I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
The problem is that "the rich" are now considered to be anyone earning more than 100k, which, post-inflation, is probably only equivalent to 70k a few years ago.
I've just been put on a K-code for FY24-25 which is a negative personal allowance- I.e. they artificially raise my income so I get to pay extra tax.
It's why I'm seriously eyeing up Canada, the US and Oz now, even though I don't want to.
Someone earning £100k is in the top 5% of earners in the UK.
This is where, I fear, the level of income on this forum being wildly out of sync with the vast majority of people leads to a huge bias against taxing and spending. Most people want more taxes on the richest people, not less.
The £100K trap that Casino mentions (withdrawing personal allowance gradually) is just weird, as it leads to a 60% tax rate in the £100-£125K bracket, before dropping back to 40% thereafter. I can't see any political or economic justification for it, and I must admit that in retirement year with an income of £120K I'm considering putting £20K into my pension pot to avoid it, as that will save me £12K tax (and I can then on retirment claim back £5K tax-free from the retirement pot, as well as getting higher pension from the rest). I've always despised people who go through elaborate maneouvres to pay less tax, but this particular one seems so daft that I'm tempted.
Simply having an extra band of say 43p from 100K would be much more logical and probably raise more cash too.
I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
The problem is that "the rich" are now considered to be anyone earning more than 100k, which, post-inflation, is probably only equivalent to 70k a few years ago.
I've just been put on a K-code for FY24-25 which is a negative personal allowance- I.e. they artificially raise my income so I get to pay extra tax.
It's why I'm seriously eyeing up Canada, the US and Oz now, even though I don't want to.
I've been in this situation for years, yet despite being a woke lefty who no doubt hates Britain I am happy to contribute to our national coffers and have no intention of leaving. PB flag shaggers please explain!
Who isn't happy to contribute? But do you think there's no upper limit to that?
When you're paying 60% or 70% effective taxation then work doesn't pay.
Yeah it is annoying, I probably pay about 60-70% of my income in tax once you add up the income tax, NI, VAT, stamp duty etc etc. And for that I get crumbling and understaffed schools, doctors I can't get a appointment at, roads full of potholes, and police that are never around when kids are getting mugged in our neighbourhood. But that's what happens when you have a government that keeps making stupid decisions, from Brexit downwards. The solution is to get a government that's not venal and dumb, and stay and work hard and contribute so the country has a chance of improving. You seem to have a genuine love of your country (even though you seem to also hate some parts of it) so I am surprised you're ready to jack it all in and go somewhere else - especially when your lot have been in charge for all this time.
Which government brought in the 100k withdrawal policy?
This isn't a partisan dig by the way, but it wasn't this one - although I do blame this one for not reversing it - and I don't have much confidence in any government of any stripe to take the tough decisions needed.
It is a dumb policy, if you believe in progressive taxation as I do it is nonsensical for those on incomes around 100k to pay a higher marginal tax rate than those on 200k. It's also damaging for incentives to have such high marginal tax rates. My view is that the top rate of income tax+NIC should be 50% but not above. Your lot have had a very long time to sort this out, though!
Overlooked in the fuss over OpenAI's Sora is DeepMind's Gemini 1.5 Pro - which was unveiled, literally, 2 hours prior
In a very dfferent way it is equally incredible - it can process, summarise and extract information with stunning ease
eg To demo Gemini 1.5’s capabilities, Google fed it the entire 402 page transcript of the Apollo 11 mission. They then asked Gemini to find “three comedic moments” within that text.
It did so, in 30 seconds – eg it found astronaut Michael Collins “betting someone a cup of coffee”
This bears repeating, Google didn’t search for specific words, the researchers asked a machine to find “three funny bits” in 402 pages. It did so.
And this is my fave bit, they also showed Gemini a simple and rubbish drawing, apparently by a 4 year old, of what could be a treading boot. They asked Gemini to identify this moment in the document, using just the child-like drawing. Gemini correctly identified it as picturing the moment Neil Armstrong stepped on to the lunar surface
Deep Mind was another British firm sold to America (in this case, Google). Great for the founders; good for AI; bad for this country's long term prospects.
They are still very much based in London
"DeepMind is opening a huge new London headquarters in 2020 The Alphabet-owned artificial intelligence startup is expanding to an 11-storey building in Kings Cross"
Deep Mind is Britain's best hope of significant gain at the cutting edge of AI
Deep Mind is now American, as is its IP and any profits that will eventually result. If not Google, then it would have been Facebook or your mate Elon Musk who now owns it because Britain is chronically unable to fund and incubate innovative companies.
If your job involves extracting, analysing or summarising information - visual or textual - you too are fucked
"This was pretty amazing: I got access to the 1 million token Gemini Pro, and fed in the 20 papers and books that made up my academic work prior to 2022, over 1000+ pages of PDFs
It was able to extract direct quotes & find themes across all of them with only quite minor errors..."
They said that when Google itself was launched, and again when Google started digitising everything it could lay its hands on, yet historians still run loose among us.
They said that when machines started doing all the farmwork, that it would push millions of rural peasants off the countryside and
Oh
You don't see many peasants sowing barley in the English shires, these days
Yet we have near full employment.
You should be careful of going so far down the rabbit hole of your latest obsession that you are unable to see any sort of bigger picture.
We may have full employment but how much is productive employment?
On topic, you need to be very careful about tax and spend polling, as you get wildly different results depending on how the question is framed. This one has an element of "Do you believe the Government should prioritise public services... or are you a selfish arsehole?"
If Hunt does go for tax cuts, he's not going to frame it as, "I'm sacking nurses so bankers can have extra jam!" He'll say something like, "We're targeting waste, and have an economic plan that is working, so I'm delighted to be able to say that, as well as record spending on schools and hospitals, I can give something back to you, the hardworking families of Britain."
Others will try to frame it differently, of course - but Hunt gets first go at it, and has a fair bit of the press onside.
Additionally, Conservatives will reason, not without justification, that people are in fact rather more selfish than they admit to pollsters.
I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
The problem is that "the rich" are now considered to be anyone earning more than 100k, which, post-inflation, is probably only equivalent to 70k a few years ago.
I've just been put on a K-code for FY24-25 which is a negative personal allowance- I.e. they artificially raise my income so I get to pay extra tax.
It's why I'm seriously eyeing up Canada, the US and Oz now, even though I don't want to.
I've been in this situation for years, yet despite being a woke lefty who no doubt hates Britain I am happy to contribute to our national coffers and have no intention of leaving. PB flag shaggers please explain!
One has to try not to get knocked down in the Gadarene stampede of Brexiters throwing petrol and lit matches around and then screaming 'Fire!' in a crowded auditorium and rushing for the exit.
The real tragedy is that you think this is a clever and witty post.
The 100k personal allowance withdrawal policy was brought in during 2009.
During all these years, what have the Tories done about it?
The first thing to fix in public services is staff retention. That will cost money upfront, but it is cheaper in the long run than ridiculous schemes where we pay the same people who have left, doing the same job, 3 or 4x their salary as contractors whilst losing control of their hours and creating understandable jealousy from the remaining permanent contracted staff. So because we don't want to pay them 7% more we pay a proportion of them 200-300% more and the others 4-5% more after long strikes.
It is an easy, if initially costly, fix, that does start saving money further down the line.
That would be my priority with any fiscal headroom.
The issue is, to conservatives, the general feeling is "you should be lucky you have a job in the first place". They are ideologically opposed to unions and labour organising, and therefore feel they cannot give in to their demands - even if it is more expensive to do that.
We could see better economic growth, without tax increases, if we bridged the gap of wage stagnation over the last decade to catch up to inflation, especially for the poorest people. Poorer people spent their money in a way that keeps it moving - they are more likely to spend in their local economy and that money is more likely to be spent again. Richer people tend to have money invested elsewhere - either in nonmobile assets like property or stocks, or overseas. If you want a system of state backed capitalism (I don't) we should be taxing richer people / corporations more - with a caveat that if they spend that money on productive things (for corporations, more UK based staff or R&D, for individuals, investment in UK based business etc.) that gets a tax write off.
On topic, you need to be very careful about tax and spend polling, as you get wildly different results depending on how the question is framed. This one has an element of "Do you believe the Government should prioritise public services... or are you a selfish arsehole?"
If Hunt does go for tax cuts, he's not going to frame it as, "I'm sacking nurses so bankers can have extra jam!" He'll say something like, "We're targeting waste, and have an economic plan that is working, so I'm delighted to be able to say that, as well as record spending on schools and hospitals, I can give something back to you, the hardworking families of Britain."
Others will try to frame it differently, of course - but Hunt gets first go at it, and has a fair bit of the press onside.
Additionally, Conservatives will reason, not without justification, that people are in fact rather more selfish than they admit to pollsters.
I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
The problem is that "the rich" are now considered to be anyone earning more than 100k, which, post-inflation, is probably only equivalent to 70k a few years ago.
I've just been put on a K-code for FY24-25 which is a negative personal allowance- I.e. they artificially raise my income so I get to pay extra tax.
It's why I'm seriously eyeing up Canada, the US and Oz now, even though I don't want to.
I've been in this situation for years, yet despite being a woke lefty who no doubt hates Britain I am happy to contribute to our national coffers and have no intention of leaving. PB flag shaggers please explain!
One has to try not to get knocked down in the Gadarene stampede of Brexiters throwing petrol and lit matches around and then screaming 'Fire!' in a crowded auditorium and rushing for the exit.
I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
The problem is that "the rich" are now considered to be anyone earning more than 100k, which, post-inflation, is probably only equivalent to 70k a few years ago.
I've just been put on a K-code for FY24-25 which is a negative personal allowance- I.e. they artificially raise my income so I get to pay extra tax.
It's why I'm seriously eyeing up Canada, the US and Oz now, even though I don't want to.
I've been in this situation for years, yet despite being a woke lefty who no doubt hates Britain I am happy to contribute to our national coffers and have no intention of leaving. PB flag shaggers please explain!
Who isn't happy to contribute? But do you think there's no upper limit to that?
When you're paying 60% or 70% effective taxation then work doesn't pay.
Yeah it is annoying, I probably pay about 60-70% of my income in tax once you add up the income tax, NI, VAT, stamp duty etc etc. And for that I get crumbling and understaffed schools, doctors I can't get a appointment at, roads full of potholes, and police that are never around when kids are getting mugged in our neighbourhood. But that's what happens when you have a government that keeps making stupid decisions, from Brexit downwards. The solution is to get a government that's not venal and dumb, and stay and work hard and contribute so the country has a chance of improving. You seem to have a genuine love of your country (even though you seem to also hate some parts of it) so I am surprised you're ready to jack it all in and go somewhere else - especially when your lot have been in charge for all this time.
Which government brought in the 100k withdrawal policy?
This isn't a partisan dig by the way, but it wasn't this one - although I do blame this one for not reversing it - and I don't have much confidence in any government of any stripe to take the tough decisions needed.
It is a dumb policy, if you believe in progressive taxation as I do it is nonsensical for those on incomes around 100k to pay a higher marginal tax rate than those on 200k. It's also damaging for incentives to have such high marginal tax rates. My view is that the top rate of income tax+NIC should be 50% but not above. Your lot have had a very long time to sort this out, though!
I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
The problem is that "the rich" are now considered to be anyone earning more than 100k, which, post-inflation, is probably only equivalent to 70k a few years ago.
I've just been put on a K-code for FY24-25 which is a negative personal allowance- I.e. they artificially raise my income so I get to pay extra tax.
It's why I'm seriously eyeing up Canada, the US and Oz now, even though I don't want to.
Someone earning £100k is in the top 5% of earners in the UK.
This is where, I fear, the level of income on this forum being wildly out of sync with the vast majority of people leads to a huge bias against taxing and spending. Most people want more taxes on the richest people, not less.
The £100K trap that Casino mentions (withdrawing personal allowance gradually) is just weird, as it leads to a 60% tax rate in the £100-£125K bracket, before dropping back to 40% thereafter. I can't see any political or economic justification for it, and I must admit that in retirement year with an income of £120K I'm considering putting £20K into my pension pot to avoid it, as that will save me £12K tax (and I can then on retirment claim back £5K tax-free from the retirement pot, as well as getting higher pension from the rest). I've always despised people who go through elaborate maneouvres to pay less tax, but this particular one seems so daft that I'm tempted.
Simply having an extra band of say 43p from 100K would be much more logical and probably raise more cash too.
I've been in that bracket a couple of times and yes it is peculiarly stupid and I have no idea why it hasn't been fixed. Sheer apathy? Some underhand reason we cannot see?
The outcome for me was different due to self employ etc but what a farce. This is yet another example of the Tories having 14 years to do stuff and pretty much doing fuck all
The first thing to fix in public services is staff retention. That will cost money upfront, but it is cheaper in the long run than ridiculous schemes where we pay the same people who have left, doing the same job, 3 or 4x their salary as contractors whilst losing control of their hours and creating understandable jealousy from the remaining permanent contracted staff. So because we don't want to pay them 7% more we pay a proportion of them 200-300% more and the others 4-5% more after long strikes.
It is an easy, if initially costly, fix, that does start saving money further down the line.
That would be my priority with any fiscal headroom.
I think what we all implicitly recognise is that the quality of public sector work is, to say the least, pretty variable. In Scotland we have over 600,000 public sector employees and I may say that in my dealings with, for example, Scottish Enterprise, I see precious little that they do that could not be done better by local government or chambers of commerce. It is that lack of efficiency in public administration that irks most of us. Bureaucratic, process driven, but worst of all, mostly utterly ineffective. In the NHS the budget for frontline doctors and nurses is squeezed by administration costs which are wildly out of line with the overall costs. In education the budget for school buildings is insufficient for capital maintenance. Everyone who has dealings with UK public administration has tales of woe. As for infrastructure, well, we have already debated to death the shocking administration of the transport department.
We need a strategic reset in the whole civil service, analogous to the Haldane report after World War One. Given the political sensitivity, I cannot help feeling that we should start this with an all party Royal Commission or Irish style citizens assemblies that spends 18 months reviewing and proposing a coherent programme of administrative reform. While they are about it, a similar Royal commission for local government might be a good idea too.
The off the cuff policy formation by unaccountable and opaquely funded self interested right wing think tanks is what has driven the Tories onto the rocks. We now need citizens assemblies and royal commissions to bring the debate about administration into the public and accountable domain.
On topic, you need to be very careful about tax and spend polling, as you get wildly different results depending on how the question is framed. This one has an element of "Do you believe the Government should prioritise public services... or are you a selfish arsehole?"
If Hunt does go for tax cuts, he's not going to frame it as, "I'm sacking nurses so bankers can have extra jam!" He'll say something like, "We're targeting waste, and have an economic plan that is working, so I'm delighted to be able to say that, as well as record spending on schools and hospitals, I can give something back to you, the hardworking families of Britain."
Others will try to frame it differently, of course - but Hunt gets first go at it, and has a fair bit of the press onside.
Additionally, Conservatives will reason, not without justification, that people are in fact rather more selfish than they admit to pollsters.
I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
The problem is that "the rich" are now considered to be anyone earning more than 100k, which, post-inflation, is probably only equivalent to 70k a few years ago.
I've just been put on a K-code for FY24-25 which is a negative personal allowance- I.e. they artificially raise my income so I get to pay extra tax.
It's why I'm seriously eyeing up Canada, the US and Oz now, even though I don't want to.
I've been in this situation for years, yet despite being a woke lefty who no doubt hates Britain I am happy to contribute to our national coffers and have no intention of leaving. PB flag shaggers please explain!
One has to try not to get knocked down in the Gadarene stampede of Brexiters throwing petrol and lit matches around and then screaming 'Fire!' in a crowded auditorium and rushing for the exit.
I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
The problem is that "the rich" are now considered to be anyone earning more than 100k, which, post-inflation, is probably only equivalent to 70k a few years ago.
I've just been put on a K-code for FY24-25 which is a negative personal allowance- I.e. they artificially raise my income so I get to pay extra tax.
It's why I'm seriously eyeing up Canada, the US and Oz now, even though I don't want to.
I've been in this situation for years, yet despite being a woke lefty who no doubt hates Britain I am happy to contribute to our national coffers and have no intention of leaving. PB flag shaggers please explain!
Who isn't happy to contribute? But do you think there's no upper limit to that?
When you're paying 60% or 70% effective taxation then work doesn't pay.
Yeah it is annoying, I probably pay about 60-70% of my income in tax once you add up the income tax, NI, VAT, stamp duty etc etc. And for that I get crumbling and understaffed schools, doctors I can't get a appointment at, roads full of potholes, and police that are never around when kids are getting mugged in our neighbourhood. But that's what happens when you have a government that keeps making stupid decisions, from Brexit downwards. The solution is to get a government that's not venal and dumb, and stay and work hard and contribute so the country has a chance of improving. You seem to have a genuine love of your country (even though you seem to also hate some parts of it) so I am surprised you're ready to jack it all in and go somewhere else - especially when your lot have been in charge for all this time.
Which government brought in the 100k withdrawal policy?
This isn't a partisan dig by the way, but it wasn't this one - although I do blame this one for not reversing it - and I don't have much confidence in any government of any stripe to take the tough decisions needed.
It is a dumb policy, if you believe in progressive taxation as I do it is nonsensical for those on incomes around 100k to pay a higher marginal tax rate than those on 200k. It's also damaging for incentives to have such high marginal tax rates. My view is that the top rate of income tax+NIC should be 50% but not above. Your lot have had a very long time to sort this out, though!
Much more fun trolling the libs, though!
Eh, who's trolling the libs?
Not everything is a partisan pissing contest.
The Tory government spend most of their energy on creating silly controversies and division, and none on fixing simple fixable things like this. Hence it hasn't been done, hence endless can kicking on the Post office, or the low staff retention in public services and so on.
On topic, you need to be very careful about tax and spend polling, as you get wildly different results depending on how the question is framed. This one has an element of "Do you believe the Government should prioritise public services... or are you a selfish arsehole?"
If Hunt does go for tax cuts, he's not going to frame it as, "I'm sacking nurses so bankers can have extra jam!" He'll say something like, "We're targeting waste, and have an economic plan that is working, so I'm delighted to be able to say that, as well as record spending on schools and hospitals, I can give something back to you, the hardworking families of Britain."
Others will try to frame it differently, of course - but Hunt gets first go at it, and has a fair bit of the press onside.
Additionally, Conservatives will reason, not without justification, that people are in fact rather more selfish than they admit to pollsters.
I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
The problem is that "the rich" are now considered to be anyone earning more than 100k, which, post-inflation, is probably only equivalent to 70k a few years ago.
I've just been put on a K-code for FY24-25 which is a negative personal allowance- I.e. they artificially raise my income so I get to pay extra tax.
It's why I'm seriously eyeing up Canada, the US and Oz now, even though I don't want to.
I've been in this situation for years, yet despite being a woke lefty who no doubt hates Britain I am happy to contribute to our national coffers and have no intention of leaving. PB flag shaggers please explain!
One has to try not to get knocked down in the Gadarene stampede of Brexiters throwing petrol and lit matches around and then screaming 'Fire!' in a crowded auditorium and rushing for the exit.
The real tragedy is that you think this is a clever and witty post.
The 100k personal allowance withdrawal policy was brought in during 2009.
It's not meant to be clever and witty. It's entirely serious in its sarcasm. Have you no idea how offensive the rush to the exit by the Brexiters is? They got what they wanted, now they want to leave the rest of us in their mess?
As for the 100K allowance, (a) the lower end needs to be sorted out with even greater urgency, and (b) who's been in power since 2010? Not the woke libtards you seem to blame.
I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
The problem is that "the rich" are now considered to be anyone earning more than 100k, which, post-inflation, is probably only equivalent to 70k a few years ago.
I've just been put on a K-code for FY24-25 which is a negative personal allowance- I.e. they artificially raise my income so I get to pay extra tax.
It's why I'm seriously eyeing up Canada, the US and Oz now, even though I don't want to.
I've been in this situation for years, yet despite being a woke lefty who no doubt hates Britain I am happy to contribute to our national coffers and have no intention of leaving. PB flag shaggers please explain!
Who isn't happy to contribute? But do you think there's no upper limit to that?
When you're paying 60% or 70% effective taxation then work doesn't pay.
Yeah it is annoying, I probably pay about 60-70% of my income in tax once you add up the income tax, NI, VAT, stamp duty etc etc. And for that I get crumbling and understaffed schools, doctors I can't get a appointment at, roads full of potholes, and police that are never around when kids are getting mugged in our neighbourhood. But that's what happens when you have a government that keeps making stupid decisions, from Brexit downwards. The solution is to get a government that's not venal and dumb, and stay and work hard and contribute so the country has a chance of improving. You seem to have a genuine love of your country (even though you seem to also hate some parts of it) so I am surprised you're ready to jack it all in and go somewhere else - especially when your lot have been in charge for all this time.
Which government brought in the 100k withdrawal policy?
This isn't a partisan dig by the way, but it wasn't this one - although I do blame this one for not reversing it - and I don't have much confidence in any government of any stripe to take the tough decisions needed.
It is a dumb policy, if you believe in progressive taxation as I do it is nonsensical for those on incomes around 100k to pay a higher marginal tax rate than those on 200k. It's also damaging for incentives to have such high marginal tax rates. My view is that the top rate of income tax+NIC should be 50% but not above. Your lot have had a very long time to sort this out, though!
The real problem is at the other end - a group who perhaps vote and engage rather less than the 100K volk.
IT + NI combined at 32% (going down to 30%) kicks in at approximately 12.5K. The long hours minimum wage person is receiving, gross about 23.5K, on which IT + NI is about 3.5K.
This of course is not the whole story, with our magnificent and Byzantine benefits system, but it is conceptually nuts to require significant tax off people working for the minimum wage. It is also of course nuts to tax working people much more aggressively than those who (like me) are not or no longer working.
Overlooked in the fuss over OpenAI's Sora is DeepMind's Gemini 1.5 Pro - which was unveiled, literally, 2 hours prior
In a very dfferent way it is equally incredible - it can process, summarise and extract information with stunning ease
eg To demo Gemini 1.5’s capabilities, Google fed it the entire 402 page transcript of the Apollo 11 mission. They then asked Gemini to find “three comedic moments” within that text.
It did so, in 30 seconds – eg it found astronaut Michael Collins “betting someone a cup of coffee”
This bears repeating, Google didn’t search for specific words, the researchers asked a machine to find “three funny bits” in 402 pages. It did so.
And this is my fave bit, they also showed Gemini a simple and rubbish drawing, apparently by a 4 year old, of what could be a treading boot. They asked Gemini to identify this moment in the document, using just the child-like drawing. Gemini correctly identified it as picturing the moment Neil Armstrong stepped on to the lunar surface
Deep Mind was another British firm sold to America (in this case, Google). Great for the founders; good for AI; bad for this country's long term prospects.
They are still very much based in London
"DeepMind is opening a huge new London headquarters in 2020 The Alphabet-owned artificial intelligence startup is expanding to an 11-storey building in Kings Cross"
Deep Mind is Britain's best hope of significant gain at the cutting edge of AI
Deep Mind is now American, as is its IP and any profits that will eventually result. If not Google, then it would have been Facebook or your mate Elon Musk who now owns it because Britain is chronically unable to fund and incubate innovative companies.
I'm not particularly disagreeing, I am refining your point
At least DeepMind are still in London, employing lots of people and plugging into the British knowledge economy. King's Cross in particular is a marvel of meda/tech/artistic/academic agglomeration
Ideally it would be all British but at least it remains partly British. London is possibly second as the global AI centre behind San Fran and the Valley?
I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
The problem is that "the rich" are now considered to be anyone earning more than 100k, which, post-inflation, is probably only equivalent to 70k a few years ago.
I've just been put on a K-code for FY24-25 which is a negative personal allowance- I.e. they artificially raise my income so I get to pay extra tax.
It's why I'm seriously eyeing up Canada, the US and Oz now, even though I don't want to.
Someone earning £100k is in the top 5% of earners in the UK.
This is where, I fear, the level of income on this forum being wildly out of sync with the vast majority of people leads to a huge bias against taxing and spending. Most people want more taxes on the richest people, not less.
The £100K trap that Casino mentions (withdrawing personal allowance gradually) is just weird, as it leads to a 60% tax rate in the £100-£125K bracket, before dropping back to 40% thereafter. I can't see any political or economic justification for it, and I must admit that in retirement year with an income of £120K I'm considering putting £20K into my pension pot to avoid it, as that will save me £12K tax (and I can then on retirment claim back £5K tax-free from the retirement pot, as well as getting higher pension from the rest). I've always despised people who go through elaborate maneouvres to pay less tax, but this particular one seems so daft that I'm tempted.
Simply having an extra band of say 43p from 100K would be much more logical and probably raise more cash too.
The problem is that the starting point was created in 2010 and hasn’t been changed since - if it had it would now be starting at something like £160,000
Overlooked in the fuss over OpenAI's Sora is DeepMind's Gemini 1.5 Pro - which was unveiled, literally, 2 hours prior
In a very dfferent way it is equally incredible - it can process, summarise and extract information with stunning ease
eg To demo Gemini 1.5’s capabilities, Google fed it the entire 402 page transcript of the Apollo 11 mission. They then asked Gemini to find “three comedic moments” within that text.
It did so, in 30 seconds – eg it found astronaut Michael Collins “betting someone a cup of coffee”
This bears repeating, Google didn’t search for specific words, the researchers asked a machine to find “three funny bits” in 402 pages. It did so.
And this is my fave bit, they also showed Gemini a simple and rubbish drawing, apparently by a 4 year old, of what could be a treading boot. They asked Gemini to identify this moment in the document, using just the child-like drawing. Gemini correctly identified it as picturing the moment Neil Armstrong stepped on to the lunar surface
Deep Mind was another British firm sold to America (in this case, Google). Great for the founders; good for AI; bad for this country's long term prospects.
They are still very much based in London
"DeepMind is opening a huge new London headquarters in 2020 The Alphabet-owned artificial intelligence startup is expanding to an 11-storey building in Kings Cross"
Deep Mind is Britain's best hope of significant gain at the cutting edge of AI
I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
The problem is that "the rich" are now considered to be anyone earning more than 100k, which, post-inflation, is probably only equivalent to 70k a few years ago.
I've just been put on a K-code for FY24-25 which is a negative personal allowance- I.e. they artificially raise my income so I get to pay extra tax.
It's why I'm seriously eyeing up Canada, the US and Oz now, even though I don't want to.
Someone earning £100k is in the top 5% of earners in the UK.
This is where, I fear, the level of income on this forum being wildly out of sync with the vast majority of people leads to a huge bias against taxing and spending. Most people want more taxes on the richest people, not less.
The £100K trap that Casino mentions (withdrawing personal allowance gradually) is just weird, as it leads to a 60% tax rate in the £100-£125K bracket, before dropping back to 40% thereafter. I can't see any political or economic justification for it, and I must admit that in retirement year with an income of £120K I'm considering putting £20K into my pension pot to avoid it, as that will save me £12K tax (and I can then on retirment claim back £5K tax-free from the retirement pot, as well as getting higher pension from the rest). I've always despised people who go through elaborate maneouvres to pay less tax, but this particular one seems so daft that I'm tempted.
Simply having an extra band of say 43p from 100K would be much more logical and probably raise more cash too.
I've been in that bracket a couple of times and yes it is peculiarly stupid and I have no idea why it hasn't been fixed. Sheer apathy? Some underhand reason we cannot see?
The outcome for me was different due to self employ etc but what a farce. This is yet another example of the Tories having 14 years to do stuff and pretty much doing fuck all
A lot of financial advice press and social media (eg Reddit) is taken up with people earning six figures checking how much they need to put into their pensions in order to reduce income tax (as Nick P) and retain child benefit.
It confounds absurdity on absurdity because, of course, not only does avoiding income tax mean less for the Treasury, Jeremy Hunt then has to hand them a big cheque for higher rate tax relief on their pension contributions, and the days when Conservatives wondered if the 1% even needed child benefits are long gone.
The first thing to fix in public services is staff retention. That will cost money upfront, but it is cheaper in the long run than ridiculous schemes where we pay the same people who have left, doing the same job, 3 or 4x their salary as contractors whilst losing control of their hours and creating understandable jealousy from the remaining permanent contracted staff. So because we don't want to pay them 7% more we pay a proportion of them 200-300% more and the others 4-5% more after long strikes.
It is an easy, if initially costly, fix, that does start saving money further down the line.
That would be my priority with any fiscal headroom.
Cutting out agencies in education would be a start. Their staff aren't paid any more, but the agency takes a huge cut. There are schools where nearly 50% of the TA's are agency on any given day. It's also hugely disruptive to the education. Pay TA's more than ALDI, and put them on contracts.
See also agency staffing within the NHS - and the cost is such that you really could significantly increase wages at no overall cost - I’ve seen calculations that show the junior doctors pay dispute could be settled in full it reduced agency spending by 70%
I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
The problem is that "the rich" are now considered to be anyone earning more than 100k, which, post-inflation, is probably only equivalent to 70k a few years ago.
I've just been put on a K-code for FY24-25 which is a negative personal allowance- I.e. they artificially raise my income so I get to pay extra tax.
It's why I'm seriously eyeing up Canada, the US and Oz now, even though I don't want to.
Someone earning £100k is in the top 5% of earners in the UK.
This is where, I fear, the level of income on this forum being wildly out of sync with the vast majority of people leads to a huge bias against taxing and spending. Most people want more taxes on the richest people, not less.
The £100K trap that Casino mentions (withdrawing personal allowance gradually) is just weird, as it leads to a 60% tax rate in the £100-£125K bracket, before dropping back to 40% thereafter. I can't see any political or economic justification for it, and I must admit that in retirement year with an income of £120K I'm considering putting £20K into my pension pot to avoid it, as that will save me £12K tax (and I can then on retirment claim back £5K tax-free from the retirement pot, as well as getting higher pension from the rest). I've always despised people who go through elaborate maneouvres to pay less tax, but this particular one seems so daft that I'm tempted.
Simply having an extra band of say 43p from 100K would be much more logical and probably raise more cash too.
If even our resident lefty thinks it's daft, then why hasn't it been addressed ?
The rest of us who earn less than £100k don't really care about it, I guess. But it does seem a ridiculous distortion, and counterproductive if it's driving away the Casinos.
I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
The problem is that "the rich" are now considered to be anyone earning more than 100k, which, post-inflation, is probably only equivalent to 70k a few years ago.
I've just been put on a K-code for FY24-25 which is a negative personal allowance- I.e. they artificially raise my income so I get to pay extra tax.
It's why I'm seriously eyeing up Canada, the US and Oz now, even though I don't want to.
Someone earning £100k is in the top 5% of earners in the UK.
This is where, I fear, the level of income on this forum being wildly out of sync with the vast majority of people leads to a huge bias against taxing and spending. Most people want more taxes on the richest people, not less.
The £100K trap that Casino mentions (withdrawing personal allowance gradually) is just weird, as it leads to a 60% tax rate in the £100-£125K bracket, before dropping back to 40% thereafter. I can't see any political or economic justification for it, and I must admit that in retirement year with an income of £120K I'm considering putting £20K into my pension pot to avoid it, as that will save me £12K tax (and I can then on retirment claim back £5K tax-free from the retirement pot, as well as getting higher pension from the rest). I've always despised people who go through elaborate maneouvres to pay less tax, but this particular one seems so daft that I'm tempted.
Simply having an extra band of say 43p from 100K would be much more logical and probably raise more cash too.
I've been in that bracket a couple of times and yes it is peculiarly stupid and I have no idea why it hasn't been fixed. Sheer apathy? Some underhand reason we cannot see?
The outcome for me was different due to self employ etc but what a farce. This is yet another example of the Tories having 14 years to do stuff and pretty much doing fuck all
A lot of financial advice press and social media (eg Reddit) is taken up with people earning six figures checking how much they need to put into their pensions in order to reduce income tax (as Nick P) and retain child benefit.
It confounds absurdity on absurdity because, of course, not only does avoiding income tax mean less for the Treasury, Jeremy Hunt then has to hand them a big cheque for higher rate tax relief on their pension contributions, and the days when Conservatives wondered if the 1% even needed child benefits are long gone.
Yes. Which is why it is stupefying they haven't fixed it in a decade and a half, which makes me think there must be some weird reason we cannot perceive
It's not like it would be wildly unpopular, it's finessing the tax code, it would barely be noticed
I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
The problem is that "the rich" are now considered to be anyone earning more than 100k, which, post-inflation, is probably only equivalent to 70k a few years ago.
I've just been put on a K-code for FY24-25 which is a negative personal allowance- I.e. they artificially raise my income so I get to pay extra tax.
It's why I'm seriously eyeing up Canada, the US and Oz now, even though I don't want to.
I’m also on a K code - which is ironic because it’s only there as HMRC have made invalid assumptions. Come April 6th HMRC owe me £5000
I'm on a K code too. But it won't encourage me to emigrate. It might encourage me to give more to charity as the cost to me will be very little but the benefit to the charity will be large. Now which one?
I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
The problem is that "the rich" are now considered to be anyone earning more than 100k, which, post-inflation, is probably only equivalent to 70k a few years ago.
I've just been put on a K-code for FY24-25 which is a negative personal allowance- I.e. they artificially raise my income so I get to pay extra tax.
It's why I'm seriously eyeing up Canada, the US and Oz now, even though I don't want to.
Someone earning £100k is in the top 5% of earners in the UK.
This is where, I fear, the level of income on this forum being wildly out of sync with the vast majority of people leads to a huge bias against taxing and spending. Most people want more taxes on the richest people, not less.
The £100K trap that Casino mentions (withdrawing personal allowance gradually) is just weird, as it leads to a 60% tax rate in the £100-£125K bracket, before dropping back to 40% thereafter. I can't see any political or economic justification for it, and I must admit that in retirement year with an income of £120K I'm considering putting £20K into my pension pot to avoid it, as that will save me £12K tax (and I can then on retirment claim back £5K tax-free from the retirement pot, as well as getting higher pension from the rest). I've always despised people who go through elaborate maneouvres to pay less tax, but this particular one seems so daft that I'm tempted.
Simply having an extra band of say 43p from 100K would be much more logical and probably raise more cash too.
I've been in that bracket a couple of times and yes it is peculiarly stupid and I have no idea why it hasn't been fixed. Sheer apathy? Some underhand reason we cannot see?
The outcome for me was different due to self employ etc but what a farce. This is yet another example of the Tories having 14 years to do stuff and pretty much doing fuck all
A lot of financial advice press and social media (eg Reddit) is taken up with people earning six figures checking how much they need to put into their pensions in order to reduce income tax (as Nick P) and retain child benefit.
It confounds absurdity on absurdity because, of course, not only does avoiding income tax mean less for the Treasury, Jeremy Hunt then has to hand them a big cheque for higher rate tax relief on their pension contributions, and the days when Conservatives wondered if the 1% even needed child benefits are long gone.
I think someone earning six figures would struggle to hold onto child benefit.
I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
The problem is that "the rich" are now considered to be anyone earning more than 100k, which, post-inflation, is probably only equivalent to 70k a few years ago.
I've just been put on a K-code for FY24-25 which is a negative personal allowance- I.e. they artificially raise my income so I get to pay extra tax.
It's why I'm seriously eyeing up Canada, the US and Oz now, even though I don't want to.
Someone earning £100k is in the top 5% of earners in the UK.
This is where, I fear, the level of income on this forum being wildly out of sync with the vast majority of people leads to a huge bias against taxing and spending. Most people want more taxes on the richest people, not less.
The £100K trap that Casino mentions (withdrawing personal allowance gradually) is just weird, as it leads to a 60% tax rate in the £100-£125K bracket, before dropping back to 40% thereafter. I can't see any political or economic justification for it, and I must admit that in retirement year with an income of £120K I'm considering putting £20K into my pension pot to avoid it, as that will save me £12K tax (and I can then on retirment claim back £5K tax-free from the retirement pot, as well as getting higher pension from the rest). I've always despised people who go through elaborate maneouvres to pay less tax, but this particular one seems so daft that I'm tempted.
Simply having an extra band of say 43p from 100K would be much more logical and probably raise more cash too.
I've been in that bracket a couple of times and yes it is peculiarly stupid and I have no idea why it hasn't been fixed. Sheer apathy? Some underhand reason we cannot see?
The outcome for me was different due to self employ etc but what a farce. This is yet another example of the Tories having 14 years to do stuff and pretty much doing fuck all
A lot of financial advice press and social media (eg Reddit) is taken up with people earning six figures checking how much they need to put into their pensions in order to reduce income tax (as Nick P) and retain child benefit.
It confounds absurdity on absurdity because, of course, not only does avoiding income tax mean less for the Treasury, Jeremy Hunt then has to hand them a big cheque for higher rate tax relief on their pension contributions, and the days when Conservatives wondered if the 1% even needed child benefits are long gone.
Yes. Which is why it is stupefying they haven't fixed it in a decade and a half, which makes me think there must be some weird reason we cannot perceive
It's not like it would be wildly unpopular, it's finessing the tax code, it would barely be noticed
Why do something that would barely be noticed when you can be in the Daily Mail promising something undeliverable or blaming your civil servants instead?
I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
The problem is that "the rich" are now considered to be anyone earning more than 100k, which, post-inflation, is probably only equivalent to 70k a few years ago.
I've just been put on a K-code for FY24-25 which is a negative personal allowance- I.e. they artificially raise my income so I get to pay extra tax.
It's why I'm seriously eyeing up Canada, the US and Oz now, even though I don't want to.
Someone earning £100k is in the top 5% of earners in the UK.
This is where, I fear, the level of income on this forum being wildly out of sync with the vast majority of people leads to a huge bias against taxing and spending. Most people want more taxes on the richest people, not less.
The £100K trap that Casino mentions (withdrawing personal allowance gradually) is just weird, as it leads to a 60% tax rate in the £100-£125K bracket, before dropping back to 40% thereafter. I can't see any political or economic justification for it, and I must admit that in retirement year with an income of £120K I'm considering putting £20K into my pension pot to avoid it, as that will save me £12K tax (and I can then on retirment claim back £5K tax-free from the retirement pot, as well as getting higher pension from the rest). I've always despised people who go through elaborate maneouvres to pay less tax, but this particular one seems so daft that I'm tempted.
Simply having an extra band of say 43p from 100K would be much more logical and probably raise more cash too.
I've been in that bracket a couple of times and yes it is peculiarly stupid and I have no idea why it hasn't been fixed. Sheer apathy? Some underhand reason we cannot see?
The outcome for me was different due to self employ etc but what a farce. This is yet another example of the Tories having 14 years to do stuff and pretty much doing fuck all
Oh, they've done a lot. Just nothing very much that's productive.
The first thing to fix in public services is staff retention. That will cost money upfront, but it is cheaper in the long run than ridiculous schemes where we pay the same people who have left, doing the same job, 3 or 4x their salary as contractors whilst losing control of their hours and creating understandable jealousy from the remaining permanent contracted staff. So because we don't want to pay them 7% more we pay a proportion of them 200-300% more and the others 4-5% more after long strikes.
It is an easy, if initially costly, fix, that does start saving money further down the line.
That would be my priority with any fiscal headroom.
Cutting out agencies in education would be a start. Their staff aren't paid any more, but the agency takes a huge cut. There are schools where nearly 50% of the TA's are agency on any given day. It's also hugely disruptive to the education. Pay TA's more than ALDI, and put them on contracts.
It seems agency working is an expensive issue across multiple government departments, especially healthcare. Investing in long term stable careers and retention for important public sector workers could really help both with cost and productivity.
When we pay tax and then government departments spend that revenue on agency workers we're essentially paying the private cost of a service but with the double bureaucracy of the agency and the government, and with none of the economies of scale we should get from a state monopoly. Worst of both worlds.
Flexibility (or its icky new version "agility") has been trendy in the UK business world for several years now and in my view has done a lot of damage. It encourages gig jobs and amateurism and dis-incentivises businesses to invest in training and skills. It's surely part of our low productivity puzzle.
I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
The problem is that "the rich" are now considered to be anyone earning more than 100k, which, post-inflation, is probably only equivalent to 70k a few years ago.
I've just been put on a K-code for FY24-25 which is a negative personal allowance- I.e. they artificially raise my income so I get to pay extra tax.
It's why I'm seriously eyeing up Canada, the US and Oz now, even though I don't want to.
I’m also on a K code - which is ironic because it’s only there as HMRC have made invalid assumptions. Come April 6th HMRC owe me £5000
I'm on a K code too. But it won't encourage me to emigrate. It might encourage me to give more to charity as the cost to me will be very little but the benefit to the charity will be large. Now which one?
I understand the Donald J Trump Foundation are a bit short at the moment.
I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
The problem is that "the rich" are now considered to be anyone earning more than 100k, which, post-inflation, is probably only equivalent to 70k a few years ago.
I've just been put on a K-code for FY24-25 which is a negative personal allowance- I.e. they artificially raise my income so I get to pay extra tax.
It's why I'm seriously eyeing up Canada, the US and Oz now, even though I don't want to.
Someone earning £100k is in the top 5% of earners in the UK.
This is where, I fear, the level of income on this forum being wildly out of sync with the vast majority of people leads to a huge bias against taxing and spending. Most people want more taxes on the richest people, not less.
The £100K trap that Casino mentions (withdrawing personal allowance gradually) is just weird, as it leads to a 60% tax rate in the £100-£125K bracket, before dropping back to 40% thereafter. I can't see any political or economic justification for it, and I must admit that in retirement year with an income of £120K I'm considering putting £20K into my pension pot to avoid it, as that will save me £12K tax (and I can then on retirment claim back £5K tax-free from the retirement pot, as well as getting higher pension from the rest). I've always despised people who go through elaborate maneouvres to pay less tax, but this particular one seems so daft that I'm tempted.
Simply having an extra band of say 43p from 100K would be much more logical and probably raise more cash too.
I agree there is no logic behind it. I suspect it was originally sloppy innumerate thinking in the Treasury, but they must be aware of it by now. Reform it.
Overlooked in the fuss over OpenAI's Sora is DeepMind's Gemini 1.5 Pro - which was unveiled, literally, 2 hours prior
In a very dfferent way it is equally incredible - it can process, summarise and extract information with stunning ease
eg To demo Gemini 1.5’s capabilities, Google fed it the entire 402 page transcript of the Apollo 11 mission. They then asked Gemini to find “three comedic moments” within that text.
It did so, in 30 seconds – eg it found astronaut Michael Collins “betting someone a cup of coffee”
This bears repeating, Google didn’t search for specific words, the researchers asked a machine to find “three funny bits” in 402 pages. It did so.
And this is my fave bit, they also showed Gemini a simple and rubbish drawing, apparently by a 4 year old, of what could be a treading boot. They asked Gemini to identify this moment in the document, using just the child-like drawing. Gemini correctly identified it as picturing the moment Neil Armstrong stepped on to the lunar surface
Deep Mind was another British firm sold to America (in this case, Google). Great for the founders; good for AI; bad for this country's long term prospects.
They are still very much based in London
"DeepMind is opening a huge new London headquarters in 2020 The Alphabet-owned artificial intelligence startup is expanding to an 11-storey building in Kings Cross"
Deep Mind is Britain's best hope of significant gain at the cutting edge of AI
I read yesterday that property value in Westminster has gone down 21%. I can't immediately find the article but a good time to buy in Soho.
As a London property owner I do not like this (tho Camden isn't quite as bad as Westminster or Ken/Chelsea) however, ultimately, this is probably good for London
The city was pricing out everyone bar the bankers and fintech people and the already-propertied oldies. Anyone creative was being forced to leave, esp the young
If prices fall, youth and dynamism returns. Twas ever thus. London was brilliantly exciting, and creative, in the 80s nd 90s when it was still relatively cheap and young people could live near the centre
I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
The problem is that "the rich" are now considered to be anyone earning more than 100k, which, post-inflation, is probably only equivalent to 70k a few years ago.
I've just been put on a K-code for FY24-25 which is a negative personal allowance- I.e. they artificially raise my income so I get to pay extra tax.
It's why I'm seriously eyeing up Canada, the US and Oz now, even though I don't want to.
Someone earning £100k is in the top 5% of earners in the UK.
This is where, I fear, the level of income on this forum being wildly out of sync with the vast majority of people leads to a huge bias against taxing and spending. Most people want more taxes on the richest people, not less.
The £100K trap that Casino mentions (withdrawing personal allowance gradually) is just weird, as it leads to a 60% tax rate in the £100-£125K bracket, before dropping back to 40% thereafter. I can't see any political or economic justification for it, and I must admit that in retirement year with an income of £120K I'm considering putting £20K into my pension pot to avoid it, as that will save me £12K tax (and I can then on retirment claim back £5K tax-free from the retirement pot, as well as getting higher pension from the rest). I've always despised people who go through elaborate maneouvres to pay less tax, but this particular one seems so daft that I'm tempted.
Simply having an extra band of say 43p from 100K would be much more logical and probably raise more cash too.
The problem is that the starting point was created in 2010 and hasn’t been changed since - if it had it would now be starting at something like £160,000
No, the problem is that it's a way of raising revenue that most people - including many who pay it - don't see or don't fully understand. Whereas the more sensible, honest, transparent way of raising the same revenue from higher earners would be, well...transparent. So no politician will put right an obvious nonsense.
I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
The problem is that "the rich" are now considered to be anyone earning more than 100k, which, post-inflation, is probably only equivalent to 70k a few years ago.
I've just been put on a K-code for FY24-25 which is a negative personal allowance- I.e. they artificially raise my income so I get to pay extra tax.
It's why I'm seriously eyeing up Canada, the US and Oz now, even though I don't want to.
Someone earning £100k is in the top 5% of earners in the UK.
This is where, I fear, the level of income on this forum being wildly out of sync with the vast majority of people leads to a huge bias against taxing and spending. Most people want more taxes on the richest people, not less.
The £100K trap that Casino mentions (withdrawing personal allowance gradually) is just weird, as it leads to a 60% tax rate in the £100-£125K bracket, before dropping back to 40% thereafter. I can't see any political or economic justification for it, and I must admit that in retirement year with an income of £120K I'm considering putting £20K into my pension pot to avoid it, as that will save me £12K tax (and I can then on retirment claim back £5K tax-free from the retirement pot, as well as getting higher pension from the rest). I've always despised people who go through elaborate maneouvres to pay less tax, but this particular one seems so daft that I'm tempted.
Simply having an extra band of say 43p from 100K would be much more logical and probably raise more cash too.
I've been in that bracket a couple of times and yes it is peculiarly stupid and I have no idea why it hasn't been fixed. Sheer apathy? Some underhand reason we cannot see?
The outcome for me was different due to self employ etc but what a farce. This is yet another example of the Tories having 14 years to do stuff and pretty much doing fuck all
A lot of financial advice press and social media (eg Reddit) is taken up with people earning six figures checking how much they need to put into their pensions in order to reduce income tax (as Nick P) and retain child benefit.
It confounds absurdity on absurdity because, of course, not only does avoiding income tax mean less for the Treasury, Jeremy Hunt then has to hand them a big cheque for higher rate tax relief on their pension contributions, and the days when Conservatives wondered if the 1% even needed child benefits are long gone.
I think someone earning six figures would struggle to hold onto child benefit.
The conventional struggle seems to be pension contributions via salary sacrifice in order to sit just below £100,000.
I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
The problem is that "the rich" are now considered to be anyone earning more than 100k, which, post-inflation, is probably only equivalent to 70k a few years ago.
I've just been put on a K-code for FY24-25 which is a negative personal allowance- I.e. they artificially raise my income so I get to pay extra tax.
It's why I'm seriously eyeing up Canada, the US and Oz now, even though I don't want to.
Earning more than £100k, or the equivalent of £70k, sure sounds like "rich" to me. £70k in 2021 would put you in the top 7% by income. If the top 7% in this country aren't rich, who are?
I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
The problem is that "the rich" are now considered to be anyone earning more than 100k, which, post-inflation, is probably only equivalent to 70k a few years ago.
I've just been put on a K-code for FY24-25 which is a negative personal allowance- I.e. they artificially raise my income so I get to pay extra tax.
It's why I'm seriously eyeing up Canada, the US and Oz now, even though I don't want to.
Someone earning £100k is in the top 5% of earners in the UK.
This is where, I fear, the level of income on this forum being wildly out of sync with the vast majority of people leads to a huge bias against taxing and spending. Most people want more taxes on the richest people, not less.
The £100K trap that Casino mentions (withdrawing personal allowance gradually) is just weird, as it leads to a 60% tax rate in the £100-£125K bracket, before dropping back to 40% thereafter. I can't see any political or economic justification for it, and I must admit that in retirement year with an income of £120K I'm considering putting £20K into my pension pot to avoid it, as that will save me £12K tax (and I can then on retirment claim back £5K tax-free from the retirement pot, as well as getting higher pension from the rest). I've always despised people who go through elaborate maneouvres to pay less tax, but this particular one seems so daft that I'm tempted.
Simply having an extra band of say 43p from 100K would be much more logical and probably raise more cash too.
The problem is that the starting point was created in 2010 and hasn’t been changed since - if it had it would now be starting at something like £160,000
No, the problem is that it's a way of raising revenue that most people - including many who pay it - don't see or don't fully understand. Whereas the more sensible, honest, transparent way of raising the same revenue from higher earners would be, well...transparent. So no politician will put right an obvious nonsense.
For many people who pay it it isn't an issue, if you earn above the point at which the clawback is done you face a lower marginal tax rate and it doesn't really affect your thinking even though you are paying it. Those really affected in the sense of paying the marginal rate are a relatively small group, but it is a dumb policy that Labour should never have introduced and which the Tories should have got rid of. The problem is the Tories are no longer the party of the six figure earner, they are the party of the seven or eight figure earner, plus "stop the boats" to distract people from this fact.
Median salary in the UK is less than £30k. If people here are complaining about taxes generally and the £100k tax bracket specifically I'll get out my tiny tiny violin. I'm sure you find it annoying that the numbers don't make sense to you but have you considered instead that in work poverty has sky rocketed over the last decade and that may be a bigger issue than whether by some quirk of accountancy if you get paid slightly less you actually get paid more?
The annual allowance is tapered (reduced) for higher earners. It is reduced by £1 for every £2 someone earns over £260,000 (including pension contributions). Tapering stops when the annual allowance reaches £10,000.
The first thing to fix in public services is staff retention. That will cost money upfront, but it is cheaper in the long run than ridiculous schemes where we pay the same people who have left, doing the same job, 3 or 4x their salary as contractors whilst losing control of their hours and creating understandable jealousy from the remaining permanent contracted staff. So because we don't want to pay them 7% more we pay a proportion of them 200-300% more and the others 4-5% more after long strikes.
It is an easy, if initially costly, fix, that does start saving money further down the line.
That would be my priority with any fiscal headroom.
I think what we all implicitly recognise is that the quality of public sector work is, to say the least, pretty variable. In Scotland we have over 600,000 public sector employees and I may say that in my dealings with, for example, Scottish Enterprise, I see precious little that they do that could not be done better by local government or chambers of commerce. It is that lack of efficiency in public administration that irks most of us. Bureaucratic, process driven, but worst of all, mostly utterly ineffective. In the NHS the budget for frontline doctors and nurses is squeezed by administration costs which are wildly out of line with the overall costs. In education the budget for school buildings is insufficient for capital maintenance. Everyone who has dealings with UK public administration has tales of woe. As for infrastructure, well, we have already debated to death the shocking administration of the transport department.
We need a strategic reset in the whole civil service, analogous to the Haldane report after World War One. Given the political sensitivity, I cannot help feeling that we should start this with an all party Royal Commission or Irish style citizens assemblies that spends 18 months reviewing and proposing a coherent programme of administrative reform. While they are about it, a similar Royal commission for local government might be a good idea too.
The off the cuff policy formation by unaccountable and opaquely funded self interested right wing think tanks is what has driven the Tories onto the rocks. We now need citizens assemblies and royal commissions to bring the debate about administration into the public and accountable domain.
On topic, you need to be very careful about tax and spend polling, as you get wildly different results depending on how the question is framed. This one has an element of "Do you believe the Government should prioritise public services... or are you a selfish arsehole?"
If Hunt does go for tax cuts, he's not going to frame it as, "I'm sacking nurses so bankers can have extra jam!" He'll say something like, "We're targeting waste, and have an economic plan that is working, so I'm delighted to be able to say that, as well as record spending on schools and hospitals, I can give something back to you, the hardworking families of Britain."
Others will try to frame it differently, of course - but Hunt gets first go at it, and has a fair bit of the press onside.
Additionally, Conservatives will reason, not without justification, that people are in fact rather more selfish than they admit to pollsters.
I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
The problem is that "the rich" are now considered to be anyone earning more than 100k, which, post-inflation, is probably only equivalent to 70k a few years ago.
I've just been put on a K-code for FY24-25 which is a negative personal allowance- I.e. they artificially raise my income so I get to pay extra tax.
It's why I'm seriously eyeing up Canada, the US and Oz now, even though I don't want to.
I've been in this situation for years, yet despite being a woke lefty who no doubt hates Britain I am happy to contribute to our national coffers and have no intention of leaving. PB flag shaggers please explain!
One has to try not to get knocked down in the Gadarene stampede of Brexiters throwing petrol and lit matches around and then screaming 'Fire!' in a crowded auditorium and rushing for the exit.
The real tragedy is that you think this is a clever and witty post.
The 100k personal allowance withdrawal policy was brought in during 2009.
It's not meant to be clever and witty. It's entirely serious in its sarcasm. Have you no idea how offensive the rush to the exit by the Brexiters is? They got what they wanted, now they want to leave the rest of us in their mess?
As for the 100K allowance, (a) the lower end needs to be sorted out with even greater urgency, and (b) who's been in power since 2010? Not the woke libtards you seem to blame.
The only person mentioning Brexit and woke libtards is you. I'm surprised your resident anglophobia hasn't crept into this yet, but no doubt that's coming.
The 100k allowance withdrawal policy was introduced by the Brown government, which you seem to reluctantly admit, and, yes, I have criticised the present administration for not reversing it.
It must be sad living inside your head in an endless sea of blind prejudice and scapegoats. Maybe consider getting some help.
I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
The problem is that "the rich" are now considered to be anyone earning more than 100k, which, post-inflation, is probably only equivalent to 70k a few years ago.
I've just been put on a K-code for FY24-25 which is a negative personal allowance- I.e. they artificially raise my income so I get to pay extra tax.
It's why I'm seriously eyeing up Canada, the US and Oz now, even though I don't want to.
Someone earning £100k is in the top 5% of earners in the UK.
This is where, I fear, the level of income on this forum being wildly out of sync with the vast majority of people leads to a huge bias against taxing and spending. Most people want more taxes on the richest people, not less.
The £100K trap that Casino mentions (withdrawing personal allowance gradually) is just weird, as it leads to a 60% tax rate in the £100-£125K bracket, before dropping back to 40% thereafter. I can't see any political or economic justification for it, and I must admit that in retirement year with an income of £120K I'm considering putting £20K into my pension pot to avoid it, as that will save me £12K tax (and I can then on retirment claim back £5K tax-free from the retirement pot, as well as getting higher pension from the rest). I've always despised people who go through elaborate maneouvres to pay less tax, but this particular one seems so daft that I'm tempted.
Simply having an extra band of say 43p from 100K would be much more logical and probably raise more cash too.
I agree there is no logic behind it. I suspect it was originally sloppy innumerate thinking in the Treasury, but they must be aware of it by now. Reform it.
The logic was to enable an increase in the personal allowance, without sharing the benefit of that increase with the highest earners.
It was a deplorable bit of divisive politics, and typical of the sleight of hand orthodoxy that has prevailed at the Treasury for as long as I've been able to keep an eye on them (Brown onwards, but older PBers will be able to confirm how many centuries back this goes).
I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
The problem is that "the rich" are now considered to be anyone earning more than 100k, which, post-inflation, is probably only equivalent to 70k a few years ago.
I've just been put on a K-code for FY24-25 which is a negative personal allowance- I.e. they artificially raise my income so I get to pay extra tax.
It's why I'm seriously eyeing up Canada, the US and Oz now, even though I don't want to.
Someone earning £100k is in the top 5% of earners in the UK.
This is where, I fear, the level of income on this forum being wildly out of sync with the vast majority of people leads to a huge bias against taxing and spending. Most people want more taxes on the richest people, not less.
The £100K trap that Casino mentions (withdrawing personal allowance gradually) is just weird, as it leads to a 60% tax rate in the £100-£125K bracket, before dropping back to 40% thereafter. I can't see any political or economic justification for it, and I must admit that in retirement year with an income of £120K I'm considering putting £20K into my pension pot to avoid it, as that will save me £12K tax (and I can then on retirment claim back £5K tax-free from the retirement pot, as well as getting higher pension from the rest). I've always despised people who go through elaborate maneouvres to pay less tax, but this particular one seems so daft that I'm tempted.
Simply having an extra band of say 43p from 100K would be much more logical and probably raise more cash too.
The problem is that the starting point was created in 2010 and hasn’t been changed since - if it had it would now be starting at something like £160,000
No, the problem is that it's a way of raising revenue that most people - including many who pay it - don't see or don't fully understand. Whereas the more sensible, honest, transparent way of raising the same revenue from higher earners would be, well...transparent. So no politician will put right an obvious nonsense.
For many people who pay it it isn't an issue, if you earn above the point at which the clawback is done you face a lower marginal tax rate and it doesn't really affect your thinking even though you are paying it. Those really affected in the sense of paying the marginal rate are a relatively small group, but it is a dumb policy that Labour should never have introduced and which the Tories should have got rid of. The problem is the Tories are no longer the party of the six figure earner, they are the party of the seven or eight figure earner, plus "stop the boats" to distract people from this fact.
I don't think the Tories are the party of anything any more, they are the party of "er, what the fuck shall we do now"
They are entirely and literally clueless and they need to go into Opposition to regroup and renew, it is obvious
The great fear is that Labour are equally bereft of ideas, and possibly worse, because they will try and hide this with Wokeness. I mean, another fox hunting law, really? That's it? And another equality act to prevent racial discrimination which is already illegal?
This is dismal. And a bleak outlook for the country
I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
The problem is that "the rich" are now considered to be anyone earning more than 100k, which, post-inflation, is probably only equivalent to 70k a few years ago.
I've just been put on a K-code for FY24-25 which is a negative personal allowance- I.e. they artificially raise my income so I get to pay extra tax.
It's why I'm seriously eyeing up Canada, the US and Oz now, even though I don't want to.
Someone earning £100k is in the top 5% of earners in the UK.
This is where, I fear, the level of income on this forum being wildly out of sync with the vast majority of people leads to a huge bias against taxing and spending. Most people want more taxes on the richest people, not less.
The £100K trap that Casino mentions (withdrawing personal allowance gradually) is just weird, as it leads to a 60% tax rate in the £100-£125K bracket, before dropping back to 40% thereafter. I can't see any political or economic justification for it, and I must admit that in retirement year with an income of £120K I'm considering putting £20K into my pension pot to avoid it, as that will save me £12K tax (and I can then on retirment claim back £5K tax-free from the retirement pot, as well as getting higher pension from the rest). I've always despised people who go through elaborate maneouvres to pay less tax, but this particular one seems so daft that I'm tempted.
Simply having an extra band of say 43p from 100K would be much more logical and probably raise more cash too.
The problem is that the starting point was created in 2010 and hasn’t been changed since - if it had it would now be starting at something like £160,000
No, the problem is that it's a way of raising revenue that most people - including many who pay it - don't see or don't fully understand. Whereas the more sensible, honest, transparent way of raising the same revenue from higher earners would be, well...transparent. So no politician will put right an obvious nonsense.
For many people who pay it it isn't an issue, if you earn above the point at which the clawback is done you face a lower marginal tax rate and it doesn't really affect your thinking even though you are paying it. Those really affected in the sense of paying the marginal rate are a relatively small group, but it is a dumb policy that Labour should never have introduced and which the Tories should have got rid of. The problem is the Tories are no longer the party of the six figure earner, they are the party of the seven or eight figure earner, plus "stop the boats" to distract people from this fact.
It is an issue because what happens is that people who can afford it chuck it into their pensions (so HMG doesn't get the tax anyway) or they reduce their hours to 3 or 4 days a week to stay beneath the 100k threshold.
Either way, the policy deters both work and revenue.
On topic, you need to be very careful about tax and spend polling, as you get wildly different results depending on how the question is framed. This one has an element of "Do you believe the Government should prioritise public services... or are you a selfish arsehole?"
If Hunt does go for tax cuts, he's not going to frame it as, "I'm sacking nurses so bankers can have extra jam!" He'll say something like, "We're targeting waste, and have an economic plan that is working, so I'm delighted to be able to say that, as well as record spending on schools and hospitals, I can give something back to you, the hardworking families of Britain."
Others will try to frame it differently, of course - but Hunt gets first go at it, and has a fair bit of the press onside.
Additionally, Conservatives will reason, not without justification, that people are in fact rather more selfish than they admit to pollsters.
I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
The problem is that "the rich" are now considered to be anyone earning more than 100k, which, post-inflation, is probably only equivalent to 70k a few years ago.
I've just been put on a K-code for FY24-25 which is a negative personal allowance- I.e. they artificially raise my income so I get to pay extra tax.
It's why I'm seriously eyeing up Canada, the US and Oz now, even though I don't want to.
I've been in this situation for years, yet despite being a woke lefty who no doubt hates Britain I am happy to contribute to our national coffers and have no intention of leaving. PB flag shaggers please explain!
One has to try not to get knocked down in the Gadarene stampede of Brexiters throwing petrol and lit matches around and then screaming 'Fire!' in a crowded auditorium and rushing for the exit.
The real tragedy is that you think this is a clever and witty post.
The 100k personal allowance withdrawal policy was brought in during 2009.
It's not meant to be clever and witty. It's entirely serious in its sarcasm. Have you no idea how offensive the rush to the exit by the Brexiters is? They got what they wanted, now they want to leave the rest of us in their mess?
As for the 100K allowance, (a) the lower end needs to be sorted out with even greater urgency, and (b) who's been in power since 2010? Not the woke libtards you seem to blame.
The only person mentioning Brexit and woke libtards is you. I'm surprised your resident anglophobia hasn't crept into this yet, but no doubt that's coming.
The 100k allowance withdrawal policy was introduced by the Brown government, which you seem to reluctantly admit, and, yes, I have criticised the present administration for not reversing it.
It must be sad living inside your head in an endless sea of blind prejudice and scapegoats. Maybe consider getting some help.
Two things are true: 1. We are living with the costs of Brexit. Realised, genuine costs. Trying to import the food we need to eat is slow and expensive post 31st January and its only going to get slower and more expensive from here 2. Voters have moved on from Brexit, so "Remainer" and "Brexiteer" labels are redundant.
Brexit doesn't pay your bills - few people are so triggered by it as to change their vote accordingly now.
Isn't the answer to marginal tax woes quite simply to salary sacrifice more into your pension ?
High earners can only put £10k in their pension and obtain tax benefits (it was just £4k until this year).
And the lifetime allowance which only disappeared last year meant that from a certain age you needed to be careful what you invested for fear of future growth breaching the cap.
The 1.5m LTA sounded high but at annuity rates prevailing until last year’s inflation surge that meant a pension of about £50k before tax, or as low as £35k if you wanted to index-link it and provide a spousal income after death.
Isn't the answer to marginal tax woes quite simply to salary sacrifice more into your pension ?
I mean the annual allowance is 60 grand a year !
Yes, time and time again I get this advice, but with two kids, a mortgage and big bills to pay I need the money now.
It's a choice between deferring near 100% for at least 15 years (and getting nothing now) and taking a 60% haircut, but getting 40% now.
Maybe you should just live within your means - stop buying avocado toast and such. That's the advice that always seems to come to my generation when we complain about our income being shit. Bootstraps, pull them up by, etc.
Given the amount Hunt has taken they are hardly tax cuts. A small rebate might be nearer the mark.
Yes. And people know this. They spun that they put through a tax cut in January. Cut? From a previous proposal, maybe. But in practice? Taxes went up. So when Tories keep talking up tax cuts voters assume they are stupid, or lying, or increasingly both.
Unfortunately the country is full of stupid people.
Median salary in the UK is less than £30k. If people here are complaining about taxes generally and the £100k tax bracket specifically I'll get out my tiny tiny violin. I'm sure you find it annoying that the numbers don't make sense to you but have you considered instead that in work poverty has sky rocketed over the last decade and that may be a bigger issue than whether by some quirk of accountancy if you get paid slightly less you actually get paid more?
My business turns over north of £100k and yet I argue for the interests of the people on median salary and below. Why? Because I'm not a total stard. Point is though that the £100k tax ceiling is just as mental as the UC tax ceiling which prevents people from working more hours below the median.
Tax policy in general is the problem, not specifics. We need to incentivise people to work, and have work pay. And yet we provide huge subsidies to employers to keep employees on poverty wages...
I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
The problem is that "the rich" are now considered to be anyone earning more than 100k, which, post-inflation, is probably only equivalent to 70k a few years ago.
I've just been put on a K-code for FY24-25 which is a negative personal allowance- I.e. they artificially raise my income so I get to pay extra tax.
It's why I'm seriously eyeing up Canada, the US and Oz now, even though I don't want to.
Someone earning £100k is in the top 5% of earners in the UK.
This is where, I fear, the level of income on this forum being wildly out of sync with the vast majority of people leads to a huge bias against taxing and spending. Most people want more taxes on the richest people, not less.
The £100K trap that Casino mentions (withdrawing personal allowance gradually) is just weird, as it leads to a 60% tax rate in the £100-£125K bracket, before dropping back to 40% thereafter. I can't see any political or economic justification for it, and I must admit that in retirement year with an income of £120K I'm considering putting £20K into my pension pot to avoid it, as that will save me £12K tax (and I can then on retirment claim back £5K tax-free from the retirement pot, as well as getting higher pension from the rest). I've always despised people who go through elaborate maneouvres to pay less tax, but this particular one seems so daft that I'm tempted.
Simply having an extra band of say 43p from 100K would be much more logical and probably raise more cash too.
The problem is that the starting point was created in 2010 and hasn’t been changed since - if it had it would now be starting at something like £160,000
No, the problem is that it's a way of raising revenue that most people - including many who pay it - don't see or don't fully understand. Whereas the more sensible, honest, transparent way of raising the same revenue from higher earners would be, well...transparent. So no politician will put right an obvious nonsense.
For many people who pay it it isn't an issue, if you earn above the point at which the clawback is done you face a lower marginal tax rate and it doesn't really affect your thinking even though you are paying it. Those really affected in the sense of paying the marginal rate are a relatively small group, but it is a dumb policy that Labour should never have introduced and which the Tories should have got rid of. The problem is the Tories are no longer the party of the six figure earner, they are the party of the seven or eight figure earner, plus "stop the boats" to distract people from this fact.
I don't think the Tories are the party of anything any more, they are the party of "er, what the fuck shall we do now"
They are entirely and literally clueless and they need to go into Opposition to regroup and renew, it is obvious
The great fear is that Labour are equally bereft of ideas, and possibly worse, because they will try and hide this with Wokeness. I mean, another fox hunting law, really? That's it? And another equality act to prevent racial discrimination which is already illegal?
This is dismal. And a bleak outlook for the country
The alternative is telling the truth which involves telling:
Consumers they will have to consume less Property owners that they will have to pay more tax Public sectors workers that they will have to increase their productivity
A Labour government would have a narrow window of opportunity to do those after being elected.
But it would take courage and then a lot more courage to back up words with actions.
I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
The problem is that "the rich" are now considered to be anyone earning more than 100k, which, post-inflation, is probably only equivalent to 70k a few years ago.
I've just been put on a K-code for FY24-25 which is a negative personal allowance- I.e. they artificially raise my income so I get to pay extra tax.
It's why I'm seriously eyeing up Canada, the US and Oz now, even though I don't want to.
Earning more than £100k, or the equivalent of £70k, sure sounds like "rich" to me. £70k in 2021 would put you in the top 7% by income. If the top 7% in this country aren't rich, who are?
No, it places you as a higher-earner at the present moment in time. It doesn't make you "rich".
"Rich" is when you have lots of assets, equity and cash so you don't need to work. My 'assets' are very modest indeed and I'd run out of cash inside 3 months if I stopped working.
Lots of people on 100k+ are simply professionals in their late 30s/early 40s who've spend 15-20 years working hard to get there and still have student loans, big mortgages and childcare costs to pay.
On topic, you need to be very careful about tax and spend polling, as you get wildly different results depending on how the question is framed. This one has an element of "Do you believe the Government should prioritise public services... or are you a selfish arsehole?"
If Hunt does go for tax cuts, he's not going to frame it as, "I'm sacking nurses so bankers can have extra jam!" He'll say something like, "We're targeting waste, and have an economic plan that is working, so I'm delighted to be able to say that, as well as record spending on schools and hospitals, I can give something back to you, the hardworking families of Britain."
Others will try to frame it differently, of course - but Hunt gets first go at it, and has a fair bit of the press onside.
Additionally, Conservatives will reason, not without justification, that people are in fact rather more selfish than they admit to pollsters.
I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
The problem is that "the rich" are now considered to be anyone earning more than 100k, which, post-inflation, is probably only equivalent to 70k a few years ago.
I've just been put on a K-code for FY24-25 which is a negative personal allowance- I.e. they artificially raise my income so I get to pay extra tax.
It's why I'm seriously eyeing up Canada, the US and Oz now, even though I don't want to.
I've been in this situation for years, yet despite being a woke lefty who no doubt hates Britain I am happy to contribute to our national coffers and have no intention of leaving. PB flag shaggers please explain!
One has to try not to get knocked down in the Gadarene stampede of Brexiters throwing petrol and lit matches around and then screaming 'Fire!' in a crowded auditorium and rushing for the exit.
The real tragedy is that you think this is a clever and witty post.
The 100k personal allowance withdrawal policy was brought in during 2009.
It's not meant to be clever and witty. It's entirely serious in its sarcasm. Have you no idea how offensive the rush to the exit by the Brexiters is? They got what they wanted, now they want to leave the rest of us in their mess?
As for the 100K allowance, (a) the lower end needs to be sorted out with even greater urgency, and (b) who's been in power since 2010? Not the woke libtards you seem to blame.
The only person mentioning Brexit and woke libtards is you. I'm surprised your resident anglophobia hasn't crept into this yet, but no doubt that's coming.
The 100k allowance withdrawal policy was introduced by the Brown government, which you seem to reluctantly admit, and, yes, I have criticised the present administration for not reversing it.
It must be sad living inside your head in an endless sea of blind prejudice and scapegoats. Maybe consider getting some help.
Two things are true: 1. We are living with the costs of Brexit. Realised, genuine costs. Trying to import the food we need to eat is slow and expensive post 31st January and its only going to get slower and more expensive from here 2. Voters have moved on from Brexit, so "Remainer" and "Brexiteer" labels are redundant.
Brexit doesn't pay your bills - few people are so triggered by it as to change their vote accordingly now.
The main thing we are living with is the cost of ageing demographics. I don’t see any way out of this (lack of) death spiral.
Something we all learned about as a theory in GCSE Geography but actually happening now. Rather like climate change and equally or more difficult to reverse.
We thought the UK public finances were less exposed than our continental neighbours because our pensions system is largely privatised, and in that sense they are, but we reckoned without the escalating cost of health and social care and the shrinking workforce able to support it.
We - by which I mean the entire West, and China and most of Asia, and Russia, and most of Latin America, in fact everywhere apart from Africa and the Middle East - are demographically screwed.
I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
The problem is that "the rich" are now considered to be anyone earning more than 100k, which, post-inflation, is probably only equivalent to 70k a few years ago.
I've just been put on a K-code for FY24-25 which is a negative personal allowance- I.e. they artificially raise my income so I get to pay extra tax.
It's why I'm seriously eyeing up Canada, the US and Oz now, even though I don't want to.
Someone earning £100k is in the top 5% of earners in the UK.
This is where, I fear, the level of income on this forum being wildly out of sync with the vast majority of people leads to a huge bias against taxing and spending. Most people want more taxes on the richest people, not less.
The £100K trap that Casino mentions (withdrawing personal allowance gradually) is just weird, as it leads to a 60% tax rate in the £100-£125K bracket, before dropping back to 40% thereafter. I can't see any political or economic justification for it, and I must admit that in retirement year with an income of £120K I'm considering putting £20K into my pension pot to avoid it, as that will save me £12K tax (and I can then on retirment claim back £5K tax-free from the retirement pot, as well as getting higher pension from the rest). I've always despised people who go through elaborate maneouvres to pay less tax, but this particular one seems so daft that I'm tempted.
Simply having an extra band of say 43p from 100K would be much more logical and probably raise more cash too.
The problem is that the starting point was created in 2010 and hasn’t been changed since - if it had it would now be starting at something like £160,000
No, the problem is that it's a way of raising revenue that most people - including many who pay it - don't see or don't fully understand. Whereas the more sensible, honest, transparent way of raising the same revenue from higher earners would be, well...transparent. So no politician will put right an obvious nonsense.
For many people who pay it it isn't an issue, if you earn above the point at which the clawback is done you face a lower marginal tax rate and it doesn't really affect your thinking even though you are paying it. Those really affected in the sense of paying the marginal rate are a relatively small group, but it is a dumb policy that Labour should never have introduced and which the Tories should have got rid of. The problem is the Tories are no longer the party of the six figure earner, they are the party of the seven or eight figure earner, plus "stop the boats" to distract people from this fact.
It is an issue because what happens is that people who can afford it chuck it into their pensions (so HMG doesn't get the tax anyway) or they reduce their hours to 3 or 4 days a week to stay beneath the 100k threshold.
Either way, the policy deters both work and revenue.
Yes it is an entirely stupid policy that creates a headache for people earning within the range that the marginal rate applies, I was simply observing that the number of people affected is relatively small, and this fact, combined with the fact that neither party really fights for this group's interests, might explain why it hasn't been rectified up to now.
The real story here is in the demographics, and it's really very bad for the Tories.
Their client vote, the over 65s, have a higher than average demand for public services and this is borne out in the polling. Social grade too - they have had no luck at all persuading the working class that tax cuts are the answer. The gender split is surprising too - I'd have expected men to be much more gung-ho about the state of public services
When even Conservative leaning people prefer public services to tax cuts (49:32)... the post-2008 argument has been lost. Austerity is, at least implicitly, being blamed for the lack of growth over the last 15 years. I think the debate about Brexit is a red herring.
I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
The problem is that "the rich" are now considered to be anyone earning more than 100k, which, post-inflation, is probably only equivalent to 70k a few years ago.
I've just been put on a K-code for FY24-25 which is a negative personal allowance- I.e. they artificially raise my income so I get to pay extra tax.
It's why I'm seriously eyeing up Canada, the US and Oz now, even though I don't want to.
Someone earning £100k is in the top 5% of earners in the UK.
This is where, I fear, the level of income on this forum being wildly out of sync with the vast majority of people leads to a huge bias against taxing and spending. Most people want more taxes on the richest people, not less.
The £100K trap that Casino mentions (withdrawing personal allowance gradually) is just weird, as it leads to a 60% tax rate in the £100-£125K bracket, before dropping back to 40% thereafter. I can't see any political or economic justification for it, and I must admit that in retirement year with an income of £120K I'm considering putting £20K into my pension pot to avoid it, as that will save me £12K tax (and I can then on retirment claim back £5K tax-free from the retirement pot, as well as getting higher pension from the rest). I've always despised people who go through elaborate maneouvres to pay less tax, but this particular one seems so daft that I'm tempted.
Simply having an extra band of say 43p from 100K would be much more logical and probably raise more cash too.
The problem is that the starting point was created in 2010 and hasn’t been changed since - if it had it would now be starting at something like £160,000
No, the problem is that it's a way of raising revenue that most people - including many who pay it - don't see or don't fully understand. Whereas the more sensible, honest, transparent way of raising the same revenue from higher earners would be, well...transparent. So no politician will put right an obvious nonsense.
For many people who pay it it isn't an issue, if you earn above the point at which the clawback is done you face a lower marginal tax rate and it doesn't really affect your thinking even though you are paying it. Those really affected in the sense of paying the marginal rate are a relatively small group, but it is a dumb policy that Labour should never have introduced and which the Tories should have got rid of. The problem is the Tories are no longer the party of the six figure earner, they are the party of the seven or eight figure earner, plus "stop the boats" to distract people from this fact.
I don't think the Tories are the party of anything any more, they are the party of "er, what the fuck shall we do now"
They are entirely and literally clueless and they need to go into Opposition to regroup and renew, it is obvious
The great fear is that Labour are equally bereft of ideas, and possibly worse, because they will try and hide this with Wokeness. I mean, another fox hunting law, really? That's it? And another equality act to prevent racial discrimination which is already illegal?
This is dismal. And a bleak outlook for the country
If you look at what Starmer is doing, he's essentially replaying the greatest hits from New Labour c. 1995 to 1997.
A fox hunting ban and withdrawal of assisted places featured then, and he's doing precisely the same now.
I expect lots of gesture laws on identity politics once he's in office too.
Isn't the answer to marginal tax woes quite simply to salary sacrifice more into your pension ?
I mean the annual allowance is 60 grand a year !
Yes, time and time again I get this advice, but with two kids, a mortgage and big bills to pay I need the money now.
It's a choice between deferring near 100% for at least 15 years (and getting nothing now) and taking a 60% haircut, but getting 40% now.
Maybe you should just live within your means - stop buying avocado toast and such. That's the advice that always seems to come to my generation when we complain about our income being shit. Bootstraps, pull them up by, etc.
You're missing the point. No one's asking you to feel sympathy for Casino - just recognise that incentives which tend to get people like him to move overseas don't work out to our advantage either.
I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
The problem is that "the rich" are now considered to be anyone earning more than 100k, which, post-inflation, is probably only equivalent to 70k a few years ago.
I've just been put on a K-code for FY24-25 which is a negative personal allowance- I.e. they artificially raise my income so I get to pay extra tax.
It's why I'm seriously eyeing up Canada, the US and Oz now, even though I don't want to.
Someone earning £100k is in the top 5% of earners in the UK.
This is where, I fear, the level of income on this forum being wildly out of sync with the vast majority of people leads to a huge bias against taxing and spending. Most people want more taxes on the richest people, not less.
The £100K trap that Casino mentions (withdrawing personal allowance gradually) is just weird, as it leads to a 60% tax rate in the £100-£125K bracket, before dropping back to 40% thereafter. I can't see any political or economic justification for it, and I must admit that in retirement year with an income of £120K I'm considering putting £20K into my pension pot to avoid it, as that will save me £12K tax (and I can then on retirment claim back £5K tax-free from the retirement pot, as well as getting higher pension from the rest). I've always despised people who go through elaborate maneouvres to pay less tax, but this particular one seems so daft that I'm tempted.
Simply having an extra band of say 43p from 100K would be much more logical and probably raise more cash too.
The reason it happens is because the desired increase in Personal Allowances for the less well off actually benefited the better off more. This was cured by phasing out the personal Allowance from £100k at a £1 for every £2 earned.
However this causes the bizarre marginal rate issue of going from 40% to 60% and then dropping again once the allowance is all used up. This is made worse by similar issues in NI where that drops from 12% to 2% as you earn more so if you draw a graph of marginal rates they go up and down like a yo-yo rather than being a neat straight line or curve upwards as you earn more.
It is perfectly easy to fix, but all this stuff is done piecemeal and by politicians who want to make sexy announcements or hide tax rises which makes this horrendous mess.
I'm not sure why so many are on K coded personal allowances. It should only happen if you owe tax from previous years or you have (or HMRC believe you have) taxable income that is not being taxed. Obviously if you are at £120k you won't have any personal allowance left so any owed tax or taxable untaxed income will result in a K code straight away, but that is right surely. After all you owe the tax. If you don't, a call to HMRC (after a 3 hour wait on the phone) and it can be corrected.
And yes if you are over the £100k earnings an AVC can simply sort out the 60% band issue, but I agree it is nonsense and the marginal rate tax graph needs smoothing out.
I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
The problem is that "the rich" are now considered to be anyone earning more than 100k, which, post-inflation, is probably only equivalent to 70k a few years ago.
I've just been put on a K-code for FY24-25 which is a negative personal allowance- I.e. they artificially raise my income so I get to pay extra tax.
It's why I'm seriously eyeing up Canada, the US and Oz now, even though I don't want to.
Someone earning £100k is in the top 5% of earners in the UK.
This is where, I fear, the level of income on this forum being wildly out of sync with the vast majority of people leads to a huge bias against taxing and spending. Most people want more taxes on the richest people, not less.
The £100K trap that Casino mentions (withdrawing personal allowance gradually) is just weird, as it leads to a 60% tax rate in the £100-£125K bracket, before dropping back to 40% thereafter. I can't see any political or economic justification for it, and I must admit that in retirement year with an income of £120K I'm considering putting £20K into my pension pot to avoid it, as that will save me £12K tax (and I can then on retirment claim back £5K tax-free from the retirement pot, as well as getting higher pension from the rest). I've always despised people who go through elaborate maneouvres to pay less tax, but this particular one seems so daft that I'm tempted.
Simply having an extra band of say 43p from 100K would be much more logical and probably raise more cash too.
The problem is that the starting point was created in 2010 and hasn’t been changed since - if it had it would now be starting at something like £160,000
No, the problem is that it's a way of raising revenue that most people - including many who pay it - don't see or don't fully understand. Whereas the more sensible, honest, transparent way of raising the same revenue from higher earners would be, well...transparent. So no politician will put right an obvious nonsense.
For many people who pay it it isn't an issue, if you earn above the point at which the clawback is done you face a lower marginal tax rate and it doesn't really affect your thinking even though you are paying it. Those really affected in the sense of paying the marginal rate are a relatively small group, but it is a dumb policy that Labour should never have introduced and which the Tories should have got rid of. The problem is the Tories are no longer the party of the six figure earner, they are the party of the seven or eight figure earner, plus "stop the boats" to distract people from this fact.
I don't think the Tories are the party of anything any more, they are the party of "er, what the fuck shall we do now"
They are entirely and literally clueless and they need to go into Opposition to regroup and renew, it is obvious
The great fear is that Labour are equally bereft of ideas, and possibly worse, because they will try and hide this with Wokeness. I mean, another fox hunting law, really? That's it? And another equality act to prevent racial discrimination which is already illegal?
This is dismal. And a bleak outlook for the country
If you look at what Starmer is doing, he's essentially replaying the greatest hits from New Labour c. 1995 to 1997.
A fox hunting ban and withdrawal of assisted places featured then, and he's doing precisely the same now.
I expect lots of gesture laws on identity politics once he's in office too.
I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
The problem is that "the rich" are now considered to be anyone earning more than 100k, which, post-inflation, is probably only equivalent to 70k a few years ago.
I've just been put on a K-code for FY24-25 which is a negative personal allowance- I.e. they artificially raise my income so I get to pay extra tax.
It's why I'm seriously eyeing up Canada, the US and Oz now, even though I don't want to.
Someone earning £100k is in the top 5% of earners in the UK.
This is where, I fear, the level of income on this forum being wildly out of sync with the vast majority of people leads to a huge bias against taxing and spending. Most people want more taxes on the richest people, not less.
The £100K trap that Casino mentions (withdrawing personal allowance gradually) is just weird, as it leads to a 60% tax rate in the £100-£125K bracket, before dropping back to 40% thereafter. I can't see any political or economic justification for it, and I must admit that in retirement year with an income of £120K I'm considering putting £20K into my pension pot to avoid it, as that will save me £12K tax (and I can then on retirment claim back £5K tax-free from the retirement pot, as well as getting higher pension from the rest). I've always despised people who go through elaborate maneouvres to pay less tax, but this particular one seems so daft that I'm tempted.
Simply having an extra band of say 43p from 100K would be much more logical and probably raise more cash too.
The problem is that the starting point was created in 2010 and hasn’t been changed since - if it had it would now be starting at something like £160,000
No, the problem is that it's a way of raising revenue that most people - including many who pay it - don't see or don't fully understand. Whereas the more sensible, honest, transparent way of raising the same revenue from higher earners would be, well...transparent. So no politician will put right an obvious nonsense.
For many people who pay it it isn't an issue, if you earn above the point at which the clawback is done you face a lower marginal tax rate and it doesn't really affect your thinking even though you are paying it. Those really affected in the sense of paying the marginal rate are a relatively small group, but it is a dumb policy that Labour should never have introduced and which the Tories should have got rid of. The problem is the Tories are no longer the party of the six figure earner, they are the party of the seven or eight figure earner, plus "stop the boats" to distract people from this fact.
It is an issue because what happens is that people who can afford it chuck it into their pensions (so HMG doesn't get the tax anyway) or they reduce their hours to 3 or 4 days a week to stay beneath the 100k threshold.
Either way, the policy deters both work and revenue.
Yes it is an entirely stupid policy that creates a headache for people earning within the range that the marginal rate applies, I was simply observing that the number of people affected is relatively small, and this fact, combined with the fact that neither party really fights for this group's interests, might explain why it hasn't been rectified up to now.
It might be, but businesses, public services and companies are dependent on such talent and, at the moment, the lack of availability of it is severely constraining growth.
But, if this thread has demonstrated anything - and I don't include you in this, btw - the politics of envy is alive and well and a lot of people are far more comfortable with a punitive headline rate because they understand it and it makes them feel better.
On topic I would suggest Hunt has to cut taxes as demanded by the right and he could cut taxes and increase allowances and at the same time to make it popular by introducing a super tax of 50% on high earners say at £250,000
I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
The problem is that "the rich" are now considered to be anyone earning more than 100k, which, post-inflation, is probably only equivalent to 70k a few years ago.
I've just been put on a K-code for FY24-25 which is a negative personal allowance- I.e. they artificially raise my income so I get to pay extra tax.
It's why I'm seriously eyeing up Canada, the US and Oz now, even though I don't want to.
Someone earning £100k is in the top 5% of earners in the UK.
This is where, I fear, the level of income on this forum being wildly out of sync with the vast majority of people leads to a huge bias against taxing and spending. Most people want more taxes on the richest people, not less.
The £100K trap that Casino mentions (withdrawing personal allowance gradually) is just weird, as it leads to a 60% tax rate in the £100-£125K bracket, before dropping back to 40% thereafter. I can't see any political or economic justification for it, and I must admit that in retirement year with an income of £120K I'm considering putting £20K into my pension pot to avoid it, as that will save me £12K tax (and I can then on retirment claim back £5K tax-free from the retirement pot, as well as getting higher pension from the rest). I've always despised people who go through elaborate maneouvres to pay less tax, but this particular one seems so daft that I'm tempted.
Simply having an extra band of say 43p from 100K would be much more logical and probably raise more cash too.
The reason it happens is because the desired increase in Personal Allowances for the less well off actually benefited the better off more. This was cured by phasing out the personal Allowance from £100k at a £1 for every £2 earned.
However this causes the bizarre marginal rate issue of going from 40% to 60% and then dropping again once the allowance is all used up. This is made worse by similar issues in NI where that drops from 12% to 2% as you earn more so if you draw a graph of marginal rates they go up and down like a yo-yo rather than being a neat straight line or curve upwards as you earn more.
It is perfectly easy to fix, but all this stuff is done piecemeal and by politicians who want to make sexy announcements or hide tax rises which makes this horrendous mess.
I'm not sure why so many are on K coded personal allowances. It should only happen if you owe tax from previous years or you have (or HMRC believe you have) taxable income that is not being taxed. Obviously if you are at £120k you won't have any personal allowance left so any owed tax or taxable untaxed income will result in a K code straight away, but that is right surely. After all you owe the tax. If you don't, a call to HMRC (after a 3 hour wait on the phone) and it can be corrected.
And yes if you are over the £100k earnings and AVC can simply sort out the 60% band issue, but I agree it is nonsense and the marginal rate tax graph needs smoothing out.
K codes come from entering the 60% bracket while the PAYE software continues to deduct you tax allowance. It’s usually due to an edge case that HMRC’s PAYE rules can’t easily cover so don’t try to
I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
The problem is that "the rich" are now considered to be anyone earning more than 100k, which, post-inflation, is probably only equivalent to 70k a few years ago.
I've just been put on a K-code for FY24-25 which is a negative personal allowance- I.e. they artificially raise my income so I get to pay extra tax.
It's why I'm seriously eyeing up Canada, the US and Oz now, even though I don't want to.
Someone earning £100k is in the top 5% of earners in the UK.
This is where, I fear, the level of income on this forum being wildly out of sync with the vast majority of people leads to a huge bias against taxing and spending. Most people want more taxes on the richest people, not less.
The £100K trap that Casino mentions (withdrawing personal allowance gradually) is just weird, as it leads to a 60% tax rate in the £100-£125K bracket, before dropping back to 40% thereafter. I can't see any political or economic justification for it, and I must admit that in retirement year with an income of £120K I'm considering putting £20K into my pension pot to avoid it, as that will save me £12K tax (and I can then on retirment claim back £5K tax-free from the retirement pot, as well as getting higher pension from the rest). I've always despised people who go through elaborate maneouvres to pay less tax, but this particular one seems so daft that I'm tempted.
Simply having an extra band of say 43p from 100K would be much more logical and probably raise more cash too.
If even our resident lefty thinks it's daft, then why hasn't it been addressed ?
The rest of us who earn less than £100k don't really care about it, I guess. But it does seem a ridiculous distortion, and counterproductive if it's driving away the Casinos.
Personal Allowance £12,570 Highest rate of income tax 45% Tax cut to every additional rate taxpayer would be £5,656.50 That's nearly £500 a month.
At a time of plenty you might be able to get away with that, but in the current climate it would be politically toxic.
Now, sure, you can balance it with an extra % or two on the higher rate above £100k, or bringing down the threshold at which the additional rate is levied, and it would be a sensible change. But we all know that the media and opposition would only look at the giveaway side of the ledger.
And with the multitude of difficult things that need to be done, which politician will spend their meagre political capital on fixing this?
It's one of those things that I'm putting on my list as a Herald of the Apocalypse. An event so unlikely that it could only happen at the End of Days.
It's also why you can argue that Liz Truss, as well as being evidently the worst Prime Minister of All Time, was also the best. She actually managed to get rid of the NHS & Social Care Levy, and if she hadn't it would have been a similarly permanent feature of the tax system, despite it's distorting effects.
I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
The problem is that "the rich" are now considered to be anyone earning more than 100k, which, post-inflation, is probably only equivalent to 70k a few years ago.
I've just been put on a K-code for FY24-25 which is a negative personal allowance- I.e. they artificially raise my income so I get to pay extra tax.
It's why I'm seriously eyeing up Canada, the US and Oz now, even though I don't want to.
Earning more than £100k, or the equivalent of £70k, sure sounds like "rich" to me. £70k in 2021 would put you in the top 7% by income. If the top 7% in this country aren't rich, who are?
No, it places you as a higher-earner at the present moment in time. It doesn't make you "rich".
"Rich" is when you have lots of assets, equity and cash so you don't need to work. My 'assets' are very modest indeed and I'd run out of cash inside 3 months if I stopped working.
Lots of people on 100k+ are simply professionals in their late 30s/early 40s who've spend 15-20 years working hard to get there and still have student loans, big mortgages and childcare costs to pay.
Lots of idiots don't realise that many people on 30K can be better off than some on 100K who may well have far more outgoings/loans etc. Best off are those on benefits who get free house, free council tax and a pay every week with no taxation whatsoever, they never need worry about losing their jobs as others are paying for their lifestyles.
On topic, you need to be very careful about tax and spend polling, as you get wildly different results depending on how the question is framed. This one has an element of "Do you believe the Government should prioritise public services... or are you a selfish arsehole?"
If Hunt does go for tax cuts, he's not going to frame it as, "I'm sacking nurses so bankers can have extra jam!" He'll say something like, "We're targeting waste, and have an economic plan that is working, so I'm delighted to be able to say that, as well as record spending on schools and hospitals, I can give something back to you, the hardworking families of Britain."
Others will try to frame it differently, of course - but Hunt gets first go at it, and has a fair bit of the press onside.
Additionally, Conservatives will reason, not without justification, that people are in fact rather more selfish than they admit to pollsters.
I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
The problem is that "the rich" are now considered to be anyone earning more than 100k, which, post-inflation, is probably only equivalent to 70k a few years ago.
I've just been put on a K-code for FY24-25 which is a negative personal allowance- I.e. they artificially raise my income so I get to pay extra tax.
It's why I'm seriously eyeing up Canada, the US and Oz now, even though I don't want to.
I've been in this situation for years, yet despite being a woke lefty who no doubt hates Britain I am happy to contribute to our national coffers and have no intention of leaving. PB flag shaggers please explain!
One has to try not to get knocked down in the Gadarene stampede of Brexiters throwing petrol and lit matches around and then screaming 'Fire!' in a crowded auditorium and rushing for the exit.
The real tragedy is that you think this is a clever and witty post.
The 100k personal allowance withdrawal policy was brought in during 2009.
It's not meant to be clever and witty. It's entirely serious in its sarcasm. Have you no idea how offensive the rush to the exit by the Brexiters is? They got what they wanted, now they want to leave the rest of us in their mess?
As for the 100K allowance, (a) the lower end needs to be sorted out with even greater urgency, and (b) who's been in power since 2010? Not the woke libtards you seem to blame.
The only person mentioning Brexit and woke libtards is you. I'm surprised your resident anglophobia hasn't crept into this yet, but no doubt that's coming.
The 100k allowance withdrawal policy was introduced by the Brown government, which you seem to reluctantly admit, and, yes, I have criticised the present administration for not reversing it.
It must be sad living inside your head in an endless sea of blind prejudice and scapegoats. Maybe consider getting some help.
Two things are true: 1. We are living with the costs of Brexit. Realised, genuine costs. Trying to import the food we need to eat is slow and expensive post 31st January and its only going to get slower and more expensive from here 2. Voters have moved on from Brexit, so "Remainer" and "Brexiteer" labels are redundant.
Brexit doesn't pay your bills - few people are so triggered by it as to change their vote accordingly now.
The main thing we are living with is the cost of ageing demographics. I don’t see any way out of this (lack of) death spiral.
Something we all learned about as a theory in GCSE Geography but actually happening now. Rather like climate change and equally or more difficult to reverse.
We thought the UK public finances were less exposed than our continental neighbours because our pensions system is largely privatised, and in that sense they are, but we reckoned without the escalating cost of health and social care and the shrinking workforce able to support it.
We - by which I mean the entire West, and China and most of Asia, and Russia, and most of Latin America, in fact everywhere apart from Africa and the Middle East - are demographically screwed.
Except, AI
I know I keep banging on about it, but I am like someone banging on about the car in the 1900s, when everyone else is worried about the impossible management of all this horse dung
We cannot know what AI will do, but we can make highly educated guesses and at the top of the guess list is "AI will replace many many jobs", meaning demography becomes MUCH less of an issue, just as horse manure paled away as a problem really quite swiftly, once the car and the engine arrived
Isn't the answer to marginal tax woes quite simply to salary sacrifice more into your pension ?
I mean the annual allowance is 60 grand a year !
Yes, time and time again I get this advice, but with two kids, a mortgage and big bills to pay I need the money now.
It's a choice between deferring near 100% for at least 15 years (and getting nothing now) and taking a 60% haircut, but getting 40% now.
Maybe you should just live within your means - stop buying avocado toast and such. That's the advice that always seems to come to my generation when we complain about our income being shit. Bootstraps, pull them up by, etc.
Green with envy, rather than going out and working hard like Casino you prefer to whine about people who work hard being better off than lazy barstewards like yourself.
The real story here is in the demographics, and it's really very bad for the Tories.
Their client vote, the over 65s, have a higher than average demand for public services and this is borne out in the polling. Social grade too - they have had no luck at all persuading the working class that tax cuts are the answer. The gender split is surprising too - I'd have expected men to be much more gung-ho about the state of public services
When even Conservative leaning people prefer public services to tax cuts (49:32)... the post-2008 argument has been lost. Austerity is, at least implicitly, being blamed for the lack of growth over the last 15 years. I think the debate about Brexit is a red herring.
There isn't a debate.
People want everything.
Tax cuts for themselves Tax rises for others Public spending rises for themselves Public spending cuts for others
They also want pay rises for themselves and also price cuts for things they buy.
Isn't the answer to marginal tax woes quite simply to salary sacrifice more into your pension ?
I mean the annual allowance is 60 grand a year !
Yes, time and time again I get this advice, but with two kids, a mortgage and big bills to pay I need the money now.
It's a choice between deferring near 100% for at least 15 years (and getting nothing now) and taking a 60% haircut, but getting 40% now.
Maybe you should just live within your means - stop buying avocado toast and such. That's the advice that always seems to come to my generation when we complain about our income being shit. Bootstraps, pull them up by, etc.
You're missing the point. No one's asking you to feel sympathy for Casino - just recognise that incentives which tend to get people like him to move overseas don't work out to our advantage either.
If we prioritise the interests of the rich, it still won't help the average person. Yes, globalisation has increased in the last half century, but all the mechanisms to tax people and corporations still exist - governments just refuse to use them based on that very logic (if we did they'd just leave!). If you have Student Loans you have to tell SFE if you're going abroad and they still take your money - I don't see why the taxman shouldn't be able to as well. If an individual benefitted from public spending (in the form of growing up here with a NHS, national education, general operational road infrastructure and so on) then that, in part, helped get them to where they are as an adult - wherever they are.
On topic, you need to be very careful about tax and spend polling, as you get wildly different results depending on how the question is framed. This one has an element of "Do you believe the Government should prioritise public services... or are you a selfish arsehole?"
If Hunt does go for tax cuts, he's not going to frame it as, "I'm sacking nurses so bankers can have extra jam!" He'll say something like, "We're targeting waste, and have an economic plan that is working, so I'm delighted to be able to say that, as well as record spending on schools and hospitals, I can give something back to you, the hardworking families of Britain."
Others will try to frame it differently, of course - but Hunt gets first go at it, and has a fair bit of the press onside.
Additionally, Conservatives will reason, not without justification, that people are in fact rather more selfish than they admit to pollsters.
I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
The problem is that "the rich" are now considered to be anyone earning more than 100k, which, post-inflation, is probably only equivalent to 70k a few years ago.
I've just been put on a K-code for FY24-25 which is a negative personal allowance- I.e. they artificially raise my income so I get to pay extra tax.
It's why I'm seriously eyeing up Canada, the US and Oz now, even though I don't want to.
I've been in this situation for years, yet despite being a woke lefty who no doubt hates Britain I am happy to contribute to our national coffers and have no intention of leaving. PB flag shaggers please explain!
One has to try not to get knocked down in the Gadarene stampede of Brexiters throwing petrol and lit matches around and then screaming 'Fire!' in a crowded auditorium and rushing for the exit.
The real tragedy is that you think this is a clever and witty post.
The 100k personal allowance withdrawal policy was brought in during 2009.
It's not meant to be clever and witty. It's entirely serious in its sarcasm. Have you no idea how offensive the rush to the exit by the Brexiters is? They got what they wanted, now they want to leave the rest of us in their mess?
As for the 100K allowance, (a) the lower end needs to be sorted out with even greater urgency, and (b) who's been in power since 2010? Not the woke libtards you seem to blame.
The only person mentioning Brexit and woke libtards is you. I'm surprised your resident anglophobia hasn't crept into this yet, but no doubt that's coming.
The 100k allowance withdrawal policy was introduced by the Brown government, which you seem to reluctantly admit, and, yes, I have criticised the present administration for not reversing it.
It must be sad living inside your head in an endless sea of blind prejudice and scapegoats. Maybe consider getting some help.
Two things are true: 1. We are living with the costs of Brexit. Realised, genuine costs. Trying to import the food we need to eat is slow and expensive post 31st January and its only going to get slower and more expensive from here 2. Voters have moved on from Brexit, so "Remainer" and "Brexiteer" labels are redundant.
Brexit doesn't pay your bills - few people are so triggered by it as to change their vote accordingly now.
The main thing we are living with is the cost of ageing demographics. I don’t see any way out of this (lack of) death spiral.
Something we all learned about as a theory in GCSE Geography but actually happening now. Rather like climate change and equally or more difficult to reverse.
We thought the UK public finances were less exposed than our continental neighbours because our pensions system is largely privatised, and in that sense they are, but we reckoned without the escalating cost of health and social care and the shrinking workforce able to support it.
We - by which I mean the entire West, and China and most of Asia, and Russia, and most of Latin America, in fact everywhere apart from Africa and the Middle East - are demographically screwed.
Except, AI
I know I keep banging on about it, but I am like someone banging on about the car in the 1900s, when everyone else is worried about the impossible management of all this horse dung
We cannot know what AI will do, but we can make highly educated guesses and at the top of the guess list is "AI will replace many many jobs", meaning demography becomes MUCH less of an issue, just as horse manure paled away as a problem really quite swiftly, once the car and the engine arrived
AI can do certain things better than humans, I get that, but can it do anything useful?
Looking at my biggest expenditures, Can it bring my food shopping bill down? Can it bring the cost of electricity down? Can it reduce my bill for landline, broadband and TV? Can it bring down my council tax? Can it make my mobile phone cheaper?
If it can't do any of those, what use is it, really?
Isn't the answer to marginal tax woes quite simply to salary sacrifice more into your pension ?
I mean the annual allowance is 60 grand a year !
Yes, time and time again I get this advice, but with two kids, a mortgage and big bills to pay I need the money now.
It's a choice between deferring near 100% for at least 15 years (and getting nothing now) and taking a 60% haircut, but getting 40% now.
Maybe you should just live within your means - stop buying avocado toast and such. That's the advice that always seems to come to my generation when we complain about our income being shit. Bootstraps, pull them up by, etc.
Green with envy, rather than going out and working hard like Casino you prefer to whine about people who work hard being better off than lazy barstewards like yourself.
It has nothing to do with hard work - and that's clearer now, post-covid, then ever. The workers needed for society to function at a base level (workers in shopping centres, nurses, teachers, etc.) are some of the worse paid. And that's just the UK, let's not forget those abroad who work in mines and factories doing back breaking work for barely any money at all. Why is that? Because the actual reproduction of a functioning society is not something capital cares about. Whereas capital does care about people whose work produces excess profits. So if your job is magicking numbers from thin air, or making already rich people even richer, then you're allowed a small slice of the pie. The rest of you - scramble for the crumbs...
I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
The problem is that "the rich" are now considered to be anyone earning more than 100k, which, post-inflation, is probably only equivalent to 70k a few years ago.
I've just been put on a K-code for FY24-25 which is a negative personal allowance- I.e. they artificially raise my income so I get to pay extra tax.
It's why I'm seriously eyeing up Canada, the US and Oz now, even though I don't want to.
Earning more than £100k, or the equivalent of £70k, sure sounds like "rich" to me. £70k in 2021 would put you in the top 7% by income. If the top 7% in this country aren't rich, who are?
No, it places you as a higher-earner at the present moment in time. It doesn't make you "rich".
"Rich" is when you have lots of assets, equity and cash so you don't need to work. My 'assets' are very modest indeed and I'd run out of cash inside 3 months if I stopped working.
Lots of people on 100k+ are simply professionals in their late 30s/early 40s who've spend 15-20 years working hard to get there and still have student loans, big mortgages and childcare costs to pay.
Lots of idiots don't realise that many people on 30K can be better off than some on 100K who may well have far more outgoings/loans etc. Best off are those on benefits who get free house, free council tax and a pay every week with no taxation whatsoever, they never need worry about losing their jobs as others are paying for their lifestyles.
Yes, boo hoo, people on less than £30K a year cannot possibly know the horrors of earning three times that amount - much pity, much pity.
I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
The problem is that "the rich" are now considered to be anyone earning more than 100k, which, post-inflation, is probably only equivalent to 70k a few years ago.
I've just been put on a K-code for FY24-25 which is a negative personal allowance- I.e. they artificially raise my income so I get to pay extra tax.
It's why I'm seriously eyeing up Canada, the US and Oz now, even though I don't want to.
Earning more than £100k, or the equivalent of £70k, sure sounds like "rich" to me. £70k in 2021 would put you in the top 7% by income. If the top 7% in this country aren't rich, who are?
No, it places you as a higher-earner at the present moment in time. It doesn't make you "rich".
"Rich" is when you have lots of assets, equity and cash so you don't need to work. My 'assets' are very modest indeed and I'd run out of cash inside 3 months if I stopped working.
Lots of people on 100k+ are simply professionals in their late 30s/early 40s who've spend 15-20 years working hard to get there and still have student loans, big mortgages and childcare costs to pay.
Lots of idiots don't realise that many people on 30K can be better off than some on 100K who may well have far more outgoings/loans etc. Best off are those on benefits who get free house, free council tax and a pay every week with no taxation whatsoever, they never need worry about losing their jobs as others are paying for their lifestyles.
Banks and Credit Card companies certainly have an issue distinguishing between income and assets. Both my wife and myself have retired and by most peoples standards we are very well off, but we have practically no income and are not drawing on our pensions (other than to use up the personal allowance) because we don't need to. Trying to be accepted for a credit card or fill in any form sensibly that asks for income details is a nightmare, even when you start speaking to a human.
The attack on the PA at £100k is ludicrous, moronic and creates absurd perverse incentives on earners close to that level. Marginal rates are off the chart.
Just raise the rate at £100k to 45p if necessary but end this stupidity with the PA.
Isn't the answer to marginal tax woes quite simply to salary sacrifice more into your pension ?
I mean the annual allowance is 60 grand a year !
Yes, time and time again I get this advice, but with two kids, a mortgage and big bills to pay I need the money now.
It's a choice between deferring near 100% for at least 15 years (and getting nothing now) and taking a 60% haircut, but getting 40% now.
Maybe you should just live within your means - stop buying avocado toast and such. That's the advice that always seems to come to my generation when we complain about our income being shit. Bootstraps, pull them up by, etc.
You're missing the point. No one's asking you to feel sympathy for Casino - just recognise that incentives which tend to get people like him to move overseas don't work out to our advantage either.
If we prioritise the interests of the rich, it still won't help the average person. Yes, globalisation has increased in the last half century, but all the mechanisms to tax people and corporations still exist - governments just refuse to use them based on that very logic (if we did they'd just leave!). If you have Student Loans you have to tell SFE if you're going abroad and they still take your money - I don't see why the taxman shouldn't be able to as well. If an individual benefitted from public spending (in the form of growing up here with a NHS, national education, general operational road infrastructure and so on) then that, in part, helped get them to where they are as an adult - wherever they are.
Who's arguing we "prioritise the interests of the rich" ? Saying that we should remove a tax distortion is not that.
As far as taxing income from those resident abroad is concerned, only the US tries that. It's not a spectacular success. All that would do is ensure such people never return to the UK.
You're confusing what you would like in an ideal world run by you, with what is possible.
On topic, you need to be very careful about tax and spend polling, as you get wildly different results depending on how the question is framed. This one has an element of "Do you believe the Government should prioritise public services... or are you a selfish arsehole?"
If Hunt does go for tax cuts, he's not going to frame it as, "I'm sacking nurses so bankers can have extra jam!" He'll say something like, "We're targeting waste, and have an economic plan that is working, so I'm delighted to be able to say that, as well as record spending on schools and hospitals, I can give something back to you, the hardworking families of Britain."
Others will try to frame it differently, of course - but Hunt gets first go at it, and has a fair bit of the press onside.
Additionally, Conservatives will reason, not without justification, that people are in fact rather more selfish than they admit to pollsters.
I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
The problem is that "the rich" are now considered to be anyone earning more than 100k, which, post-inflation, is probably only equivalent to 70k a few years ago.
I've just been put on a K-code for FY24-25 which is a negative personal allowance- I.e. they artificially raise my income so I get to pay extra tax.
It's why I'm seriously eyeing up Canada, the US and Oz now, even though I don't want to.
I've been in this situation for years, yet despite being a woke lefty who no doubt hates Britain I am happy to contribute to our national coffers and have no intention of leaving. PB flag shaggers please explain!
One has to try not to get knocked down in the Gadarene stampede of Brexiters throwing petrol and lit matches around and then screaming 'Fire!' in a crowded auditorium and rushing for the exit.
The real tragedy is that you think this is a clever and witty post.
The 100k personal allowance withdrawal policy was brought in during 2009.
It's not meant to be clever and witty. It's entirely serious in its sarcasm. Have you no idea how offensive the rush to the exit by the Brexiters is? They got what they wanted, now they want to leave the rest of us in their mess?
As for the 100K allowance, (a) the lower end needs to be sorted out with even greater urgency, and (b) who's been in power since 2010? Not the woke libtards you seem to blame.
The only person mentioning Brexit and woke libtards is you. I'm surprised your resident anglophobia hasn't crept into this yet, but no doubt that's coming.
The 100k allowance withdrawal policy was introduced by the Brown government, which you seem to reluctantly admit, and, yes, I have criticised the present administration for not reversing it.
It must be sad living inside your head in an endless sea of blind prejudice and scapegoats. Maybe consider getting some help.
Two things are true: 1. We are living with the costs of Brexit. Realised, genuine costs. Trying to import the food we need to eat is slow and expensive post 31st January and its only going to get slower and more expensive from here 2. Voters have moved on from Brexit, so "Remainer" and "Brexiteer" labels are redundant.
Brexit doesn't pay your bills - few people are so triggered by it as to change their vote accordingly now.
The main thing we are living with is the cost of ageing demographics. I don’t see any way out of this (lack of) death spiral.
Something we all learned about as a theory in GCSE Geography but actually happening now. Rather like climate change and equally or more difficult to reverse.
We thought the UK public finances were less exposed than our continental neighbours because our pensions system is largely privatised, and in that sense they are, but we reckoned without the escalating cost of health and social care and the shrinking workforce able to support it.
We - by which I mean the entire West, and China and most of Asia, and Russia, and most of Latin America, in fact everywhere apart from Africa and the Middle East - are demographically screwed.
Except, AI
I know I keep banging on about it, but I am like someone banging on about the car in the 1900s, when everyone else is worried about the impossible management of all this horse dung
We cannot know what AI will do, but we can make highly educated guesses and at the top of the guess list is "AI will replace many many jobs", meaning demography becomes MUCH less of an issue, just as horse manure paled away as a problem really quite swiftly, once the car and the engine arrived
AI can do certain things better than humans, I get that, but can it do anything useful?
Looking at my biggest expenditures, Can it bring my food shopping bill down? Can it bring the cost of electricity down? Can it reduce my bill for landline, broadband and TV? Can it bring down my council tax? Can it make my mobile phone cheaper?
If it can't do any of those, what use is it, really?
Let's go through the list
1. Yes, food, almost certainly - you will have an AI assistant which will work out your food spending much better than you, and order it online 2. Yes, energy, probably, for similar reasons - running your household more efficently 3. Maybe, TV, same reason - seeking out the best deals - also AI will deliver this stuff more efficiently, from the other end, movies and drama will be made for pennies = Netflix charging less 4. Dunno, weird, no one can say, too many imponderables 5. Yes, it will make this stuff basically free
So that's Yes Yes Maybe Dunno Yes, and that's in the short-medium term - 5 years?
Long term it will transform humanity in ways which make all this irrelevant, for good or ill
I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
The problem is that "the rich" are now considered to be anyone earning more than 100k, which, post-inflation, is probably only equivalent to 70k a few years ago.
I've just been put on a K-code for FY24-25 which is a negative personal allowance- I.e. they artificially raise my income so I get to pay extra tax.
It's why I'm seriously eyeing up Canada, the US and Oz now, even though I don't want to.
Earning more than £100k, or the equivalent of £70k, sure sounds like "rich" to me. £70k in 2021 would put you in the top 7% by income. If the top 7% in this country aren't rich, who are?
No, it places you as a higher-earner at the present moment in time. It doesn't make you "rich".
"Rich" is when you have lots of assets, equity and cash so you don't need to work. My 'assets' are very modest indeed and I'd run out of cash inside 3 months if I stopped working.
Lots of people on 100k+ are simply professionals in their late 30s/early 40s who've spend 15-20 years working hard to get there and still have student loans, big mortgages and childcare costs to pay.
Lots of idiots don't realise that many people on 30K can be better off than some on 100K who may well have far more outgoings/loans etc. Best off are those on benefits who get free house, free council tax and a pay every week with no taxation whatsoever, they never need worry about losing their jobs as others are paying for their lifestyles.
Banks and Credit Card companies certainly have an issue distinguishing between income and assets. Both my wife and myself have retired and by most peoples standards we are very well off, but we have practically no income and are not drawing on our pensions (other than to use up the personal allowance) because we don't need to. Trying to be accepted for a credit card or fill in any form sensibly that asks for income details is a nightmare, even when you start speaking to a human.
This entire discussion is descending into parody - am I being Poe'd here and just don't know?
I mean it's one banana, Michael, what could it cost, 10 dollars?!?
On topic, you need to be very careful about tax and spend polling, as you get wildly different results depending on how the question is framed. This one has an element of "Do you believe the Government should prioritise public services... or are you a selfish arsehole?"
If Hunt does go for tax cuts, he's not going to frame it as, "I'm sacking nurses so bankers can have extra jam!" He'll say something like, "We're targeting waste, and have an economic plan that is working, so I'm delighted to be able to say that, as well as record spending on schools and hospitals, I can give something back to you, the hardworking families of Britain."
Others will try to frame it differently, of course - but Hunt gets first go at it, and has a fair bit of the press onside.
Additionally, Conservatives will reason, not without justification, that people are in fact rather more selfish than they admit to pollsters.
I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
The problem is that "the rich" are now considered to be anyone earning more than 100k, which, post-inflation, is probably only equivalent to 70k a few years ago.
I've just been put on a K-code for FY24-25 which is a negative personal allowance- I.e. they artificially raise my income so I get to pay extra tax.
It's why I'm seriously eyeing up Canada, the US and Oz now, even though I don't want to.
I've been in this situation for years, yet despite being a woke lefty who no doubt hates Britain I am happy to contribute to our national coffers and have no intention of leaving. PB flag shaggers please explain!
One has to try not to get knocked down in the Gadarene stampede of Brexiters throwing petrol and lit matches around and then screaming 'Fire!' in a crowded auditorium and rushing for the exit.
The real tragedy is that you think this is a clever and witty post.
The 100k personal allowance withdrawal policy was brought in during 2009.
It's not meant to be clever and witty. It's entirely serious in its sarcasm. Have you no idea how offensive the rush to the exit by the Brexiters is? They got what they wanted, now they want to leave the rest of us in their mess?
As for the 100K allowance, (a) the lower end needs to be sorted out with even greater urgency, and (b) who's been in power since 2010? Not the woke libtards you seem to blame.
The only person mentioning Brexit and woke libtards is you. I'm surprised your resident anglophobia hasn't crept into this yet, but no doubt that's coming.
The 100k allowance withdrawal policy was introduced by the Brown government, which you seem to reluctantly admit, and, yes, I have criticised the present administration for not reversing it.
It must be sad living inside your head in an endless sea of blind prejudice and scapegoats. Maybe consider getting some help.
Two things are true: 1. We are living with the costs of Brexit. Realised, genuine costs. Trying to import the food we need to eat is slow and expensive post 31st January and its only going to get slower and more expensive from here 2. Voters have moved on from Brexit, so "Remainer" and "Brexiteer" labels are redundant.
Brexit doesn't pay your bills - few people are so triggered by it as to change their vote accordingly now.
The main thing we are living with is the cost of ageing demographics. I don’t see any way out of this (lack of) death spiral.
Something we all learned about as a theory in GCSE Geography but actually happening now. Rather like climate change and equally or more difficult to reverse.
We thought the UK public finances were less exposed than our continental neighbours because our pensions system is largely privatised, and in that sense they are, but we reckoned without the escalating cost of health and social care and the shrinking workforce able to support it.
We - by which I mean the entire West, and China and most of Asia, and Russia, and most of Latin America, in fact everywhere apart from Africa and the Middle East - are demographically screwed.
Except, AI
I know I keep banging on about it, but I am like someone banging on about the car in the 1900s, when everyone else is worried about the impossible management of all this horse dung
We cannot know what AI will do, but we can make highly educated guesses and at the top of the guess list is "AI will replace many many jobs", meaning demography becomes MUCH less of an issue, just as horse manure paled away as a problem really quite swiftly, once the car and the engine arrived
AI can do certain things better than humans, I get that, but can it do anything useful?
Looking at my biggest expenditures, Can it bring my food shopping bill down? Can it bring the cost of electricity down? Can it reduce my bill for landline, broadband and TV? Can it bring down my council tax? Can it make my mobile phone cheaper?
If it can't do any of those, what use is it, really?
Let's go thrpugh the list
1. Yes, food, almost certainly - you will have an AI sisstant which will work out your food spending much better than you, and order it online 2. Yes, energy, probably, for similar reasons - running your household more efficently 3. Maybe, TV, same reason - seeking out the best deals - also AI will deliver this stuff more efficiently, from the other end, movies and drama will be made for pennies = Netflix charging less 4. Dunno, weird, no one can say, too many imponderables 5. Yes, it will make this stuff basically free
So that's Yes Yes Maybe Dunno Yes, and that's in the short-medium term - 5 years?
Long term it will transform humanity in ways which make all this irrelevant, for good or ill
So it wont be long before people are asking their AI
Interesting. I watched the competing stories last night and found Staunton much the more convincing.
Whether Badenoch had actually lied was difficult to tell but her judgement in trying to rip him apart seemed so crass and her language so childish that a bet on her being out by lunchtime looked like a nailed on certainty.
But the boundaries of bad judgement and dishonesty with this government are so wide it's unlikely it will even register
By working about one and a half times full time hours I've managed to get my pay for the year up to around 37k, which I think is somewhere between median and mean full time salary in the UK. I pay about a third of what's left after tax on rent
I spend much of my working day delivering Amazon packages, and letters from housing associations and the benefits office, to much bigger houses than mine where there's always someone in
The attack on the PA at £100k is ludicrous, moronic and creates absurd perverse incentives on earners close to that level. Marginal rates are off the chart.
Just raise the rate at £100k to 45p if necessary but end this stupidity with the PA.
That would cause a greater benefit to the high earners of any increase in PA which is aimed at the poor. However it can be overcome easily. It is only an issue because what has been implemented is so crude. It just needs smoothing better. Some effort has been made by reducing the starting point of the additional rate, but it is still a mess. Instead of going (22/23) from 40%, 60%, 40%, 45% it should be a gradual rise from 40% to 45%.
Isn't the answer to marginal tax woes quite simply to salary sacrifice more into your pension ?
I mean the annual allowance is 60 grand a year !
Yes, time and time again I get this advice, but with two kids, a mortgage and big bills to pay I need the money now.
It's a choice between deferring near 100% for at least 15 years (and getting nothing now) and taking a 60% haircut, but getting 40% now.
Maybe you should just live within your means - stop buying avocado toast and such. That's the advice that always seems to come to my generation when we complain about our income being shit. Bootstraps, pull them up by, etc.
You're missing the point. No one's asking you to feel sympathy for Casino - just recognise that incentives which tend to get people like him to move overseas don't work out to our advantage either.
If we prioritise the interests of the rich, it still won't help the average person. Yes, globalisation has increased in the last half century, but all the mechanisms to tax people and corporations still exist - governments just refuse to use them based on that very logic (if we did they'd just leave!). If you have Student Loans you have to tell SFE if you're going abroad and they still take your money - I don't see why the taxman shouldn't be able to as well. If an individual benefitted from public spending (in the form of growing up here with a NHS, national education, general operational road infrastructure and so on) then that, in part, helped get them to where they are as an adult - wherever they are.
Who's arguing we "prioritise the interests of the rich" ? Saying that we should remove a tax distortion is not that.
As far as taxing income from those resident abroad is concerned, only the US tries that. It's not a spectacular success. All that would do is ensure such people never return to the UK.
You're confusing what you would like in an ideal world run by you, with what is possible.
Saying "if we tax them more they'll just leave" is prioritising the rich. We don't say about poverty, for example, that we can't afford not to feed all the children in the UK that are going hungry (which is estimated to affect around 25% of households, roughly £3.7 million children) because it will make the country a worse place. But we bend over backwards to accommodate rich people and an ideology where they piss down on us and we should be grateful for that trickle.
By working about one and a half times full time hours I've managed to get my pay for the year up to around 37k, which I think is somewhere between median and mean full time salary in the UK. I pay about a third of what's left after tax on rent
I spend much of my working day delivering Amazon packages, and letters from housing associations and the benefits office, to much bigger houses than mine where there's always someone in
The real story here is in the demographics, and it's really very bad for the Tories.
Their client vote, the over 65s, have a higher than average demand for public services and this is borne out in the polling. Social grade too - they have had no luck at all persuading the working class that tax cuts are the answer. The gender split is surprising too - I'd have expected men to be much more gung-ho about the state of public services
When even Conservative leaning people prefer public services to tax cuts (49:32)... the post-2008 argument has been lost. Austerity is, at least implicitly, being blamed for the lack of growth over the last 15 years. I think the debate about Brexit is a red herring.
As usual I don't think polls on tax and spend mean anything at all. The answers are mere routine journeying through well trodden territory. The general question fails to ask the essential one: Who? Whom?
However, a proper set of questions would require a totalistic approach as well as answering who should gain and who should lose. Among the trickier issues to answer are: Do you think public services can be put right with more money, and if so how much? What is the right approach to increasing public debt and how should it be serviced?
So an interesting question for YouGov might be:
"At the moment we are paying over £100 bn in debt interest and borrowing a similar sum to balance the books. How best should this be dealt with". And give a list of options.
On topic, you need to be very careful about tax and spend polling, as you get wildly different results depending on how the question is framed. This one has an element of "Do you believe the Government should prioritise public services... or are you a selfish arsehole?"
If Hunt does go for tax cuts, he's not going to frame it as, "I'm sacking nurses so bankers can have extra jam!" He'll say something like, "We're targeting waste, and have an economic plan that is working, so I'm delighted to be able to say that, as well as record spending on schools and hospitals, I can give something back to you, the hardworking families of Britain."
Others will try to frame it differently, of course - but Hunt gets first go at it, and has a fair bit of the press onside.
Additionally, Conservatives will reason, not without justification, that people are in fact rather more selfish than they admit to pollsters.
I blame Liz Truss for this polling, she has damaged the argument for tax cuts for a generation.
Fucking Lib Dem sleeper agent.
Hang on - we pushed through a huge tax cut to the poorest in the form of raising the tax free allowance to £10k. Tax cuts are fine when they can be afforded and they give money to people who will circulate it through the economy. Tax cuts to the top who don't circulate it? Less optimal...
You sound like a lefty when Thatcher and Lawson cut the top rate of tax from 66% to 40%, it raised revenue.
The problem is that "the rich" are now considered to be anyone earning more than 100k, which, post-inflation, is probably only equivalent to 70k a few years ago.
I've just been put on a K-code for FY24-25 which is a negative personal allowance- I.e. they artificially raise my income so I get to pay extra tax.
It's why I'm seriously eyeing up Canada, the US and Oz now, even though I don't want to.
I've been in this situation for years, yet despite being a woke lefty who no doubt hates Britain I am happy to contribute to our national coffers and have no intention of leaving. PB flag shaggers please explain!
One has to try not to get knocked down in the Gadarene stampede of Brexiters throwing petrol and lit matches around and then screaming 'Fire!' in a crowded auditorium and rushing for the exit.
The real tragedy is that you think this is a clever and witty post.
The 100k personal allowance withdrawal policy was brought in during 2009.
It's not meant to be clever and witty. It's entirely serious in its sarcasm. Have you no idea how offensive the rush to the exit by the Brexiters is? They got what they wanted, now they want to leave the rest of us in their mess?
As for the 100K allowance, (a) the lower end needs to be sorted out with even greater urgency, and (b) who's been in power since 2010? Not the woke libtards you seem to blame.
The only person mentioning Brexit and woke libtards is you. I'm surprised your resident anglophobia hasn't crept into this yet, but no doubt that's coming.
The 100k allowance withdrawal policy was introduced by the Brown government, which you seem to reluctantly admit, and, yes, I have criticised the present administration for not reversing it.
It must be sad living inside your head in an endless sea of blind prejudice and scapegoats. Maybe consider getting some help.
Two things are true: 1. We are living with the costs of Brexit. Realised, genuine costs. Trying to import the food we need to eat is slow and expensive post 31st January and its only going to get slower and more expensive from here 2. Voters have moved on from Brexit, so "Remainer" and "Brexiteer" labels are redundant.
Brexit doesn't pay your bills - few people are so triggered by it as to change their vote accordingly now.
The main thing we are living with is the cost of ageing demographics. I don’t see any way out of this (lack of) death spiral.
Something we all learned about as a theory in GCSE Geography but actually happening now. Rather like climate change and equally or more difficult to reverse.
We thought the UK public finances were less exposed than our continental neighbours because our pensions system is largely privatised, and in that sense they are, but we reckoned without the escalating cost of health and social care and the shrinking workforce able to support it.
We - by which I mean the entire West, and China and most of Asia, and Russia, and most of Latin America, in fact everywhere apart from Africa and the Middle East - are demographically screwed.
Except, AI
I know I keep banging on about it, but I am like someone banging on about the car in the 1900s, when everyone else is worried about the impossible management of all this horse dung
We cannot know what AI will do, but we can make highly educated guesses and at the top of the guess list is "AI will replace many many jobs", meaning demography becomes MUCH less of an issue, just as horse manure paled away as a problem really quite swiftly, once the car and the engine arrived
Cars replaced horses but allowed many more jobs. AI is more than a doom loop. And what later took away a lot of car manufacturing jobs were CNC machines and robots, not AI.
Comments
Ooh, that's nice, thank you very much, now fuck off, Tories.
Simply having an extra band of say 43p from 100K would be much more logical and probably raise more cash too.
We could see better economic growth, without tax increases, if we bridged the gap of wage stagnation over the last decade to catch up to inflation, especially for the poorest people. Poorer people spent their money in a way that keeps it moving - they are more likely to spend in their local economy and that money is more likely to be spent again. Richer people tend to have money invested elsewhere - either in nonmobile assets like property or stocks, or overseas. If you want a system of state backed capitalism (I don't) we should be taxing richer people / corporations more - with a caveat that if they spend that money on productive things (for corporations, more UK based staff or R&D, for individuals, investment in UK based business etc.) that gets a tax write off.
Not everything is a partisan pissing contest.
The outcome for me was different due to self employ etc but what a farce. This is yet another example of the Tories having 14 years to do stuff and pretty much doing fuck all
How on earth is this even acceptable !!!!
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/baby-s-birth-certificate-returned-from-home-office-with-israel-scribbled-out/ar-BB1ixA8M?ocid=entnewsntp&pc=U531&cvid=49e54d9d996c47cc91c84cd82e5b3fb0&ei=47
We need a strategic reset in the whole civil service, analogous to the Haldane report after World War One. Given the political sensitivity, I cannot help feeling that we should start this with an all party Royal Commission or Irish style citizens assemblies that spends 18 months reviewing and proposing a coherent programme of administrative reform. While they are about it, a similar Royal commission for local government might be a good idea too.
The off the cuff policy formation by unaccountable and opaquely funded self interested right wing think tanks is what has driven the Tories onto the rocks. We now need citizens assemblies and royal commissions to bring the debate about administration into the public and accountable domain.
The £100k tax situation does seem daft. Nice problem to have, though.
As for the 100K allowance, (a) the lower end needs to be sorted out with even greater urgency, and (b) who's been in power since 2010? Not the woke libtards you seem to blame.
IT + NI combined at 32% (going down to 30%) kicks in at approximately 12.5K. The long hours minimum wage person is receiving, gross about 23.5K, on which IT + NI is about 3.5K.
This of course is not the whole story, with our magnificent and Byzantine benefits system, but it is conceptually nuts to require significant tax off people working for the minimum wage. It is also of course nuts to tax working people much more aggressively than those who (like me) are not or no longer working.
At least DeepMind are still in London, employing lots of people and plugging into the British knowledge economy. King's Cross in particular is a marvel of meda/tech/artistic/academic agglomeration
Ideally it would be all British but at least it remains partly British. London is possibly second as the global AI centre behind San Fran and the Valley?
It confounds absurdity on absurdity because, of course, not only does avoiding income tax mean less for the Treasury, Jeremy Hunt then has to hand them a big cheque for higher rate tax relief on their pension contributions, and the days when Conservatives wondered if the 1% even needed child benefits are long gone.
The rest of us who earn less than £100k don't really care about it, I guess. But it does seem a ridiculous distortion, and counterproductive if it's driving away the Casinos.
It's not like it would be wildly unpopular, it's finessing the tax code, it would barely be noticed
It might encourage me to give more to charity as the cost to me will be very little but the benefit to the charity will be large. Now which one?
Just nothing very much that's productive.
When we pay tax and then government departments spend that revenue on agency workers we're essentially paying the private cost of a service but with the double bureaucracy of the agency and the government, and with none of the economies of scale we should get from a state monopoly. Worst of both worlds.
Flexibility (or its icky new version "agility") has been trendy in the UK business world for several years now and in my view has done a lot of damage. It encourages gig jobs and amateurism and dis-incentivises businesses to invest in training and skills. It's surely part of our low productivity puzzle.
The city was pricing out everyone bar the bankers and fintech people and the already-propertied oldies. Anyone creative was being forced to leave, esp the young
If prices fall, youth and dynamism returns. Twas ever thus. London was brilliantly exciting, and creative, in the 80s nd 90s when it was still relatively cheap and young people could live near the centre
I mean the annual allowance is 60 grand a year !
Unfortunately they won’t.
The annual allowance is tapered (reduced) for higher earners. It is reduced by £1 for every £2 someone earns over £260,000 (including pension contributions). Tapering stops when the annual allowance reaches £10,000.
PS I'm not complaining at all. I'm in favour of NI on pensions. In fact I would like NI folded into income tax.
The 100k allowance withdrawal policy was introduced by the Brown government, which you seem to reluctantly admit, and, yes, I have criticised the present administration for not reversing it.
It must be sad living inside your head in an endless sea of blind prejudice and scapegoats. Maybe consider getting some help.
It was a deplorable bit of divisive politics, and typical of the sleight of hand orthodoxy that has prevailed at the Treasury for as long as I've been able to keep an eye on them (Brown onwards, but older PBers will be able to confirm how many centuries back this goes).
They are entirely and literally clueless and they need to go into Opposition to regroup and renew, it is obvious
The great fear is that Labour are equally bereft of ideas, and possibly worse, because they will try and hide this with Wokeness. I mean, another fox hunting law, really? That's it? And another equality act to prevent racial discrimination which is already illegal?
This is dismal. And a bleak outlook for the country
It's a choice between deferring near 100% for at least 15 years (and getting nothing now) and taking a 60% haircut, but getting 40% now.
Either way, the policy deters both work and revenue.
1. We are living with the costs of Brexit. Realised, genuine costs. Trying to import the food we need to eat is slow and expensive post 31st January and its only going to get slower and more expensive from here
2. Voters have moved on from Brexit, so "Remainer" and "Brexiteer" labels are redundant.
Brexit doesn't pay your bills - few people are so triggered by it as to change their vote accordingly now.
The 1.5m LTA sounded high but at annuity rates prevailing until last year’s inflation surge that meant a pension of about £50k before tax, or as low as £35k if you wanted to index-link it and provide a spousal income after death.
Tax policy in general is the problem, not specifics. We need to incentivise people to work, and have work pay. And yet we provide huge subsidies to employers to keep employees on poverty wages...
Consumers they will have to consume less
Property owners that they will have to pay more tax
Public sectors workers that they will have to increase their productivity
A Labour government would have a narrow window of opportunity to do those after being elected.
But it would take courage and then a lot more courage to back up words with actions.
"Rich" is when you have lots of assets, equity and cash so you don't need to work. My 'assets' are very modest indeed and I'd run out of cash inside 3 months if I stopped working.
Lots of people on 100k+ are simply professionals in their late 30s/early 40s who've spend 15-20 years working hard to get there and still have student loans, big mortgages and childcare costs to pay.
Something we all learned about as a theory in GCSE Geography but actually happening now. Rather like climate change and equally or more difficult to reverse.
We thought the UK public finances were less exposed than our continental neighbours because our pensions system is largely privatised, and in that sense they are, but we reckoned without the escalating cost of health and social care and the shrinking workforce able to support it.
We - by which I mean the entire West, and China and most of Asia, and Russia, and most of Latin America, in fact everywhere apart from Africa and the Middle East - are demographically screwed.
Their client vote, the over 65s, have a higher than average demand for public services and this is borne out in the polling. Social grade too - they have had no luck at all persuading the working class that tax cuts are the answer. The gender split is surprising too - I'd have expected men to be much more gung-ho about the state of public services
When even Conservative leaning people prefer public services to tax cuts (49:32)... the post-2008 argument has been lost. Austerity is, at least implicitly, being blamed for the lack of growth over the last 15 years. I think the debate about Brexit is a red herring.
A fox hunting ban and withdrawal of assisted places featured then, and he's doing precisely the same now.
I expect lots of gesture laws on identity politics once he's in office too.
No one's asking you to feel sympathy for Casino - just recognise that incentives which tend to get people like him to move overseas don't work out to our advantage either.
However this causes the bizarre marginal rate issue of going from 40% to 60% and then dropping again once the allowance is all used up. This is made worse by similar issues in NI where that drops from 12% to 2% as you earn more so if you draw a graph of marginal rates they go up and down like a yo-yo rather than being a neat straight line or curve upwards as you earn more.
It is perfectly easy to fix, but all this stuff is done piecemeal and by politicians who want to make sexy announcements or hide tax rises which makes this horrendous mess.
I'm not sure why so many are on K coded personal allowances. It should only happen if you owe tax from previous years or you have (or HMRC believe you have) taxable income that is not being taxed. Obviously if you are at £120k you won't have any personal allowance left so any owed tax or taxable untaxed income will result in a K code straight away, but that is right surely. After all you owe the tax. If you don't, a call to HMRC (after a 3 hour wait on the phone) and it can be corrected.
And yes if you are over the £100k earnings an AVC can simply sort out the 60% band issue, but I agree it is nonsense and the marginal rate tax graph needs smoothing out.
On Horizon, the truth is an insult to the ever-outraged Kemi Badenoch
The business secretary is a passionate defender of free speech – apart from any criticism of her
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/feb/19/it-must-be-exhausting-to-be-kemi-badenoch-anger-her-ever-faithful-companion
Who is now the least ridiculous contender ?
But, if this thread has demonstrated anything - and I don't include you in this, btw - the politics of envy is alive and well and a lot of people are far more comfortable with a punitive headline rate because they understand it and it makes them feel better.
On topic I would suggest Hunt has to cut taxes as demanded by the right and he could cut taxes and increase allowances and at the same time to make it popular by introducing a super tax of 50% on high earners say at £250,000
Of course he won't but it would be quite popular
Highest rate of income tax 45%
Tax cut to every additional rate taxpayer would be £5,656.50
That's nearly £500 a month.
At a time of plenty you might be able to get away with that, but in the current climate it would be politically toxic.
Now, sure, you can balance it with an extra % or two on the higher rate above £100k, or bringing down the threshold at which the additional rate is levied, and it would be a sensible change. But we all know that the media and opposition would only look at the giveaway side of the ledger.
And with the multitude of difficult things that need to be done, which politician will spend their meagre political capital on fixing this?
It's one of those things that I'm putting on my list as a Herald of the Apocalypse. An event so unlikely that it could only happen at the End of Days.
It's also why you can argue that Liz Truss, as well as being evidently the worst Prime Minister of All Time, was also the best. She actually managed to get rid of the NHS & Social Care Levy, and if she hadn't it would have been a similarly permanent feature of the tax system, despite it's distorting effects.
I know I keep banging on about it, but I am like someone banging on about the car in the 1900s, when everyone else is worried about the impossible management of all this horse dung
We cannot know what AI will do, but we can make highly educated guesses and at the top of the guess list is "AI will replace many many jobs", meaning demography becomes MUCH less of an issue, just as horse manure paled away as a problem really quite swiftly, once the car and the engine arrived
People want everything.
Tax cuts for themselves
Tax rises for others
Public spending rises for themselves
Public spending cuts for others
They also want pay rises for themselves and also price cuts for things they buy.
Looking at my biggest expenditures,
Can it bring my food shopping bill down?
Can it bring the cost of electricity down?
Can it reduce my bill for landline, broadband and TV?
Can it bring down my council tax?
Can it make my mobile phone cheaper?
If it can't do any of those, what use is it, really?
The attack on the PA at £100k is ludicrous, moronic and creates absurd perverse incentives on earners close to that level. Marginal rates are off the chart.
Just raise the rate at £100k to 45p if necessary but end this stupidity with the PA.
Saying that we should remove a tax distortion is not that.
As far as taxing income from those resident abroad is concerned, only the US tries that. It's not a spectacular success.
All that would do is ensure such people never return to the UK.
You're confusing what you would like in an ideal world run by you, with what is possible.
1. Yes, food, almost certainly - you will have an AI assistant which will work out your food spending much better than you, and order it online
2. Yes, energy, probably, for similar reasons - running your household more efficently
3. Maybe, TV, same reason - seeking out the best deals - also AI will deliver this stuff more efficiently, from the other end, movies and drama will be made for pennies = Netflix charging less
4. Dunno, weird, no one can say, too many imponderables
5. Yes, it will make this stuff basically free
So that's Yes Yes Maybe Dunno Yes, and that's in the short-medium term - 5 years?
Long term it will transform humanity in ways which make all this irrelevant, for good or ill
I mean it's one banana, Michael, what could it cost, 10 dollars?!?
"What the hell have you ordered that for ?"
When I first started on here my income was much closer to £0 than to £100,000. Indeed at times it was basically £0
Whether Badenoch had actually lied was difficult to tell but her judgement in trying to rip him apart seemed so crass and her language so childish that a bet on her being out by lunchtime looked like a nailed on certainty.
But the boundaries of bad judgement and dishonesty with this government are so wide it's unlikely it will even register
I spend much of my working day delivering Amazon packages, and letters from housing associations and the benefits office, to much bigger houses than mine where there's always someone in
However, a proper set of questions would require a totalistic approach as well as answering who should gain and who should lose. Among the trickier issues to answer are:
Do you think public services can be put right with more money, and if so how much?
What is the right approach to increasing public debt and how should it be serviced?
So an interesting question for YouGov might be:
"At the moment we are paying over £100 bn in debt interest and borrowing a similar sum to balance the books. How best should this be dealt with". And give a list of options.