using smokers - who cluster around the lowest socioeconomic groups - as a cash cow - is utterly immoral?
Paying, on average, £1666 in tax, per smoker, per year - and getting £433 per person, per year back in nhs/cessation services? Smokers are getting a shit deal.
The tories moral compass needs recalibrating.
(apologies for the possibly the longest sentence ever written, btw)
No, legal but very highly taxed and alarming photos on the packets feels a good policy balance for me. Sorry smokers!
Why should the missing £7.4bn go into the general treasury pot instead of being spent on nhs/cessation services?
These are some of the very poorest and most vulnerable members of our society. Hunt has chosen to tax them to the eyeballs to subsidise tax cuts for - already very wealthy - senior doctors.
How is that moral?
Hm. Did you include
(a) disability costs, to central and local government? (b) illnesses to close relatives (passive smoking, effect on unborn children, chioldhood asthma, etc.)?
a) will be huge.
Smokers die younger - as smokers are reliably informed on the packet - saving the taxpayer huge amounts of money.
They’re an easy target for the tories.
Go after the vulnerable. That is their ideology.
Sickening.
Sin taxes, sickening? How about not smoking.
Putting revolting medical photographs on packets is in extremely poor taste.
Smoking related diseases/cessation services cost the NHS £2.6bn/year.
Following todays budget, the treasury rakes in over £10bn/year in tobacco tax.
Whether you take the left wing position that smokers are victims of the tobacco industry and the government should ban the sale of tobacco products and/or have an obligation to use all the tax duties to provide effective cessation services - or the conservative/libertarian position that stresses free agency and that the government shouldn’t tax above the cost of providing health services to smokers (preferably no tax at all - and health would be privatised) - surely we can all agree that government using smokers - who cluster around the lowest socioeconomic groups - as a cash cow - is utterly immoral?
Paying, on average, £1666 in tax, per smoker, per year - and getting £433 per person, per year back in nhs/cessation services? Smokers are getting a shit deal.
The tories moral compass needs recalibrating.
(apologies for the possibly the longest sentence ever written, btw)
No, legal but very highly taxed and alarming photos on the packets feels a good policy balance for me. Sorry smokers!
Why should the missing £7.4bn go into the general treasury pot instead of being spent on nhs/cessation services?
These are some of the very poorest and most vulnerable members of our society. Hunt has chosen to tax them to the eyeballs to subsidise tax cuts for - already very wealthy - senior doctors.
How is that moral?
Hm. Did you include
(a) disability costs, to central and local government? (b) illnesses to close relatives (passive smoking, effect on unborn children, chioldhood asthma, etc.)?
a) will be huge.
Smokers die younger - as smokers are reliably informed on the packet - saving the taxpayer huge amounts of money.
They’re an easy target for the tories.
Go after the vulnerable. That is their ideology.
Sickening.
Sin taxes, sickening? How about not smoking.
Putting revolting medical photographs on packets is in extremely poor taste.
Whereas paying a fortune to slowly poison yourself is the height of good manners.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. 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. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
That's completely beside the point: the tax and benefits system should not have cliffs where the marginal tax rate shoots up well above 100%.
We should be encouraging Casino to work, and to generate value and tax revenues.
The impact of this move is to discourage a large portion of the population from working.
Madness.
... a large portion ... guffaws.
How many people are affected? A very tiny portion of the UK earn over 100k per annum, and they only need childcare for a very small portion of their working life.
How many people are affected by cliff edges and tax and benefits rates shooting upto around 100%?
Many millions of people actually.
For starters anyone on UC paying IC and NI is already at 70% marginal tax rate even before anything else. These cliff edges exist throughout our NYC skyline tax code and it is damaging.
Of course, cliff edges are bad. The question is why pb.com is fixated on this cliff edge.
It is weird. The purpose of this measure is to avoid child poverty, which has sadly grown under this government, where parents can't afford to look after their children properly.
No-one earning £100 000 a year is remotely in this bucket.
A classic example of several things being true at once.
The govt should focus more on helping avoid child poverty. People on £100k a year+ should pay more tax. The marginal rate of people earning around £100k-130k should not be negative.
None of those three statements should be controversial imo. Not sure this particular budget does enough on any of them.
Smoking related diseases/cessation services cost the NHS £2.6bn/year.
Following todays budget, the treasury rakes in over £10bn/year in tobacco tax.
Whether you take the left wing position that smokers are victims of the tobacco industry and the government should ban the sale of tobacco products and/or have an obligation to use all the tax duties to provide effective cessation services - or the conservative/libertarian position that stresses free agency and that the government shouldn’t tax above the cost of providing health services to smokers (preferably no tax at all - and health would be privatised) - surely we can all agree that government using smokers - who cluster around the lowest socioeconomic groups - as a cash cow - is utterly immoral?
Paying, on average, £1666 in tax, per smoker, per year - and getting £433 per person, per year back in nhs/cessation services? Smokers are getting a shit deal.
The tories moral compass needs recalibrating.
(apologies for the possibly the longest sentence ever written, btw)
No, legal but very highly taxed and alarming photos on the packets feels a good policy balance for me. Sorry smokers!
Why should the missing £7.4bn go into the general treasury pot instead of being spent on nhs/cessation services?
These are some of the very poorest and most vulnerable members of our society. Hunt has chosen to tax them to the eyeballs to subsidise tax cuts for - already very wealthy - senior doctors.
How is that moral?
Hm. Did you include
(a) disability costs, to central and local government? (b) illnesses to close relatives (passive smoking, effect on unborn children, chioldhood asthma, etc.)?
a) will be huge.
Smokers die younger - as smokers are reliably informed on the packet - saving the taxpayer huge amounts of money.
They’re an easy target for the tories.
Go after the vulnerable. That is their ideology.
Sickening.
Sin taxes, sickening? How about not smoking.
Putting revolting medical photographs on packets is in extremely poor taste.
Again, all you end up doing is creating a disincentive for the highest earners to work full time. You can call them as many names as you like, think of them as unpatriotic, call them tax dodgers or whatever but they are rational. Someone earning £100k getting a £10k payrise gets to keep £3.8k or just over £300 quid a month, a marginal rate of 62%, if they have kids under 5 the marginal rate goes up over 80% and sometimes over 100%.
On the flip side, the same person can choose to work a 4 day week and drop down to £88k per year, they lose £500 quid a month in net salary but they gain 52 days off per year for it and 3 day weekends. The day rate for that additional day per week is just under £200, which for someone in that position just isn't worth it. I think the specific maths for someone without kids is a ~40% drop in the day rate for that additional day worked when looking at the marginal gain.
Faced with those numbers, the possibility of spending more time with the family, being able to take them to zoo, park, long weekends away with the wife and daughter vs grinding out an additional day so the government can claim over 60% of it.
No, it's completely idiotic to have these marginal rates and this was the budget to get rid of them, a proper Tory government would have done so already because it is a barrier to growth.
So some well-off people do less work, but if there is still work to be done maybe some people who are freed up by affordable childcare can now pursue that work? It's certain more complex than just considering the downside for the few, the upside for the many will likely be much larger.
That's not how it works, almost all of the time people working these roles are highly skilled and if they don't work it just doesn't get done the NHS waiting list is the best example of this, or consultancies who take on fewer clients because they have fewer available workdays and collectively there's just less work being done. It is one of the reasons we have such poor productivity.
The demand for skilled IT staff is insane. A contractor we used to use, whose work I'm still correcting, was recruited even after the interviewer googled the question he'd just asked and could read the exact answer the contractor was giving on the call. They weren't great, but they were better than nothing, and I've come across worse.
Are there a lot of training opportunities for people to get IT skills?
Again, all you end up doing is creating a disincentive for the highest earners to work full time. You can call them as many names as you like, think of them as unpatriotic, call them tax dodgers or whatever but they are rational. Someone earning £100k getting a £10k payrise gets to keep £3.8k or just over £300 quid a month, a marginal rate of 62%, if they have kids under 5 the marginal rate goes up over 80% and sometimes over 100%.
On the flip side, the same person can choose to work a 4 day week and drop down to £88k per year, they lose £500 quid a month in net salary but they gain 52 days off per year for it and 3 day weekends. The day rate for that additional day per week is just under £200, which for someone in that position just isn't worth it. I think the specific maths for someone without kids is a ~40% drop in the day rate for that additional day worked when looking at the marginal gain.
Faced with those numbers, the possibility of spending more time with the family, being able to take them to zoo, park, long weekends away with the wife and daughter vs grinding out an additional day so the government can claim over 60% of it.
No, it's completely idiotic to have these marginal rates and this was the budget to get rid of them, a proper Tory government would have done so already because it is a barrier to growth.
So some well-off people do less work, but if there is still work to be done maybe some people who are freed up by affordable childcare can now pursue that work? It's certain more complex than just considering the downside for the few, the upside for the many will likely be much larger.
That's not how it works, almost all of the time people working these roles are highly skilled and if they don't work it just doesn't get done the NHS waiting list is the bes example of this, or consultancies who take on fewer clients because they have fewer available workdays and collectively there's just less work being done. It is one of the reasons we have such poor productivity.
This is just rubbish. Very, very, very people are that indispensible.
Surgeons, medical consultants, some kinds of engineers, some kinds of research scientists, high level data scientists or ML/AI engineers. All of these roles are in extremely high demand and will be in these pay brackets with many, many of them working 4 day weeks with the companies (or NHS) just having lower output.
I'm a research scientist, you could call me a data scientist, doing some work in ML/AI. I'm a professor. I'm a long way off earning £100k. There are some professors who do earn that, although they've generally got very grown up children!
I agree that marginal rates can be an issue, I'm not supporting this budget, but I think you may have an erroneous view of the high earners with young children affected by this issue.
One of the three people I agreed to go down to a 4 day week was our ML engineer, he was due to go above the £100k mark and decided he wanted to spend more time with his wife who's on maternity leave with their kid. It's why I included it in the list!
There will be differences between the public sector and private sector! Perhaps, if you need some more manpower, you can hire one of my graduating students.
I had a look around for some actual data on this. Who are the people earning £100-130k? I found a list of highest paying jobs (1 lawyer, 2 CEO, 3 actuary, 4 marketing director, 5 managing director), but that doesn't tell us how many there are of those different roles. Maybe I am being snobbish, but I'm not convinced that the country's productivity will be too damaged if some marketing directors drop down to 4-day weeks.
I used to work in a public sector data scientist role, but I've since moved to the private sector and with barely five years consultancy experience under my belt I can see a lot of my colleagues who are likely to be paid close to £100k, unless I've been extraordinarily good at bargaining my pay up.
You simply have no idea what the going rate is for IT staff who can actually get stuff done.
If the purpose of removing the lifetime limit on tax free pension contributions is to encourage people to stay in work, it looks counterproductive to me.
You either have enough money to retire on or you don't. If you do, you won't be adding to your pension pot just so you can work for longer. You retire.
If you want to encourage people to work longer you should force them to build their pot slower, or maybe back-end it so they only get the biggest tax breaks at the end of their working life.
I think the point is that there's a very specific bottleneck with consultant doctors in their late 50's who have reached the pension cap and it does some specific odd things that make it pretty hard for them to justify continuing to work; @Foxy knows more about this I'm sure. And given the NHS backlog and the time it takes to get to consultant level, we really can't afford for them to retire. They hold, as the saying goes, all the cards (or perscription pads).
Whether this is the best solution, or a bit "you were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off" is another matter.
It is more the Annual Allowance and the taper that creates problems for my colleagues, rather than the LTA. Quite a lot have reduced sessions as a result.
Interesting conversations with a few colleagues today, including an Orthopod who had spent the day working as a junior intern (F2). He had discharged 3 patients by 9 0'clock and was flavour of the month with management and nurses, as he had the experience and knowledge to be able to do so. In a similar vein, the queue in our Casualty has been shorter than usual, with fewer breaching target times than most weeks. Once again because senior experienced clinicians were the front line.
So we see how productivity in the NHS is dependent on the skills of the workforce. Increase these and productivity magically gets better. Not too surprising as that is one of the usual ways to increase productivity in other industries.
The present staffing of these roles is not sustainable beyond strike days, but does show what is possible if we invest in staff training, and create ways to improve retention.
Smoking related diseases/cessation services cost the NHS £2.6bn/year.
Following todays budget, the treasury rakes in over £10bn/year in tobacco tax.
Whether you take the left wing position that smokers are victims of the tobacco industry and the government should ban the sale of tobacco products and/or have an obligation to use all the tax duties to provide effective cessation services - or the conservative/libertarian position that stresses free agency and that the government shouldn’t tax above the cost of providing health services to smokers (preferably no tax at all - and health would be privatised) - surely we can all agree that government using smokers - who cluster around the lowest socioeconomic groups - as a cash cow - is utterly immoral?
Paying, on average, £1666 in tax, per smoker, per year - and getting £433 per person, per year back in nhs/cessation services? Smokers are getting a shit deal.
The tories moral compass needs recalibrating.
(apologies for the possibly the longest sentence ever written, btw)
No, legal but very highly taxed and alarming photos on the packets feels a good policy balance for me. Sorry smokers!
Why should the missing £7.4bn go into the general treasury pot instead of being spent on nhs/cessation services?
These are some of the very poorest and most vulnerable members of our society. Hunt has chosen to tax them to the eyeballs to subsidise tax cuts for - already very wealthy - senior doctors.
How is that moral?
Hm. Did you include
(a) disability costs, to central and local government? (b) illnesses to close relatives (passive smoking, effect on unborn children, chioldhood asthma, etc.)?
a) will be huge.
Smokers die younger - as smokers are reliably informed on the packet - saving the taxpayer huge amounts of money.
They’re an easy target for the tories.
Go after the vulnerable. That is their ideology.
Sickening.
Sin taxes, sickening? How about not smoking.
Putting revolting medical photographs on packets is in extremely poor taste.
Why?
Because unless someone has a particular interest, they should be between the person concerned and their doctor. I don't think they help the cigarette smokers who see them - if anything they will just be totally demoralised and add depression and anxiety to smoking. It is all part and parcel of the coarsening of society.
If the purpose of removing the lifetime limit on tax free pension contributions is to encourage people to stay in work, it looks counterproductive to me.
You either have enough money to retire on or you don't. If you do, you won't be adding to your pension pot just so you can work for longer. You retire.
If you want to encourage people to work longer you should force them to build their pot slower, or maybe back-end it so they only get the biggest tax breaks at the end of their working life.
What percentage of people have gone over the limit? 1% 2%
Point is if people are retiring when they hit the old limit of £1.07 million it's because they think it's enough to retire on.
Smoking related diseases/cessation services cost the NHS £2.6bn/year.
Following todays budget, the treasury rakes in over £10bn/year in tobacco tax.
Whether you take the left wing position that smokers are victims of the tobacco industry and the government should ban the sale of tobacco products and/or have an obligation to use all the tax duties to provide effective cessation services - or the conservative/libertarian position that stresses free agency and that the government shouldn’t tax above the cost of providing health services to smokers (preferably no tax at all - and health would be privatised) - surely we can all agree that government using smokers - who cluster around the lowest socioeconomic groups - as a cash cow - is utterly immoral?
Paying, on average, £1666 in tax, per smoker, per year - and getting £433 per person, per year back in nhs/cessation services? Smokers are getting a shit deal.
The tories moral compass needs recalibrating.
(apologies for the possibly the longest sentence ever written, btw)
No, legal but very highly taxed and alarming photos on the packets feels a good policy balance for me. Sorry smokers!
Why should the missing £7.4bn go into the general treasury pot instead of being spent on nhs/cessation services?
These are some of the very poorest and most vulnerable members of our society. Hunt has chosen to tax them to the eyeballs to subsidise tax cuts for - already very wealthy - senior doctors.
How is that moral?
Hm. Did you include
(a) disability costs, to central and local government? (b) illnesses to close relatives (passive smoking, effect on unborn children, chioldhood asthma, etc.)?
a) will be huge.
Smokers die younger - as smokers are reliably informed on the packet - saving the taxpayer huge amounts of money.
They’re an easy target for the tories.
Go after the vulnerable. That is their ideology.
Sickening.
Sin taxes, sickening? How about not smoking.
Putting revolting medical photographs on packets is in extremely poor taste.
"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
It is completely perverse to accept any decline in living standards. It is absolutely being inflicted deliberately by an ideologically-crazed minority peddling climate alarmism, and we are badly in need of a counter-narrative.
There are dozens of reasons for accepting declining living standards. We all have our hobbyhorses. I would, for example, accept a future where I was poorer - let's say one in which I need to work for another 12 months before retirement to retire on the same level of comfort - in return for a UK less trewn with graffiti and litter and with more trains. Others will have different priorities for what the state might do which might not equal 'living standards', or at least easily measurable ones.
If for example we suddenly had no smartphones or streaming tv would people be less happy. Probably not. Technology has made a small number of uber nerds rich but as time goes on its contribution to human happiness becomes less and less. Would i want to live without a refrigarator..hell no. Could i live without streaming tv. Of course.
That was, I'm sure, the argument of Communists in eastern Europe.
If people in the UK didn't have smartphones, and people in France did, I think people would notice.
Thats the point. In eastern europe they did have unreliable cars and lacked basic consumer goods. that hasnt been true in the west since at least the 60s or 70s. And im talking of a situation where no country has a smartphone not one does one doesnt. Do you think smartphones have been major beneficiaries for humanity because i could certainly live without them.
Every generation can look back at life 25 years ago and say "hey, life was pretty good back then because we had [y] and do we really need new fangled [x]".
So, people in the 1930s could have said "Life in the 1910s was pretty good; I mean we didn't have cars yet, with all that nasty pollution and the risk of getting knocked over. And who actually needs to go to the cinema anyway?"
And people in the 1950s could say "Life in the 1930s was pretty good. They already the cinema and cars, which is all you really need to lead a modern life. Do we really need jetplanes? And you used to be able to send your washing out for almost nothing. Is it really an improvement to have an unreliable and expensive machine and to do it yourself?"
Then people in the 1970s would say "Life in the 1950s was great. Already you innovations like washing machines and fridges than make home care simple. And the railway system was great - you could get anywhere in the UK cheaply. All there is today is colour TV and ridiculously expensive VCRs and the shows are exactly the same!"
Etcetera. Etcetera.
If we didn't advance technologically and France did. People would notice. And they would be spitting mad.
The difference is the tech elite actually shield their kids from tablets and smartphones. They know. The point is as im sure you will understand the marginal benefit of each wave of technological development is less and less and the associated costs more and more negative so that at some point the costs outweigh the benefits. We are arguably close to this point now which is why the dreams of silicon valley uber nerds will remain dreams,
Absurd assertions without evidence.
And as a member of the tech elite, I can assure you that I teach my kids how to use tech, I don't shield them from it.
ok an example. Social media like facebook and twitter. Have they contributed to the sum of human happiness in the same way as the invention of the automobile or refrigarator. I think not.
You honestly think that Facebook and Twitter are even in the top 10,000 innovations of this century?
Here's a question: has that modern (Communist and post-Communist) China had made no significant technological advancements/innovations that have significantly changed the world? Computers, the Internet, GNSS/GPS, many medical advances and drugs, all came from the west.
China have been very good at copying/productionising, but what major things have they invented? Widening it out, what major scientific breakthroughs have they made?
I'm not saying there are not any; I just can't immediately think of any.
5g? Artemisin therapy for malaria a huge life saver.
Josias has a point though. Number of Nobel prizes won by Chinese scientists = 6; number won by by the UK scientists >100.
Of course, cultural bias, historic under development etc. but the UK has won 15 science Nobel prizes in the last 10 years compared to China's one (Tu Youyou for Artemisin therapy, as it happens).
I raised this question of China's strange lack of technology innovation on PB last year and was accused of being racist.
Interesting interview with Michael Crick on Starmer and the NEC's purging of leftwingers and trade union linked candidates from selection for Labour for winnable seats
Smoking related diseases/cessation services cost the NHS £2.6bn/year.
Following todays budget, the treasury rakes in over £10bn/year in tobacco tax.
Whether you take the left wing position that smokers are victims of the tobacco industry and the government should ban the sale of tobacco products and/or have an obligation to use all the tax duties to provide effective cessation services - or the conservative/libertarian position that stresses free agency and that the government shouldn’t tax above the cost of providing health services to smokers (preferably no tax at all - and health would be privatised) - surely we can all agree that government using smokers - who cluster around the lowest socioeconomic groups - as a cash cow - is utterly immoral?
Paying, on average, £1666 in tax, per smoker, per year - and getting £433 per person, per year back in nhs/cessation services? Smokers are getting a shit deal.
The tories moral compass needs recalibrating.
(apologies for the possibly the longest sentence ever written, btw)
No, legal but very highly taxed and alarming photos on the packets feels a good policy balance for me. Sorry smokers!
Why should the missing £7.4bn go into the general treasury pot instead of being spent on nhs/cessation services?
These are some of the very poorest and most vulnerable members of our society. Hunt has chosen to tax them to the eyeballs to subsidise tax cuts for - already very wealthy - senior doctors.
How is that moral?
Hm. Did you include
(a) disability costs, to central and local government? (b) illnesses to close relatives (passive smoking, effect on unborn children, chioldhood asthma, etc.)?
a) will be huge.
Smokers die younger - as smokers are reliably informed on the packet - saving the taxpayer huge amounts of money.
They’re an easy target for the tories.
Go after the vulnerable. That is their ideology.
Sickening.
Sin taxes, sickening? How about not smoking.
Putting revolting medical photographs on packets is in extremely poor taste.
Why?
Because unless someone has a particular interest, they should be between the person concerned and their doctor. I don't think they help the cigarette smokers who see them - if anything they will just be totally demoralised and add depression and anxiety to smoking. It is all part and parcel of the coarsening of society.
There is evidence that fear based campaigns work, albeit with other consequences:
"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
It is completely perverse to accept any decline in living standards. It is absolutely being inflicted deliberately by an ideologically-crazed minority peddling climate alarmism, and we are badly in need of a counter-narrative.
There are dozens of reasons for accepting declining living standards. We all have our hobbyhorses. I would, for example, accept a future where I was poorer - let's say one in which I need to work for another 12 months before retirement to retire on the same level of comfort - in return for a UK less trewn with graffiti and litter and with more trains. Others will have different priorities for what the state might do which might not equal 'living standards', or at least easily measurable ones.
If for example we suddenly had no smartphones or streaming tv would people be less happy. Probably not. Technology has made a small number of uber nerds rich but as time goes on its contribution to human happiness becomes less and less. Would i want to live without a refrigarator..hell no. Could i live without streaming tv. Of course.
That was, I'm sure, the argument of Communists in eastern Europe.
If people in the UK didn't have smartphones, and people in France did, I think people would notice.
Thats the point. In eastern europe they did have unreliable cars and lacked basic consumer goods. that hasnt been true in the west since at least the 60s or 70s. And im talking of a situation where no country has a smartphone not one does one doesnt. Do you think smartphones have been major beneficiaries for humanity because i could certainly live without them.
Every generation can look back at life 25 years ago and say "hey, life was pretty good back then because we had [y] and do we really need new fangled [x]".
So, people in the 1930s could have said "Life in the 1910s was pretty good; I mean we didn't have cars yet, with all that nasty pollution and the risk of getting knocked over. And who actually needs to go to the cinema anyway?"
And people in the 1950s could say "Life in the 1930s was pretty good. They already the cinema and cars, which is all you really need to lead a modern life. Do we really need jetplanes? And you used to be able to send your washing out for almost nothing. Is it really an improvement to have an unreliable and expensive machine and to do it yourself?"
Then people in the 1970s would say "Life in the 1950s was great. Already you innovations like washing machines and fridges than make home care simple. And the railway system was great - you could get anywhere in the UK cheaply. All there is today is colour TV and ridiculously expensive VCRs and the shows are exactly the same!"
Etcetera. Etcetera.
If we didn't advance technologically and France did. People would notice. And they would be spitting mad.
The difference is the tech elite actually shield their kids from tablets and smartphones. They know. The point is as im sure you will understand the marginal benefit of each wave of technological development is less and less and the associated costs more and more negative so that at some point the costs outweigh the benefits. We are arguably close to this point now which is why the dreams of silicon valley uber nerds will remain dreams,
Absurd assertions without evidence.
And as a member of the tech elite, I can assure you that I teach my kids how to use tech, I don't shield them from it.
ok an example. Social media like facebook and twitter. Have they contributed to the sum of human happiness in the same way as the invention of the automobile or refrigarator. I think not.
You honestly think that Facebook and Twitter are even in the top 10,000 innovations of this century?
Here's a question: has that modern (Communist and post-Communist) China had made no significant technological advancements/innovations that have significantly changed the world? Computers, the Internet, GNSS/GPS, many medical advances and drugs, all came from the west.
China have been very good at copying/productionising, but what major things have they invented? Widening it out, what major scientific breakthroughs have they made?
I'm not saying there are not any; I just can't immediately think of any.
5g? Artemisin therapy for malaria a huge life saver.
Josias has a point though. Number of Nobel prizes won by Chinese scientists = 6; number won by by the UK scientists >100.
Of course, cultural bias, historic under development etc. but the UK has won 15 science Nobel prizes in the last 10 years compared to China's one (Tu Youyou for Artemisin therapy, as it happens).
I raised this question of China's strange lack of technology innovation on PB last year and was accused of being racist.
Fibre optic technology.
Well, of course, the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics was "UK" -- Sir Charles Kao Kuen of Standard Telecommunication Laboratories, Harlow, UK. ... but he was born in Shanghai and bought up in Hong Kong.
The truth is the best Chinese scientists are not in China -- that is why China seemingly has won so few Nobels.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. 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. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
I don't want to subsidise them out of some big love of higher earners (I am not one) but because my (admittedly untested) belief is that the country will be better off if we can get higher earners earning (and paying tax). I would expect the benefit to cost ratio of paying for childcare for higher earners to be greater than 1 (indeed, it probably has a higher BCR than for medium earners).
At over £100k a year they can afford child care out of their taxed income. Just as I did when paying private school fees. There are some who cannot earn because the absurd cost of child care in this country is higher than what they can hope to receive. People earning over £100k are not in that category and we need to focus the limited funds available to those who are.
But it doesn't make any sense that someone earning £130k would be better off in practice, in terms of take home pay etc, reducing their salary to £100k, which is what this situation effectively is. It is total madness.
I've been based in London with work recently and think that these people, earning £100k, are not even vaguely rich in this context, where a terraced house costs £700k. If you are earning £5k per month (after pensions) a large chunk of money would go servicing a mortgage, it is not like school/nursery fees are just a trivial expense, you can't actually afford to pay them.
The system is creating bizarre incentives, ie to work less, or to move out of London and the south east; this has caused a lot of problems within the public sector.
Indeed, people forget London stretches to Barking and Dagenham, Havering, Bexley, Orpington and Uxbridge it is not just Zone 1 and Zone 2, indeed some of the Outer suburbs of London even voted for Brexit!
I think what you're describing is Greater London.
London itself, that great teeming metropolis, filled with the greatest brains of their generation, stretches from the Thames in the South, to Hampstead in the North, and from Richmond in the West to Tower Bridge in the East.
I'm reading this as I cross the river heading south into civilisation.
South of the river there be barbarians, I even hear some of them voted for Brexit down there!!
This one is serious, CS is potentially too wide ranging an outfit not to have knock on effects if it goes south. Apparently the pressure on the Swiss from external forces, presumably the US, to act is seriously heavy right now.
The only luck is that CS have been a well trailed, slow moving problem case so you'd hope for others having done their containment planning some time ago.
It doesn't seem to have made the news headlines yet in the UK.
This one is serious, CS is potentially too wide ranging an outfit not to have knock on effects if it goes south. Apparently the pressure on the Swiss from external forces, presumably the US, to act is seriously heavy right now.
The only luck is that CS have been a well trailed, slow moving problem case so you'd hope for others having done their containment planning some time ago.
It doesn't seem to have made the news headlines yet in the UK.
Last thing the govt wants is queues of people outside barclays tomorrow morning.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. 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. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
I don't want to subsidise them out of some big love of higher earners (I am not one) but because my (admittedly untested) belief is that the country will be better off if we can get higher earners earning (and paying tax). I would expect the benefit to cost ratio of paying for childcare for higher earners to be greater than 1 (indeed, it probably has a higher BCR than for medium earners).
At over £100k a year they can afford child care out of their taxed income. Just as I did when paying private school fees. There are some who cannot earn because the absurd cost of child care in this country is higher than what they can hope to receive. People earning over £100k are not in that category and we need to focus the limited funds available to those who are.
Again, all you end up doing is creating a disincentive for the highest earners to work full time. You can call them as many names as you like, think of them as unpatriotic, call them tax dodgers or whatever but they are rational. Someone earning £100k getting a £10k payrise gets to keep £3.8k or just over £300 quid a month, a marginal rate of 62%, if they have kids under 5 the marginal rate goes up over 80% and sometimes over 100%.
On the flip side, the same person can choose to work a 4 day week and drop down to £88k per year, they lose £500 quid a month in net salary but they gain 52 days off per year for it and 3 day weekends. The day rate for that additional day per week is just under £200, which for someone in that position just isn't worth it. I think the specific maths for someone without kids is a ~40% drop in the day rate for that additional day worked when looking at the marginal gain.
Faced with those numbers, the possibility of spending more time with the family, being able to take them to zoo, park, long weekends away with the wife and daughter vs grinding out an additional day so the government can claim over 60% of it.
No, it's completely idiotic to have these marginal rates and this was the budget to get rid of them, a proper Tory government would have done so already because it is a barrier to growth.
Sorry but this running theme through this thread and others is just bollocks of the highest order. Someone on a £100k has one vague inconvenience? I earn £70k and I know I don’t get to complain about it EVER.
Cry me a f*cking river! They can reduce their hours if they like, and give up on ever being on £200k, or back here on planet Earth they’ll suck it up for a bit and be quiet.
If Nick's post above is right (I assume it is), Sunak has managed to make an already absurd cliff edge at £100k even worse – how?
There is now an even stronger direct perverse incentive to earn less.
Bonkers.
We discussed this at 7am this morning.
Pick the worst possible way to implement things and they’ve done so.
The tax rate at £100,000 if you have children is now something like 650,000% or 1,300,000% assuming £6,500 in child care costs (probably way too low). The £13,000 is if you have 2 children at nursery age.
The problem is more that the Government wants people to work full time and yet I’m more than happy to live off 5 months of income a year and take the other 7 months off.
If Nick's post above is right (I assume it is), Sunak has managed to make an already absurd cliff edge at £100k even worse – how?
There is now an even stronger direct perverse incentive to earn less.
Bonkers.
We discussed this at 7am this morning.
Pick the worst possible way to implement things and they’ve done so.
The tax rate at £100,000 if you have children is now something like 650,000% or 1,300,000% assuming £6,500 in child care costs (probably way too low). The £13,000 is if you have 2 children at nursery age.
But surely with one person earning 100 grand the wife can afford to stay at home and look after the kids. Sympathy for this privileged group will be limited.
Again, all you end up doing is creating a disincentive for the highest earners to work full time. You can call them as many names as you like, think of them as unpatriotic, call them tax dodgers or whatever but they are rational. Someone earning £100k getting a £10k payrise gets to keep £3.8k or just over £300 quid a month, a marginal rate of 62%, if they have kids under 5 the marginal rate goes up over 80% and sometimes over 100%.
On the flip side, the same person can choose to work a 4 day week and drop down to £88k per year, they lose £500 quid a month in net salary but they gain 52 days off per year for it and 3 day weekends. The day rate for that additional day per week is just under £200, which for someone in that position just isn't worth it. I think the specific maths for someone without kids is a ~40% drop in the day rate for that additional day worked when looking at the marginal gain.
Faced with those numbers, the possibility of spending more time with the family, being able to take them to zoo, park, long weekends away with the wife and daughter vs grinding out an additional day so the government can claim over 60% of it.
No, it's completely idiotic to have these marginal rates and this was the budget to get rid of them, a proper Tory government would have done so already because it is a barrier to growth.
So some well-off people do less work, but if there is still work to be done maybe some people who are freed up by affordable childcare can now pursue that work? It's certain more complex than just considering the downside for the few, the upside for the many will likely be much larger.
That's not how it works, almost all of the time people working these roles are highly skilled and if they don't work it just doesn't get done the NHS waiting list is the bes example of this, or consultancies who take on fewer clients because they have fewer available workdays and collectively there's just less work being done. It is one of the reasons we have such poor productivity.
This is just rubbish. Very, very, very people are that indispensible.
Surgeons, medical consultants, some kinds of engineers, some kinds of research scientists, high level data scientists or ML/AI engineers. All of these roles are in extremely high demand and will be in these pay brackets with many, many of them working 4 day weeks with the companies (or NHS) just having lower output.
I'm a research scientist, you could call me a data scientist, doing some work in ML/AI. I'm a professor. I'm a long way off earning £100k. There are some professors who do earn that, although they've generally got very grown up children!
I agree that marginal rates can be an issue, I'm not supporting this budget, but I think you may have an erroneous view of the high earners with young children affected by this issue.
One of the three people I agreed to go down to a 4 day week was our ML engineer, he was due to go above the £100k mark and decided he wanted to spend more time with his wife who's on maternity leave with their kid. It's why I included it in the list!
There will be differences between the public sector and private sector! Perhaps, if you need some more manpower, you can hire one of my graduating students.
I had a look around for some actual data on this. Who are the people earning £100-130k? I found a list of highest paying jobs (1 lawyer, 2 CEO, 3 actuary, 4 marketing director, 5 managing director), but that doesn't tell us how many there are of those different roles. Maybe I am being snobbish, but I'm not convinced that the country's productivity will be too damaged if some marketing directors drop down to 4-day weeks.
I used to work in a public sector data scientist role, but I've since moved to the private sector and with barely five years consultancy experience under my belt I can see a lot of my colleagues who are likely to be paid close to £100k, unless I've been extraordinarily good at bargaining my pay up.
You simply have no idea what the going rate is for IT staff who can actually get stuff done.
The problem is more that the Government wants people to work full time and yet I’m more than happy to live off 5 months of income a year and take the other 7 months off.
To be honest after the covid lockdowns i think many people think the govt can go scr.w themselves.
If the purpose of removing the lifetime limit on tax free pension contributions is to encourage people to stay in work, it looks counterproductive to me.
You either have enough money to retire on or you don't. If you do, you won't be adding to your pension pot just so you can work for longer. You retire.
If you want to encourage people to work longer you should force them to build their pot slower, or maybe back-end it so they only get the biggest tax breaks at the end of their working life.
That’s simply not true - my dad still works aged 75 - albeit for free, as one of the Uk experts on maritime standards.
Likewise it’s easy to find experts and others who keep on doing paid work because they enjoy it and continue to find it rewarding.
I also expect I’ll do the same because I enjoy solving issues way more than acting as a volunteer room guide in a local museum
If the purpose of removing the lifetime limit on tax free pension contributions is to encourage people to stay in work, it looks counterproductive to me.
You either have enough money to retire on or you don't. If you do, you won't be adding to your pension pot just so you can work for longer. You retire.
If you want to encourage people to work longer you should force them to build their pot slower, or maybe back-end it so they only get the biggest tax breaks at the end of their working life.
I think the point is that there's a very specific bottleneck with consultant doctors in their late 50's who have reached the pension cap and it does some specific odd things that make it pretty hard for them to justify continuing to work; @Foxy knows more about this I'm sure. And given the NHS backlog and the time it takes to get to consultant level, we really can't afford for them to retire. They hold, as the saying goes, all the cards (or perscription pads).
Whether this is the best solution, or a bit "you were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off" is another matter.
The buggers get paid too much. That's the problem. Pay them less and they wouldn't be able to afford to go part time at 50 and retire before they reach 60.
If Nick's post above is right (I assume it is), Sunak has managed to make an already absurd cliff edge at £100k even worse – how?
There is now an even stronger direct perverse incentive to earn less.
Bonkers.
We discussed this at 7am this morning.
Pick the worst possible way to implement things and they’ve done so.
The tax rate at £100,000 if you have children is now something like 650,000% or 1,300,000% assuming £6,500 in child care costs (probably way too low). The £13,000 is if you have 2 children at nursery age.
But surely with one person earning 100 grand the wife can afford to stay at home and look after the kids. Sympathy for this privileged group will be limited.
If 1 person is earning £100k it’s likely that their partner is also well paid and in a career where x years off is career suicide.
You could, of course, just make people eligible for UC not liable for Council Tax if they find work. I suspect that may increase the labour pool far more than pension changes But what do I know.
You get 90% of your CT paid anyway if you are on UC and no other income*.
(*It's a bit more complex than that but that's the net effect for most.)
If Nick's post above is right (I assume it is), Sunak has managed to make an already absurd cliff edge at £100k even worse – how?
There is now an even stronger direct perverse incentive to earn less.
Bonkers.
We discussed this at 7am this morning.
Pick the worst possible way to implement things and they’ve done so.
The tax rate at £100,000 if you have children is now something like 650,000% or 1,300,000% assuming £6,500 in child care costs (probably way too low). The £13,000 is if you have 2 children at nursery age.
But surely with one person earning 100 grand the wife can afford to stay at home and look after the kids. Sympathy for this privileged group will be limited.
If 1 person is earning £100k it’s likely that their partner is also well paid and in a career where x years off is career suicide.
But surely isnt it more equitable that that highly paid job goes to someone else who can then themselves support a family. Greed is never a good look.
If Nick's post above is right (I assume it is), Sunak has managed to make an already absurd cliff edge at £100k even worse – how?
There is now an even stronger direct perverse incentive to earn less.
Bonkers.
We discussed this at 7am this morning.
Pick the worst possible way to implement things and they’ve done so.
The tax rate at £100,000 if you have children is now something like 650,000% or 1,300,000% assuming £6,500 in child care costs (probably way too low). The £13,000 is if you have 2 children at nursery age.
But surely with one person earning 100 grand the wife can afford to stay at home and look after the kids. Sympathy for this privileged group will be limited.
Maybe "the wife" (is this the 1970s?) has a career too? The point isn't whether this group deserves sympathy but whether it is sensible to subject people to randomly high marginal tax rates, or to act surprised when they affect people's behaviour. Governments should be less in the business of forming moral judgements about people and more about treating people as adults and thinking through the consequences of their own policies. We used to be good at this kind of evidence based policymaking but since Brexit we seem to have government by emotional spasm and pandering to every kind of pettiness and stupidity the electorate can come up with.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. 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. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
I don't want to subsidise them out of some big love of higher earners (I am not one) but because my (admittedly untested) belief is that the country will be better off if we can get higher earners earning (and paying tax). I would expect the benefit to cost ratio of paying for childcare for higher earners to be greater than 1 (indeed, it probably has a higher BCR than for medium earners).
At over £100k a year they can afford child care out of their taxed income. Just as I did when paying private school fees. There are some who cannot earn because the absurd cost of child care in this country is higher than what they can hope to receive. People earning over £100k are not in that category and we need to focus the limited funds available to those who are.
Again, all you end up doing is creating a disincentive for the highest earners to work full time. You can call them as many names as you like, think of them as unpatriotic, call them tax dodgers or whatever but they are rational. Someone earning £100k getting a £10k payrise gets to keep £3.8k or just over £300 quid a month, a marginal rate of 62%, if they have kids under 5 the marginal rate goes up over 80% and sometimes over 100%.
On the flip side, the same person can choose to work a 4 day week and drop down to £88k per year, they lose £500 quid a month in net salary but they gain 52 days off per year for it and 3 day weekends. The day rate for that additional day per week is just under £200, which for someone in that position just isn't worth it. I think the specific maths for someone without kids is a ~40% drop in the day rate for that additional day worked when looking at the marginal gain.
Faced with those numbers, the possibility of spending more time with the family, being able to take them to zoo, park, long weekends away with the wife and daughter vs grinding out an additional day so the government can claim over 60% of it.
No, it's completely idiotic to have these marginal rates and this was the budget to get rid of them, a proper Tory government would have done so already because it is a barrier to growth.
Sorry but this running theme through this thread and others is just bollocks of the highest order. Someone on a £100k has one vague inconvenience? I earn £70k and I know I don’t get to complain about it EVER.
Cry me a f*cking river! They can reduce their hours if they like, and give up on ever being on £200k, or back here on planet Earth they’ll suck it up for a bit and be quiet.
Which part of people working part time reduces total productivity do people not quite grasp.
There is a barrier at £100,000 that is currently encouraging people to do less work than they otherwise could and that is impacting total productivity.
It could be fixed for little real effort but instead this budget has made it worse rather than better..
If you have no mortgage or kids you can live comfortably on 30 grand in a low cost part of the country.
I can confirm this to be true. I earn considerably less. Another thing to consider is the declining fertility rate. Fewer kids requires less income to support them.
That said being on pb I can't deny it's enough to make one feel a bit inadequate when I see what the average salary appears to be!
If Nick's post above is right (I assume it is), Sunak has managed to make an already absurd cliff edge at £100k even worse – how?
There is now an even stronger direct perverse incentive to earn less.
Bonkers.
We discussed this at 7am this morning.
Pick the worst possible way to implement things and they’ve done so.
The tax rate at £100,000 if you have children is now something like 650,000% or 1,300,000% assuming £6,500 in child care costs (probably way too low). The £13,000 is if you have 2 children at nursery age.
But surely with one person earning 100 grand the wife can afford to stay at home and look after the kids. Sympathy for this privileged group will be limited.
If 1 person is earning £100k it’s likely that their partner is also well paid and in a career where x years off is career suicide.
But surely isnt it more equitable that that highly paid job goes to someone else who can then themselves support a family. Greed is never a good look.
It’s not greed.
Fancy a 3 bed ex council tax in the Home Counties - that could be £750,000 which means you need a shared income of £175,000 or so to buy it…
If Nick's post above is right (I assume it is), Sunak has managed to make an already absurd cliff edge at £100k even worse – how?
There is now an even stronger direct perverse incentive to earn less.
Bonkers.
We discussed this at 7am this morning.
Pick the worst possible way to implement things and they’ve done so.
The tax rate at £100,000 if you have children is now something like 650,000% or 1,300,000% assuming £6,500 in child care costs (probably way too low). The £13,000 is if you have 2 children at nursery age.
But surely with one person earning 100 grand the wife can afford to stay at home and look after the kids. Sympathy for this privileged group will be limited.
Maybe "the wife" (is this the 1970s?) has a career too? The point isn't whether this group deserves sympathy but whether it is sensible to subject people to randomly high marginal tax rates, or to act surprised when they affect people's behaviour. Governments should be less in the business of forming moral judgements about people and more about treating people as adults and thinking through the consequences of their own policies. We used to be good at this kind of evidence based policymaking but since Brexit we seem to have government by emotional spasm and pandering to every kind of pettiness and stupidity the electorate can come up with.
Ok well the wife stays in her career. But then people earning such vast sums need to quit their whining about cliff edges and the like.
If you have no mortgage or kids you can live comfortably on 30 grand in a low cost part of the country.
For comparison: Universal Credit...
"How much you’ll get Monthly standard allowance If you’re single and under 25 £265.31 If you’re single and 25 or over £334.91 If you live with your partner and you’re both under 25 £416.45 (for you both) If you live with your partner and either of you are 25 or over £525.72 (for you both)"
If you have no mortgage or kids you can live comfortably on 30 grand in a low cost part of the country.
I can confirm this to be true. I earn considerably less. Another thing to consider is the declining fertility rate. Fewer kids requires less income to support them.
That said being on pb I can't deny it's enough to make one feel a bit inadequate when I see what the average salary appears to be!
I suspect this website has the highest average income of any website I frequent, and one of the others consists of Microsoft MVPs.
If Nick's post above is right (I assume it is), Sunak has managed to make an already absurd cliff edge at £100k even worse – how?
There is now an even stronger direct perverse incentive to earn less.
Bonkers.
We discussed this at 7am this morning.
Pick the worst possible way to implement things and they’ve done so.
The tax rate at £100,000 if you have children is now something like 650,000% or 1,300,000% assuming £6,500 in child care costs (probably way too low). The £13,000 is if you have 2 children at nursery age.
I wondered last night why they didn't just move the 45p rate to £100k, then abolish the PA taper.
The headline rate goes up – decent optics – but the absurdity in the system and the perverse incentives are exorcised.
Instead, they have seemingly doubled down with the means test on the childcare thing. It seems to be a blunder of epic proportions.
It's not a party political point or indeed a political matter at all – it's just shambolic mathematics on the government's part unless I have missed something?
If you have no mortgage or kids you can live comfortably on 30 grand in a low cost part of the country.
For comparison: Universal Credit...
"How much you’ll get Monthly standard allowance If you’re single and under 25 £265.31 If you’re single and 25 or over £334.91 If you live with your partner and you’re both under 25 £416.45 (for you both) If you live with your partner and either of you are 25 or over £525.72 (for you both)"
Again, all you end up doing is creating a disincentive for the highest earners to work full time. You can call them as many names as you like, think of them as unpatriotic, call them tax dodgers or whatever but they are rational. Someone earning £100k getting a £10k payrise gets to keep £3.8k or just over £300 quid a month, a marginal rate of 62%, if they have kids under 5 the marginal rate goes up over 80% and sometimes over 100%.
On the flip side, the same person can choose to work a 4 day week and drop down to £88k per year, they lose £500 quid a month in net salary but they gain 52 days off per year for it and 3 day weekends. The day rate for that additional day per week is just under £200, which for someone in that position just isn't worth it. I think the specific maths for someone without kids is a ~40% drop in the day rate for that additional day worked when looking at the marginal gain.
Faced with those numbers, the possibility of spending more time with the family, being able to take them to zoo, park, long weekends away with the wife and daughter vs grinding out an additional day so the government can claim over 60% of it.
No, it's completely idiotic to have these marginal rates and this was the budget to get rid of them, a proper Tory government would have done so already because it is a barrier to growth.
So some well-off people do less work, but if there is still work to be done maybe some people who are freed up by affordable childcare can now pursue that work? It's certain more complex than just considering the downside for the few, the upside for the many will likely be much larger.
That's not how it works, almost all of the time people working these roles are highly skilled and if they don't work it just doesn't get done the NHS waiting list is the best example of this, or consultancies who take on fewer clients because they have fewer available workdays and collectively there's just less work being done. It is one of the reasons we have such poor productivity.
The demand for skilled IT staff is insane. A contractor we used to use, whose work I'm still correcting, was recruited even after the interviewer googled the question he'd just asked and could read the exact answer the contractor was giving on the call. They weren't great, but they were better than nothing, and I've come across worse.
Are there a lot of training opportunities for people to get IT skills?
Yes and no.
Yes. Every company that is trying to sell software to other companies to solve their IT problems - e.g. such as Microsoft with Azure - has an interest in creating a wide pool of IT professionals who know how to use their software, so it's easier for companies paying for that software to find people who can set it up for them. So there's loads of free training.
No. My experience is that there are certain important skills that are hard to teach, at least to adults, just in terms of having the right mental framework to understand programming at a conceptual level. I once worked briefly with an IT consultant who had managed to get the job despite having a poor understanding of the concept of variable assignment.
Also, in order to debug complicated code you basically need someone capable of nitpicking at a very pedantic level. One of the ways in which pb.com is not representative of the wider public is that many of us are irredeemable pedants.
If you have no mortgage or kids you can live comfortably on 30 grand in a low cost part of the country.
For comparison: Universal Credit...
"How much you’ll get Monthly standard allowance If you’re single and under 25 £265.31 If you’re single and 25 or over £334.91 If you live with your partner and you’re both under 25 £416.45 (for you both) If you live with your partner and either of you are 25 or over £525.72 (for you both)"
If Nick's post above is right (I assume it is), Sunak has managed to make an already absurd cliff edge at £100k even worse – how?
There is now an even stronger direct perverse incentive to earn less.
Bonkers.
We discussed this at 7am this morning.
Pick the worst possible way to implement things and they’ve done so.
The tax rate at £100,000 if you have children is now something like 650,000% or 1,300,000% assuming £6,500 in child care costs (probably way too low). The £13,000 is if you have 2 children at nursery age.
But surely with one person earning 100 grand the wife can afford to stay at home and look after the kids. Sympathy for this privileged group will be limited.
If 1 person is earning £100k it’s likely that their partner is also well paid and in a career where x years off is career suicide.
But surely isnt it more equitable that that highly paid job goes to someone else who can then themselves support a family. Greed is never a good look.
It’s not greed.
Fancy a 3 bed ex council tax in the Home Counties - that could be £750,000 which means you need a shared income of £175,000 or so to buy it…
You can get properties for 400 grand in home counties. It might not be what you dreamed of growing up but hey we live in a ponzi economy.
If Nick's post above is right (I assume it is), Sunak has managed to make an already absurd cliff edge at £100k even worse – how?
There is now an even stronger direct perverse incentive to earn less.
Bonkers.
We discussed this at 7am this morning.
Pick the worst possible way to implement things and they’ve done so.
The tax rate at £100,000 if you have children is now something like 650,000% or 1,300,000% assuming £6,500 in child care costs (probably way too low). The £13,000 is if you have 2 children at nursery age.
I wondered last night why they didn't just move the 45p rate to £100k, then abolish the PA taper.
The headline rate goes up – decent optics – but the absurdity in the system and the perverse incentives are exorcised.
Instead, they have seemingly doubled down with the means test on the childcare thing. It seems to be a blunder of epic proportions.
It's not a party political point or indeed a political matter at all – it's just shambolic mathematics on the government's part unless I have missed something?
I would need to hunt out the costs but I suspect it would be less than the pension changes are going to cost.
And if the Government is so set on removing the tax allowance of the very rich they could do so, at say £130,000 or £150,000
Again, all you end up doing is creating a disincentive for the highest earners to work full time. You can call them as many names as you like, think of them as unpatriotic, call them tax dodgers or whatever but they are rational. Someone earning £100k getting a £10k payrise gets to keep £3.8k or just over £300 quid a month, a marginal rate of 62%, if they have kids under 5 the marginal rate goes up over 80% and sometimes over 100%.
On the flip side, the same person can choose to work a 4 day week and drop down to £88k per year, they lose £500 quid a month in net salary but they gain 52 days off per year for it and 3 day weekends. The day rate for that additional day per week is just under £200, which for someone in that position just isn't worth it. I think the specific maths for someone without kids is a ~40% drop in the day rate for that additional day worked when looking at the marginal gain.
Faced with those numbers, the possibility of spending more time with the family, being able to take them to zoo, park, long weekends away with the wife and daughter vs grinding out an additional day so the government can claim over 60% of it.
No, it's completely idiotic to have these marginal rates and this was the budget to get rid of them, a proper Tory government would have done so already because it is a barrier to growth.
So some well-off people do less work, but if there is still work to be done maybe some people who are freed up by affordable childcare can now pursue that work? It's certain more complex than just considering the downside for the few, the upside for the many will likely be much larger.
That's not how it works, almost all of the time people working these roles are highly skilled and if they don't work it just doesn't get done the NHS waiting list is the best example of this, or consultancies who take on fewer clients because they have fewer available workdays and collectively there's just less work being done. It is one of the reasons we have such poor productivity.
The demand for skilled IT staff is insane. A contractor we used to use, whose work I'm still correcting, was recruited even after the interviewer googled the question he'd just asked and could read the exact answer the contractor was giving on the call. They weren't great, but they were better than nothing, and I've come across worse.
Are there a lot of training opportunities for people to get IT skills?
Yes and no.
Yes. Every company that is trying to sell software to other companies to solve their IT problems - e.g. such as Microsoft with Azure - has an interest in creating a wide pool of IT professionals who know how to use their software, so it's easier for companies paying for that software to find people who can set it up for them. So there's loads of free training.
No. My experience is that there are certain important skills that are hard to teach, at least to adults, just in terms of having the right mental framework to understand programming at a conceptual level. I once worked briefly with an IT consultant who had managed to get the job despite having a poor understanding of the concept of variable assignment.
Also, in order to debug complicated code you basically need someone capable of nitpicking at a very pedantic level. One of the ways in which pb.com is not representative of the wider public is that many of us are irredeemable pedants.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. 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. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
I don't want to subsidise them out of some big love of higher earners (I am not one) but because my (admittedly untested) belief is that the country will be better off if we can get higher earners earning (and paying tax). I would expect the benefit to cost ratio of paying for childcare for higher earners to be greater than 1 (indeed, it probably has a higher BCR than for medium earners).
At over £100k a year they can afford child care out of their taxed income. Just as I did when paying private school fees. There are some who cannot earn because the absurd cost of child care in this country is higher than what they can hope to receive. People earning over £100k are not in that category and we need to focus the limited funds available to those who are.
Again, all you end up doing is creating a disincentive for the highest earners to work full time. You can call them as many names as you like, think of them as unpatriotic, call them tax dodgers or whatever but they are rational. Someone earning £100k getting a £10k payrise gets to keep £3.8k or just over £300 quid a month, a marginal rate of 62%, if they have kids under 5 the marginal rate goes up over 80% and sometimes over 100%.
On the flip side, the same person can choose to work a 4 day week and drop down to £88k per year, they lose £500 quid a month in net salary but they gain 52 days off per year for it and 3 day weekends. The day rate for that additional day per week is just under £200, which for someone in that position just isn't worth it. I think the specific maths for someone without kids is a ~40% drop in the day rate for that additional day worked when looking at the marginal gain.
Faced with those numbers, the possibility of spending more time with the family, being able to take them to zoo, park, long weekends away with the wife and daughter vs grinding out an additional day so the government can claim over 60% of it.
No, it's completely idiotic to have these marginal rates and this was the budget to get rid of them, a proper Tory government would have done so already because it is a barrier to growth.
Sorry but this running theme through this thread and others is just bollocks of the highest order. Someone on a £100k has one vague inconvenience? I earn £70k and I know I don’t get to complain about it EVER.
Cry me a f*cking river! They can reduce their hours if they like, and give up on ever being on £200k, or back here on planet Earth they’ll suck it up for a bit and be quiet.
Which part of people working part time reduces total productivity do people not quite grasp.
There is a barrier at £100,000 that is currently encouraging people to do less work than they otherwise could and that is impacting total productivity.
It could be fixed for little real effort but instead this budget has made it worse rather than better..
What part of “that’s politically too difficult, suck it up rich boy” do you not understand?
Honestly, do you lot not grasp that spending a single penny of discretionary spend on people with that salary (or even mine) is unacceptable when some people are really struggling.
If Nick's post above is right (I assume it is), Sunak has managed to make an already absurd cliff edge at £100k even worse – how?
There is now an even stronger direct perverse incentive to earn less.
Bonkers.
We discussed this at 7am this morning.
Pick the worst possible way to implement things and they’ve done so.
The tax rate at £100,000 if you have children is now something like 650,000% or 1,300,000% assuming £6,500 in child care costs (probably way too low). The £13,000 is if you have 2 children at nursery age.
But surely with one person earning 100 grand the wife can afford to stay at home and look after the kids. Sympathy for this privileged group will be limited.
If 1 person is earning £100k it’s likely that their partner is also well paid and in a career where x years off is career suicide.
But surely isnt it more equitable that that highly paid job goes to someone else who can then themselves support a family. Greed is never a good look.
It’s not greed.
Fancy a 3 bed ex council tax in the Home Counties - that could be £750,000 which means you need a shared income of £175,000 or so to buy it…
And then we're back to house prices. Because if it takes an almost unimaginable shared income to buy a unspectacular house in a hefty swathe of the country, then we're collectively stuffed.
And we all know it's bad, and more relevant to a lot of our problems than the measures announced today, but nobody knows how to resolve it in a way that gives them a chance of re-election.
If you have no mortgage or kids you can live comfortably on 30 grand in a low cost part of the country.
For comparison: Universal Credit...
"How much you’ll get Monthly standard allowance If you’re single and under 25 £265.31 If you’re single and 25 or over £334.91 If you live with your partner and you’re both under 25 £416.45 (for you both) If you live with your partner and either of you are 25 or over £525.72 (for you both)"
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. 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. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
I don't want to subsidise them out of some big love of higher earners (I am not one) but because my (admittedly untested) belief is that the country will be better off if we can get higher earners earning (and paying tax). I would expect the benefit to cost ratio of paying for childcare for higher earners to be greater than 1 (indeed, it probably has a higher BCR than for medium earners).
At over £100k a year they can afford child care out of their taxed income. Just as I did when paying private school fees. There are some who cannot earn because the absurd cost of child care in this country is higher than what they can hope to receive. People earning over £100k are not in that category and we need to focus the limited funds available to those who are.
Again, all you end up doing is creating a disincentive for the highest earners to work full time. You can call them as many names as you like, think of them as unpatriotic, call them tax dodgers or whatever but they are rational. Someone earning £100k getting a £10k payrise gets to keep £3.8k or just over £300 quid a month, a marginal rate of 62%, if they have kids under 5 the marginal rate goes up over 80% and sometimes over 100%.
On the flip side, the same person can choose to work a 4 day week and drop down to £88k per year, they lose £500 quid a month in net salary but they gain 52 days off per year for it and 3 day weekends. The day rate for that additional day per week is just under £200, which for someone in that position just isn't worth it. I think the specific maths for someone without kids is a ~40% drop in the day rate for that additional day worked when looking at the marginal gain.
Faced with those numbers, the possibility of spending more time with the family, being able to take them to zoo, park, long weekends away with the wife and daughter vs grinding out an additional day so the government can claim over 60% of it.
No, it's completely idiotic to have these marginal rates and this was the budget to get rid of them, a proper Tory government would have done so already because it is a barrier to growth.
Sorry but this running theme through this thread and others is just bollocks of the highest order. Someone on a £100k has one vague inconvenience? I earn £70k and I know I don’t get to complain about it EVER.
Cry me a f*cking river! They can reduce their hours if they like, and give up on ever being on £200k, or back here on planet Earth they’ll suck it up for a bit and be quiet.
Which part of people working part time reduces total productivity do people not quite grasp.
There is a barrier at £100,000 that is currently encouraging people to do less work than they otherwise could and that is impacting total productivity.
It could be fixed for little real effort but instead this budget has made it worse rather than better..
What part of “that’s politically too difficult, suck it up rich boy” do you not understand?
Honestly, do you lot not grasp that spending a single penny of discretionary spend on people with that salary (or even mine) is unacceptable when some people are really struggling.
Let’s highlight my career plan for the next 2 years.
22/23 earn £50,000 by working 3 or so months. 23/24 earn £50,000 ish and throw the rest into my pension pot (it’s going to be a lot), 24/25 earn £50,000 throw rest into pension pot.
October 24 - take the rest of the tax year off and possibly a lot longer..
Without the ability to throw a lot into the pension (and an interesting project) I would be working 5-6 months max a year.
If Nick's post above is right (I assume it is), Sunak has managed to make an already absurd cliff edge at £100k even worse – how?
There is now an even stronger direct perverse incentive to earn less.
Bonkers.
We discussed this at 7am this morning.
Pick the worst possible way to implement things and they’ve done so.
The tax rate at £100,000 if you have children is now something like 650,000% or 1,300,000% assuming £6,500 in child care costs (probably way too low). The £13,000 is if you have 2 children at nursery age.
But surely with one person earning 100 grand the wife can afford to stay at home and look after the kids. Sympathy for this privileged group will be limited.
Maybe "the wife" (is this the 1970s?) has a career too? The point isn't whether this group deserves sympathy but whether it is sensible to subject people to randomly high marginal tax rates, or to act surprised when they affect people's behaviour. Governments should be less in the business of forming moral judgements about people and more about treating people as adults and thinking through the consequences of their own policies. We used to be good at this kind of evidence based policymaking but since Brexit we seem to have government by emotional spasm and pandering to every kind of pettiness and stupidity the electorate can come up with.
Ok well the wife stays in her career. But then people earning such vast sums need to quit their whining about cliff edges and the like.
I'm not making any moral judgement about them, positive or negative. The idea of the deserving or undeserving rich is as absurd as the idea of the deserving or undeserving poor. In a capitalist society people will earn different amounts of money depending on the value their employers feel they bring to their firm. Personally I'd rather we lived in a more equal society, though. But if the tax system is set up so that, for no good reason, people are faced with marginal tax rates that are far higher than those imposed on billionaires, then don't be surprised if that affects their behaviour. It's not whining, it is simply responding to the incentives they face.
Again, all you end up doing is creating a disincentive for the highest earners to work full time. You can call them as many names as you like, think of them as unpatriotic, call them tax dodgers or whatever but they are rational. Someone earning £100k getting a £10k payrise gets to keep £3.8k or just over £300 quid a month, a marginal rate of 62%, if they have kids under 5 the marginal rate goes up over 80% and sometimes over 100%.
On the flip side, the same person can choose to work a 4 day week and drop down to £88k per year, they lose £500 quid a month in net salary but they gain 52 days off per year for it and 3 day weekends. The day rate for that additional day per week is just under £200, which for someone in that position just isn't worth it. I think the specific maths for someone without kids is a ~40% drop in the day rate for that additional day worked when looking at the marginal gain.
Faced with those numbers, the possibility of spending more time with the family, being able to take them to zoo, park, long weekends away with the wife and daughter vs grinding out an additional day so the government can claim over 60% of it.
No, it's completely idiotic to have these marginal rates and this was the budget to get rid of them, a proper Tory government would have done so already because it is a barrier to growth.
So some well-off people do less work, but if there is still work to be done maybe some people who are freed up by affordable childcare can now pursue that work? It's certain more complex than just considering the downside for the few, the upside for the many will likely be much larger.
That's not how it works, almost all of the time people working these roles are highly skilled and if they don't work it just doesn't get done the NHS waiting list is the best example of this, or consultancies who take on fewer clients because they have fewer available workdays and collectively there's just less work being done. It is one of the reasons we have such poor productivity.
The demand for skilled IT staff is insane. A contractor we used to use, whose work I'm still correcting, was recruited even after the interviewer googled the question he'd just asked and could read the exact answer the contractor was giving on the call. They weren't great, but they were better than nothing, and I've come across worse.
Are there a lot of training opportunities for people to get IT skills?
Yes and no.
Yes. Every company that is trying to sell software to other companies to solve their IT problems - e.g. such as Microsoft with Azure - has an interest in creating a wide pool of IT professionals who know how to use their software, so it's easier for companies paying for that software to find people who can set it up for them. So there's loads of free training.
No. My experience is that there are certain important skills that are hard to teach, at least to adults, just in terms of having the right mental framework to understand programming at a conceptual level. I once worked briefly with an IT consultant who had managed to get the job despite having a poor understanding of the concept of variable assignment.
Also, in order to debug complicated code you basically need someone capable of nitpicking at a very pedantic level. One of the ways in which pb.com is not representative of the wider public is that many of us are irredeemable pedants.
If Nick's post above is right (I assume it is), Sunak has managed to make an already absurd cliff edge at £100k even worse – how?
There is now an even stronger direct perverse incentive to earn less.
Bonkers.
We discussed this at 7am this morning.
Pick the worst possible way to implement things and they’ve done so.
The tax rate at £100,000 if you have children is now something like 650,000% or 1,300,000% assuming £6,500 in child care costs (probably way too low). The £13,000 is if you have 2 children at nursery age.
But surely with one person earning 100 grand the wife can afford to stay at home and look after the kids. Sympathy for this privileged group will be limited.
If 1 person is earning £100k it’s likely that their partner is also well paid and in a career where x years off is career suicide.
But surely isnt it more equitable that that highly paid job goes to someone else who can then themselves support a family. Greed is never a good look.
It’s not greed.
Fancy a 3 bed ex council tax in the Home Counties - that could be £750,000 which means you need a shared income of £175,000 or so to buy it…
Even a very cursory examination of a property website shows this is nonsense.
There are plenty of 3 bed houses in Beds or Bucks or Herts that are way, way less
If Nick's post above is right (I assume it is), Sunak has managed to make an already absurd cliff edge at £100k even worse – how?
There is now an even stronger direct perverse incentive to earn less.
Bonkers.
We discussed this at 7am this morning.
Pick the worst possible way to implement things and they’ve done so.
The tax rate at £100,000 if you have children is now something like 650,000% or 1,300,000% assuming £6,500 in child care costs (probably way too low). The £13,000 is if you have 2 children at nursery age.
But surely with one person earning 100 grand the wife can afford to stay at home and look after the kids. Sympathy for this privileged group will be limited.
If 1 person is earning £100k it’s likely that their partner is also well paid and in a career where x years off is career suicide.
But surely isnt it more equitable that that highly paid job goes to someone else who can then themselves support a family. Greed is never a good look.
It’s not greed.
Fancy a 3 bed ex council tax in the Home Counties - that could be £750,000 which means you need a shared income of £175,000 or so to buy it…
Even a very cursory examination of a property website shows this is nonsense.
There are plenty of 3 bed houses in Beds or Bucks or Herts that are way, way less
If you have no mortgage or kids you can live comfortably on 30 grand in a low cost part of the country.
For comparison: Universal Credit...
"How much you’ll get Monthly standard allowance If you’re single and under 25 £265.31 If you’re single and 25 or over £334.91 If you live with your partner and you’re both under 25 £416.45 (for you both) If you live with your partner and either of you are 25 or over £525.72 (for you both)"
If you have no mortgage or kids you can live comfortably on 30 grand in a low cost part of the country.
You can live on a lot less than that if you live simply.
My first year of self-employment after university, I made £6200. Rent was £3000 for a room in a shared house. It was a little tight. I think minimum wage at the time was about £9000. When you're young and single all sorts of things are doable.
Comments
I'm not saying that NHS consultants are like MRI scanners and should therefore be kept running 24/7 to get the maximum benefit from the upfront cost, but the logic probably works on a spreadsheet.
Not actually sure how much faster we could be reducing those numbers by throwing money around.
The one that surprised me is that petrol/diesel tax is being cut in real terms yet again, whilst bus fares are being allowed to rise. That's bizarre.
I think that last may be an attempted Hail Mary pass for the election.
No-one earning £100 000 a year is remotely in this bucket.
I can't believe that the Chinese are any different to the West creatively. Really their creative minds were just being used to catch up. (Not that they needed to do too much, as the wests great industries sent or sold them our IP anyway.)
Deputy Manager of a betting shop in Enfield.
Not entirely different to Wigan tbh.
I agree that marginal rates can be an issue, I'm not supporting this budget, but I think you may have an erroneous view of the high earners with young children affected by this issue.
https://twitter.com/CarlosLUFC/status/1636050063225913344?s=20
In the end we all die.
I had a look around for some actual data on this. Who are the people earning £100-130k? I found a list of highest paying jobs (1 lawyer, 2 CEO, 3 actuary, 4 marketing director, 5 managing director), but that doesn't tell us how many there are of those different roles. Maybe I am being snobbish, but I'm not convinced that the country's productivity will be too damaged if some marketing directors drop down to 4-day weeks.
You either have enough money to retire on or you don't. If you do, you won't be adding to your pension pot just so you can work for longer. You retire.
If you want to encourage people to work longer you should force them to build their pot slower, or maybe back-end it so they only get the biggest tax breaks at the end of their working life.
Whether this is the best solution, or a bit "you were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off" is another matter.
Not something currently happening in the NHS...
I suspect that may increase the labour pool far more than pension changes
But what do I know.
He seems to be the kind of guy whose list if f***s he gives isn't extensive.
The govt should focus more on helping avoid child poverty.
People on £100k a year+ should pay more tax.
The marginal rate of people earning around £100k-130k should not be negative.
None of those three statements should be controversial imo. Not sure this particular budget does enough on any of them.
The commentators kept a dignified silence as he wiped his backside and then his hand on the pitch.
I'm quite sure you can find it on YouTube...
You simply have no idea what the going rate is for IT staff who can actually get stuff done.
Interesting conversations with a few colleagues today, including an Orthopod who had spent the day working as a junior intern (F2). He had discharged 3 patients by 9 0'clock and was flavour of the month with management and nurses, as he had the experience and knowledge to be able to do so. In a similar vein, the queue in our Casualty has been shorter than usual, with fewer breaching target times than most weeks. Once again because senior experienced clinicians were the front line.
So we see how productivity in the NHS is dependent on the skills of the workforce. Increase these and productivity magically gets better. Not too surprising as that is one of the usual ways to increase productivity in other industries.
The present staffing of these roles is not sustainable beyond strike days, but does show what is possible if we invest in staff training, and create ways to improve retention.
Of course, cultural bias, historic under development etc. but the UK has won 15 science Nobel prizes in the last 10 years compared to China's one (Tu Youyou for Artemisin therapy, as it happens).
I raised this question of China's strange lack of technology innovation on PB last year and was accused of being racist.
https://conservativehome.com/2023/03/15/interview-crick-on-the-purge-in-candidate-selections-of-the-labour-left-and-the-threat-to-democracy-posed-by-localism/
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/11/02/453960470/scaring-people-can-make-them-healthier-but-it-can-backfire-too
Well, of course, the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics was "UK" -- Sir Charles Kao Kuen of Standard Telecommunication Laboratories, Harlow, UK. ... but he was born in Shanghai and bought up in Hong Kong.
The truth is the best Chinese scientists are not in China -- that is why China seemingly has won so few Nobels.
There is now an even stronger direct perverse incentive to earn less.
Bonkers.
I'm quite sure his smugface won't be altered by whatever Frank Warren cares to say, no.
Cry me a f*cking river! They can reduce their hours if they like, and give up on ever being on £200k, or back here on planet Earth they’ll suck it up for a bit and be quiet.
Pick the worst possible way to implement things and they’ve done so.
The tax rate at £100,000 if you have children is now something like 650,000% or 1,300,000% assuming £6,500 in child care costs (probably way too low). The £13,000 is if you have 2 children at nursery age.
Likewise it’s easy to find experts and others who keep on doing paid work because they enjoy it and continue to find it rewarding.
I also expect I’ll do the same because I enjoy solving issues way more than acting as a volunteer room guide in a local museum
(*It's a bit more complex than that but that's the net effect for most.)
The point isn't whether this group deserves sympathy but whether it is sensible to subject people to randomly high marginal tax rates, or to act surprised when they affect people's behaviour. Governments should be less in the business of forming moral judgements about people and more about treating people as adults and thinking through the consequences of their own policies. We used to be good at this kind of evidence based policymaking but since Brexit we seem to have government by emotional spasm and pandering to every kind of pettiness and stupidity the electorate can come up with.
There is a barrier at £100,000 that is currently encouraging people to do less work than they otherwise could and that is impacting total productivity.
It could be fixed for little real effort but instead this budget has made it worse rather than better..
That said being on pb I can't deny it's enough to make one feel a bit inadequate when I see what the average salary appears to be!
Fancy a 3 bed ex council tax in the Home Counties - that could be £750,000 which means you need a shared income of £175,000 or so to buy it…
"How much you’ll get Monthly standard allowance
If you’re single and under 25 £265.31
If you’re single and 25 or over £334.91
If you live with your partner and you’re both under 25 £416.45 (for you both)
If you live with your partner and either of you are 25 or over £525.72 (for you both)"
https://www.gov.uk/universal-credit/what-youll-get
So £4,018 pa plus 90% reduction in Council Tax (plus most of your rent if you rent) for a single person with no kids.
The headline rate goes up – decent optics – but the absurdity in the system and the perverse incentives are exorcised.
Instead, they have seemingly doubled down with the means test on the childcare thing. It seems to be a blunder of epic proportions.
It's not a party political point or indeed a political matter at all – it's just shambolic mathematics on the government's part unless I have missed something?
Yes. Every company that is trying to sell software to other companies to solve their IT problems - e.g. such as Microsoft with Azure - has an interest in creating a wide pool of IT professionals who know how to use their software, so it's easier for companies paying for that software to find people who can set it up for them. So there's loads of free training.
No. My experience is that there are certain important skills that are hard to teach, at least to adults, just in terms of having the right mental framework to understand programming at a conceptual level. I once worked briefly with an IT consultant who had managed to get the job despite having a poor understanding of the concept of variable assignment.
Also, in order to debug complicated code you basically need someone capable of nitpicking at a very pedantic level. One of the ways in which pb.com is not representative of the wider public is that many of us are irredeemable pedants.
However, you still hear people say 'but they've all got Sky and the latest iPhone, and drive around in a new car' or similar.
And if the Government is so set on removing the tax allowance of the very rich they could do so, at say £130,000 or £150,000
https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks
Honestly, do you lot not grasp that spending a single penny of discretionary spend on people with that salary (or even mine) is unacceptable when some people are really struggling.
And we all know it's bad, and more relevant to a lot of our problems than the measures announced today, but nobody knows how to resolve it in a way that gives them a chance of re-election.
And so it goes.
22/23 earn £50,000 by working 3 or so months.
23/24 earn £50,000 ish and throw the rest into my pension pot (it’s going to be a lot),
24/25 earn £50,000 throw rest into pension pot.
October 24 - take the rest of the tax year off and possibly a lot longer..
Without the ability to throw a lot into the pension (and an interesting project) I would be working 5-6 months max a year.
But if the tax system is set up so that, for no good reason, people are faced with marginal tax rates that are far higher than those imposed on billionaires, then don't be surprised if that affects their behaviour. It's not whining, it is simply responding to the incentives they face.
There are plenty of 3 bed houses in Beds or Bucks or Herts that are way, way less
Wouldn’t be much of a life.