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The great Brexit divide – Approval of Johnson and Starmer – by referendum vote and social class – po

SystemSystem Posts: 11,002
edited July 2021 in General
imageThe great Brexit divide – Approval of Johnson and Starmer – by referendum vote and social class – politicalbetting.com

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  • FloaterFloater Posts: 14,195
    first
  • PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 75,841
    Second, like the dutch lady in the cycling
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 91,392
    Huh, I don't know why, but rich leavers liking Starmer less than poorer ones surprises me.
  • https://twitter.com/spectator/status/1419978875656970282

    It's all going downhill, Tory vote is collapsing!
  • EndillionEndillion Posts: 4,960
    kle4 said:

    Huh, I don't know why, but rich leavers liking Starmer less than poorer ones surprises me.

    It shouldn't. The rich leavers are mostly lifelong Tory voters, and the poorer ones include a lot of Labour voters.
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 50,753
    Have we had these numbers before? I am surprised by the low net approval rating in C2DE leavers because that seems to be the basis of the strength of the Tories in the polls and in the red wall seats. I wonder if there has been significant movement here?
  • MattWMattW Posts: 18,080
    First.

    Ish.
  • kle4 said:

    https://twitter.com/spectator/status/1419978875656970282

    It's all going downhill, Tory vote is collapsing!

    Settle down, you'll have a coronary if it rebounds in the next round of polls!
    The comedown will be painful, back on the sauce!
  • BoJo is absolutely hated by Remainers, goodbye Tory southern seats!
  • rottenboroughrottenborough Posts: 58,038

    https://twitter.com/spectator/status/1419978875656970282

    It's all going downhill, Tory vote is collapsing!

    Isn't the Tory vote all on holiday in July?
  • LostPasswordLostPassword Posts: 14,772
    On the Employer National Insurance debate is there a comparison we can do with wages in another broadly similar country which doesn't have analogous taxes on employment?

    For example, I haven't checked whether Ireland has a similar tax, but if it doesn't would that explain why salaries are generally higher there?
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826
    Any idea what the change is since the last election on these figures? If these figures were comparable last time then its not a swing.

    Especially for gross approval instead of net approval?

    BoJo is absolutely hated by Remainers, goodbye Tory southern seats!

    South East
    Remain 2,391,718
    Leave 2,567,965
    Remain 48%, Leave 52% - same as the nationwide results.

    South West
    Remain 1,503,019
    Leave 1,669,711
    Remain 47%, Leave 53% - better than the nationwide results.
  • We will soon see how much of the Tory holds in the South were down to Jeremy Corbyn, I am betting a lot.

    Winchester, Guildford, easy money!
  • Stark_DawningStark_Dawning Posts: 9,232

    https://twitter.com/spectator/status/1419978875656970282

    It's all going downhill, Tory vote is collapsing!

    Hmm. I'm starting to think the old Boris magic is fading. It has to be due to the Leavers. Whilst they may still agree with Brexit in theory, are they seeing the mess Boris and Frosty made of it with their own eyes and feeling cheated? There can be no other explanation.
  • PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 75,841

    On the Employer National Insurance debate is there a comparison we can do with wages in another broadly similar country which doesn't have analogous taxes on employment?

    For example, I haven't checked whether Ireland has a similar tax, but if it doesn't would that explain why salaries are generally higher there?

    @Philip_Thompson is absolutely correct about the reality of it,
    Psychologically on both an individual and employer level it functions much more as @Pagan2 and @RochdalePioneers describe.
    The meta effect may well be one of wage depression as you point out.
  • Pagan2Pagan2 Posts: 8,629

    On the Employer National Insurance debate is there a comparison we can do with wages in another broadly similar country which doesn't have analogous taxes on employment?

    For example, I haven't checked whether Ireland has a similar tax, but if it doesn't would that explain why salaries are generally higher there?

    Its not quite so simple due to things like cost of living variance sadly
  • LostPasswordLostPassword Posts: 14,772
    What's interesting about these approval figures is that ABC1 Leavers are the people in the Tory twittersphere, and there's quite a disconnect between them and the C2DE Leavers they need to keep the votes of for the next election.

    Labour aren't the only party at risk of listening only to people in their bubble.
  • rottenboroughrottenborough Posts: 58,038
    Prof Francois Balloux
    @BallouxFrancois
    ·
    1h
    I've often been asked when I felt the covid pandemic would be over, and have always replied around mid/late 2021. I've never felt more confident about this prediction than now.
  • What's interesting about these approval figures is that ABC1 Leavers are the people in the Tory twittersphere, and there's quite a disconnect between them and the C2DE Leavers they need to keep the votes of for the next election.

    Labour aren't the only party at risk of listening only to people in their bubble.

    Culture wars putting them off perhaps?
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826

    https://twitter.com/spectator/status/1419978875656970282

    It's all going downhill, Tory vote is collapsing!

    Hmm. I'm starting to think the old Boris magic is fading. It has to be due to the Leavers. Whilst they may still agree with Brexit in theory, are they seeing the mess Boris and Frosty made of it with their own eyes and feeling cheated? There can be no other explanation.
    The much simpler explanation is that it is entirely pandemic related.

    Boris has chosen to lift lockdown at a faster pace than many voters wanted at the time, so annoying some people.
    And he's kepting pinging lockdowns going, so annoying other people.
    Plus cases were rising, which is annoying to others.

    In a few weeks time we'll see the polling response to cases going down, pinging lockdowns being over and the lockdown having been successfully lifted without causing a feared crisis in the NHS.

    Another bounce in the polls for Boris in a month's time. You heard it here first. Now or never for Starmer to get a lead this year.
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826
    Pulpstar said:

    On the Employer National Insurance debate is there a comparison we can do with wages in another broadly similar country which doesn't have analogous taxes on employment?

    For example, I haven't checked whether Ireland has a similar tax, but if it doesn't would that explain why salaries are generally higher there?

    @Philip_Thompson is absolutely correct about the reality of it,
    Psychologically on both an individual and employer level it functions much more as @Pagan2 and @RochdalePioneers describe.
    The meta effect may well be one of wage depression as you point out.
    Thank you.

    If you find it easier to pretend that the government can raise taxes without affecting prices in response, then its easier to pretend ENIC is different somehow and not a payroll tax.
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 49,614
    edited July 2021
    Pulpstar said:

    On the Employer National Insurance debate is there a comparison we can do with wages in another broadly similar country which doesn't have analogous taxes on employment?

    For example, I haven't checked whether Ireland has a similar tax, but if it doesn't would that explain why salaries are generally higher there?

    @Philip_Thompson is absolutely correct about the reality of it,
    Psychologically on both an individual and employer level it functions much more as @Pagan2 and @RochdalePioneers describe.
    The meta effect may well be one of wage depression as you point out.
    The two of them are coming at it from opposite extremes. The reality is that if Employer NI were abolished, then in most companies, most employees would see most of the tax cut, with sufficient publicity well in advance of the changes.

    The biggest problem is that the government would only see about 25% of it back, leaving them with a £30bn shortfall!
  • RochdalePioneersRochdalePioneers Posts: 27,006
    Pulpstar said:

    On the Employer National Insurance debate is there a comparison we can do with wages in another broadly similar country which doesn't have analogous taxes on employment?

    For example, I haven't checked whether Ireland has a similar tax, but if it doesn't would that explain why salaries are generally higher there?

    @Philip_Thompson is absolutely correct about the reality of it,
    Psychologically on both an individual and employer level it functions much more as @Pagan2 and @RochdalePioneers describe.
    The meta effect may well be one of wage depression as you point out.
    As I said at the end of the other thread, my experience of managing staffing and recruitment budgets must be very different from Philip. I have to assume that he also has personal direct real world experience of it given his black and white absolutism on the subject?

    Salary costs end up with all kinds of quirky names and acronyms. My experience of managing "SG&A" to use one example is that the pressure is always to reduce it. Philip's example is of a one-off cut in costs thanks to the abolition of ENIC. In the real world a more realistic example is expensive salary employee leaves the business. Thanks to a smart bit of recruitment their replacement is on 70% of the salary.

    The 30% saved doesn't stay in my team's SG&A for me to increase the rest of the team's wages. At best it goes into another team who need to add a head and have no budget left, or most often is taken as part of the cost reduction demand during the year.

    Salary is package - offer x salary y car z pension and other totalling bang. Does that compare well in the market, can we get the person we need for that? That is the market comparison, not one where we add in employer costs. Unless Philip's greater than mine personal experience says otherwise?
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 49,614
    I’ll believe that might actually happen, when the government schedule a vote on it.

    IMO it’s all part of the nudge theory wound up to 11, to get the teens and twenties vaccinated.
  • Dura_AceDura_Ace Posts: 12,880
    Sandpit said:




    Ouch. Airflow issue starving the engine?

    'Cold Cat' is an insufficiency of steam pressure in the catapult caused by a fault in the system or setting it for the incorrect TO weight or a/c type.

    I have been off the front of Invincible in 0 deg nozzle instead of 10 deg. A similar mistake with flaps was almost always a death sentence but I prevailed through a cloud of spray and later an artfully raised eyebrow from Cdr Air. I was shaking like Michael J. Fox shitting a penknife out for hours after. Happy days..
  • eekeek Posts: 24,797

    https://twitter.com/spectator/status/1419978875656970282

    It's all going downhill, Tory vote is collapsing!

    Isn't the Tory vote all on holiday in July?
    Not abroad this year, which means they will have answered their mobile phones when called.
  • contrariancontrarian Posts: 5,818
    Steve Baker is warning that vaccine passports will completely shatter tory unity.

    Hint: that warning is a lot more threatening with the tories on 38 than it is with the tories on 44.
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826
    edited July 2021

    Pulpstar said:

    On the Employer National Insurance debate is there a comparison we can do with wages in another broadly similar country which doesn't have analogous taxes on employment?

    For example, I haven't checked whether Ireland has a similar tax, but if it doesn't would that explain why salaries are generally higher there?

    @Philip_Thompson is absolutely correct about the reality of it,
    Psychologically on both an individual and employer level it functions much more as @Pagan2 and @RochdalePioneers describe.
    The meta effect may well be one of wage depression as you point out.
    As I said at the end of the other thread, my experience of managing staffing and recruitment budgets must be very different from Philip. I have to assume that he also has personal direct real world experience of it given his black and white absolutism on the subject?

    Salary costs end up with all kinds of quirky names and acronyms. My experience of managing "SG&A" to use one example is that the pressure is always to reduce it. Philip's example is of a one-off cut in costs thanks to the abolition of ENIC. In the real world a more realistic example is expensive salary employee leaves the business. Thanks to a smart bit of recruitment their replacement is on 70% of the salary.

    The 30% saved doesn't stay in my team's SG&A for me to increase the rest of the team's wages. At best it goes into another team who need to add a head and have no budget left, or most often is taken as part of the cost reduction demand during the year.

    Salary is package - offer x salary y car z pension and other totalling bang. Does that compare well in the market, can we get the person we need for that? That is the market comparison, not one where we add in employer costs. Unless Philip's greater than mine personal experience says otherwise?
    You're conviently ignoring the fact that your competitors are all paying their tax obligations too (unless they're engaged in fraud which is more common in some sectors than others) and so will be factoring taxes into their salaries too. If the tax rates change then your competitors have more or less money available for salaries just as you do.

    Lets simplify this a bit - do you believe that in the end market prices respond to tax changes? Or do you think the market just absorbs tax changes without any response whatsoever to prices?
  • eekeek Posts: 24,797
    Sandpit said:

    I’ll believe that might actually happen, when the government schedule a vote on it.

    IMO it’s all part of the nudge theory wound up to 11, to get the teens and twenties vaccinated.
    Looking at vaccination figures it may well have worked as well

    18/7 18,186 first vaccinations
    25/7 24,551
  • TheWhiteRabbitTheWhiteRabbit Posts: 12,387

    Steve Baker is warning that vaccine passports will completely shatter tory unity.

    Hint: that warning is a lot more threatening with the tories on 38 than it is with the tories on 44.
    Not if cases fall. If cases were to luck at 25,000/day+ I could see this being true.
  • eekeek Posts: 24,797

    Pulpstar said:

    On the Employer National Insurance debate is there a comparison we can do with wages in another broadly similar country which doesn't have analogous taxes on employment?

    For example, I haven't checked whether Ireland has a similar tax, but if it doesn't would that explain why salaries are generally higher there?

    @Philip_Thompson is absolutely correct about the reality of it,
    Psychologically on both an individual and employer level it functions much more as @Pagan2 and @RochdalePioneers describe.
    The meta effect may well be one of wage depression as you point out.
    As I said at the end of the other thread, my experience of managing staffing and recruitment budgets must be very different from Philip. I have to assume that he also has personal direct real world experience of it given his black and white absolutism on the subject?

    Salary costs end up with all kinds of quirky names and acronyms. My experience of managing "SG&A" to use one example is that the pressure is always to reduce it. Philip's example is of a one-off cut in costs thanks to the abolition of ENIC. In the real world a more realistic example is expensive salary employee leaves the business. Thanks to a smart bit of recruitment their replacement is on 70% of the salary.

    The 30% saved doesn't stay in my team's SG&A for me to increase the rest of the team's wages. At best it goes into another team who need to add a head and have no budget left, or most often is taken as part of the cost reduction demand during the year.

    Salary is package - offer x salary y car z pension and other totalling bang. Does that compare well in the market, can we get the person we need for that? That is the market comparison, not one where we add in employer costs. Unless Philip's greater than mine personal experience says otherwise?
    You're conviently ignoring the fact that your competitors are all paying their tax obligations too (unless they're engaged in fraud which is more common in some sectors than others) and so will be factoring taxes into their salaries too. If the tax rates change then your competitors have more or less money available for salaries just as you do.

    Lets simplify this a bit - do you believe that in the end market prices respond to tax changes? Or do you think the market just absorbs tax changes without any response whatsoever to prices?
    Wages are a very different market to prices - and are often very sticky for multiple reasons..
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826
    eek said:

    Sandpit said:

    I’ll believe that might actually happen, when the government schedule a vote on it.

    IMO it’s all part of the nudge theory wound up to 11, to get the teens and twenties vaccinated.
    Looking at vaccination figures it may well have worked as well

    18/7 18,186 first vaccinations
    25/7 24,551
    Especially considering all 24.5k were eligible to be vaccinated a week ago so chose not to then.

    We should be rapidly approaching zero first doses now.
  • LostPasswordLostPassword Posts: 14,772

    What's interesting about these approval figures is that ABC1 Leavers are the people in the Tory twittersphere, and there's quite a disconnect between them and the C2DE Leavers they need to keep the votes of for the next election.

    Labour aren't the only party at risk of listening only to people in their bubble.

    Culture wars putting them off perhaps?
    Johnson is all talk and no trousers, except when he manages to appoint someone to run something who can actually make that thing happen. We've seen that twice now, with Gilligan and cycle lanes in London, and Bingham with the vaccine taskforce.

    My guess is that eventually the C2DE Leavers will tire of the routine if they don't see any real improvements. So what Johnson needs now is someone he can put in charge of "Levelling-Up" who can deliver something tangible.
  • RochdalePioneersRochdalePioneers Posts: 27,006

    Pulpstar said:

    On the Employer National Insurance debate is there a comparison we can do with wages in another broadly similar country which doesn't have analogous taxes on employment?

    For example, I haven't checked whether Ireland has a similar tax, but if it doesn't would that explain why salaries are generally higher there?

    @Philip_Thompson is absolutely correct about the reality of it,
    Psychologically on both an individual and employer level it functions much more as @Pagan2 and @RochdalePioneers describe.
    The meta effect may well be one of wage depression as you point out.
    As I said at the end of the other thread, my experience of managing staffing and recruitment budgets must be very different from Philip. I have to assume that he also has personal direct real world experience of it given his black and white absolutism on the subject?

    Salary costs end up with all kinds of quirky names and acronyms. My experience of managing "SG&A" to use one example is that the pressure is always to reduce it. Philip's example is of a one-off cut in costs thanks to the abolition of ENIC. In the real world a more realistic example is expensive salary employee leaves the business. Thanks to a smart bit of recruitment their replacement is on 70% of the salary.

    The 30% saved doesn't stay in my team's SG&A for me to increase the rest of the team's wages. At best it goes into another team who need to add a head and have no budget left, or most often is taken as part of the cost reduction demand during the year.

    Salary is package - offer x salary y car z pension and other totalling bang. Does that compare well in the market, can we get the person we need for that? That is the market comparison, not one where we add in employer costs. Unless Philip's greater than mine personal experience says otherwise?
    You're conviently ignoring the fact that your competitors are all paying their tax obligations too (unless they're engaged in fraud which is more common in some sectors than others) and so will be factoring taxes into their salaries too. If the tax rates change then your competitors have more or less money available for salaries just as you do.

    Lets simplify this a bit - do you believe that in the end market prices respond to tax changes? Or do you think the market just absorbs tax changes without any response whatsoever to prices?
    What a fabulous swerve away from the question.

    Is your expertise on employee budget management based (a) on your direct professional experience or (b) theory?
  • northern_monkeynorthern_monkey Posts: 1,492

    https://twitter.com/spectator/status/1419978875656970282

    It's all going downhill, Tory vote is collapsing!

    Hmm. I'm starting to think the old Boris magic is fading. It has to be due to the Leavers. Whilst they may still agree with Brexit in theory, are they seeing the mess Boris and Frosty made of it with their own eyes and feeling cheated? There can be no other explanation.
    I was speaking to someone a few weeks ago and they were saying all the Leaver triumphalism they previously saw all over Facebook (something I strenuously avoid myself, for my sanity's sake) had gone very quiet.

    If it really becomes squeaky bum time with food shortages it will be interesting to see if any perceptions are changed if the shops in the EU don't seem to be similarly affected.
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826
    eek said:

    Pulpstar said:

    On the Employer National Insurance debate is there a comparison we can do with wages in another broadly similar country which doesn't have analogous taxes on employment?

    For example, I haven't checked whether Ireland has a similar tax, but if it doesn't would that explain why salaries are generally higher there?

    @Philip_Thompson is absolutely correct about the reality of it,
    Psychologically on both an individual and employer level it functions much more as @Pagan2 and @RochdalePioneers describe.
    The meta effect may well be one of wage depression as you point out.
    As I said at the end of the other thread, my experience of managing staffing and recruitment budgets must be very different from Philip. I have to assume that he also has personal direct real world experience of it given his black and white absolutism on the subject?

    Salary costs end up with all kinds of quirky names and acronyms. My experience of managing "SG&A" to use one example is that the pressure is always to reduce it. Philip's example is of a one-off cut in costs thanks to the abolition of ENIC. In the real world a more realistic example is expensive salary employee leaves the business. Thanks to a smart bit of recruitment their replacement is on 70% of the salary.

    The 30% saved doesn't stay in my team's SG&A for me to increase the rest of the team's wages. At best it goes into another team who need to add a head and have no budget left, or most often is taken as part of the cost reduction demand during the year.

    Salary is package - offer x salary y car z pension and other totalling bang. Does that compare well in the market, can we get the person we need for that? That is the market comparison, not one where we add in employer costs. Unless Philip's greater than mine personal experience says otherwise?
    You're conviently ignoring the fact that your competitors are all paying their tax obligations too (unless they're engaged in fraud which is more common in some sectors than others) and so will be factoring taxes into their salaries too. If the tax rates change then your competitors have more or less money available for salaries just as you do.

    Lets simplify this a bit - do you believe that in the end market prices respond to tax changes? Or do you think the market just absorbs tax changes without any response whatsoever to prices?
    Wages are a very different market to prices - and are often very sticky for multiple reasons..
    They can be sticky but they are a price and ultimately the effect of taxes work their way through the system, just as any other price does. Even if it takes a bit of time due to stickiness.
  • PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 75,841

    Pulpstar said:

    On the Employer National Insurance debate is there a comparison we can do with wages in another broadly similar country which doesn't have analogous taxes on employment?

    For example, I haven't checked whether Ireland has a similar tax, but if it doesn't would that explain why salaries are generally higher there?

    @Philip_Thompson is absolutely correct about the reality of it,
    Psychologically on both an individual and employer level it functions much more as @Pagan2 and @RochdalePioneers describe.
    The meta effect may well be one of wage depression as you point out.
    As I said at the end of the other thread, my experience of managing staffing and recruitment budgets must be very different from Philip. I have to assume that he also has personal direct real world experience of it given his black and white absolutism on the subject?

    Salary costs end up with all kinds of quirky names and acronyms. My experience of managing "SG&A" to use one example is that the pressure is always to reduce it. Philip's example is of a one-off cut in costs thanks to the abolition of ENIC. In the real world a more realistic example is expensive salary employee leaves the business. Thanks to a smart bit of recruitment their replacement is on 70% of the salary.

    The 30% saved doesn't stay in my team's SG&A for me to increase the rest of the team's wages. At best it goes into another team who need to add a head and have no budget left, or most often is taken as part of the cost reduction demand during the year.

    Salary is package - offer x salary y car z pension and other totalling bang. Does that compare well in the market, can we get the person we need for that? That is the market comparison, not one where we add in employer costs. Unless Philip's greater than mine personal experience says otherwise?
    This is because everyone else does it this way too, the employer NI is psychologically all pervasive and sunk in terms of looking at salary.
    But it is a tax on employment.
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826

    Pulpstar said:

    On the Employer National Insurance debate is there a comparison we can do with wages in another broadly similar country which doesn't have analogous taxes on employment?

    For example, I haven't checked whether Ireland has a similar tax, but if it doesn't would that explain why salaries are generally higher there?

    @Philip_Thompson is absolutely correct about the reality of it,
    Psychologically on both an individual and employer level it functions much more as @Pagan2 and @RochdalePioneers describe.
    The meta effect may well be one of wage depression as you point out.
    As I said at the end of the other thread, my experience of managing staffing and recruitment budgets must be very different from Philip. I have to assume that he also has personal direct real world experience of it given his black and white absolutism on the subject?

    Salary costs end up with all kinds of quirky names and acronyms. My experience of managing "SG&A" to use one example is that the pressure is always to reduce it. Philip's example is of a one-off cut in costs thanks to the abolition of ENIC. In the real world a more realistic example is expensive salary employee leaves the business. Thanks to a smart bit of recruitment their replacement is on 70% of the salary.

    The 30% saved doesn't stay in my team's SG&A for me to increase the rest of the team's wages. At best it goes into another team who need to add a head and have no budget left, or most often is taken as part of the cost reduction demand during the year.

    Salary is package - offer x salary y car z pension and other totalling bang. Does that compare well in the market, can we get the person we need for that? That is the market comparison, not one where we add in employer costs. Unless Philip's greater than mine personal experience says otherwise?
    You're conviently ignoring the fact that your competitors are all paying their tax obligations too (unless they're engaged in fraud which is more common in some sectors than others) and so will be factoring taxes into their salaries too. If the tax rates change then your competitors have more or less money available for salaries just as you do.

    Lets simplify this a bit - do you believe that in the end market prices respond to tax changes? Or do you think the market just absorbs tax changes without any response whatsoever to prices?
    What a fabulous swerve away from the question.

    Is your expertise on employee budget management based (a) on your direct professional experience or (b) theory?
    (a)
  • maaarshmaaarsh Posts: 3,391

    https://twitter.com/spectator/status/1419978875656970282

    It's all going downhill, Tory vote is collapsing!

    Hmm. I'm starting to think the old Boris magic is fading. It has to be due to the Leavers. Whilst they may still agree with Brexit in theory, are they seeing the mess Boris and Frosty made of it with their own eyes and feeling cheated? There can be no other explanation.
    Laughable how poorly remainers understand people who disagree with them.
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 49,614
    Dura_Ace said:

    Sandpit said:




    Ouch. Airflow issue starving the engine?

    'Cold Cat' is an insufficiency of steam pressure in the catapult caused by a fault in the system or setting it for the incorrect TO weight or a/c type.

    I have been off the front of Invincible in 0 deg nozzle instead of 10 deg. A similar mistake with flaps was almost always a death sentence but I prevailed through a cloud of spray and later an artfully raised eyebrow from Cdr Air. I was shaking like Michael J. Fox shitting a penknife out for hours after. Happy days..
    Ooh, so the catapult only half goes, and the engine alone can’t provide sufficient flying speed for the weight of the aircraft. Which in mil ops, includes the weapons complement and can vary wildly even with the same aircraft type.

    I know nothing about (presumably Harrier) nozzles, but have seen plenty of people nearly kill themselves with incorrect flap settings or weight entered on takeoff and landing - from gliders to 747s!
  • RattersRatters Posts: 756
    The implication of simplifying the employment tax system is that employment taxes would have to fall - simply because if people realised how high they were they would be outraged.

    Broadly speaking, we have the following total marginal rates:
    • >£8k pa - employee's NI @ 12% and employer's NI @ 13.8% = 25.8% total
    • >12.5k pa - base income tax @ 20% = 45.8% total
    • >50k pa - higher rate income tax @ 40%, but employee's NI drops to 2% = 55.8% total
    • £100k to £125k pa - lose tax-free threshold = 75.8% total
    • £125k to £250k pa - tax-free threshold already lost = 55.8% total
    • >£150k pa - income tax up to @ 45% = 60.8% total
    For people with student loans, add perhaps another 5 to 10% onto the above.

    Anyone arguing that we should be increasing employment taxes needs their heads checked given how much we already do, and how little we tax wealth.
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826

    What's interesting about these approval figures is that ABC1 Leavers are the people in the Tory twittersphere, and there's quite a disconnect between them and the C2DE Leavers they need to keep the votes of for the next election.

    Labour aren't the only party at risk of listening only to people in their bubble.

    Culture wars putting them off perhaps?
    Johnson is all talk and no trousers, except when he manages to appoint someone to run something who can actually make that thing happen. We've seen that twice now, with Gilligan and cycle lanes in London, and Bingham with the vaccine taskforce.

    My guess is that eventually the C2DE Leavers will tire of the routine if they don't see any real improvements. So what Johnson needs now is someone he can put in charge of "Levelling-Up" who can deliver something tangible.
    Isn't that true of pretty much every Prime Minister?

    A PM can't "do" that much themselves, they can shape the big picture but whether that's developed and runs into trouble or succeeds very much depends upon others and not just the PM. One of the primary skills of a good PM is helping to identify those who can do well and put them where they're needed.
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 47,786

    What's interesting about these approval figures is that ABC1 Leavers are the people in the Tory twittersphere, and there's quite a disconnect between them and the C2DE Leavers they need to keep the votes of for the next election.

    Labour aren't the only party at risk of listening only to people in their bubble.

    Culture wars putting them off perhaps?
    Johnson is all talk and no trousers, except when he manages to appoint someone to run something who can actually make that thing happen. We've seen that twice now, with Gilligan and cycle lanes in London, and Bingham with the vaccine taskforce.

    My guess is that eventually the C2DE Leavers will tire of the routine if they don't see any real improvements. So what Johnson needs now is someone he can put in charge of "Levelling-Up" who can deliver something tangible.
    Michael Heseltine? 😉
  • eekeek Posts: 24,797
    Ratters said:

    The implication of simplifying the employment tax system is that employment taxes would have to fall - simply because if people realised how high they were they would be outraged.

    Broadly speaking, we have the following total marginal rates:

    • >£8k pa - employee's NI @ 12% and employer's NI @ 13.8% = 25.8% total
    • >12.5k pa - base income tax @ 20% = 45.8% total
    • >50k pa - higher rate income tax @ 40%, but employee's NI drops to 2% = 55.8% total
    • £100k to £125k pa - lose tax-free threshold = 75.8% total
    • £125k to £250k pa - tax-free threshold already lost = 55.8% total
    • >£150k pa - income tax up to @ 45% = 60.8% total
    For people with student loans, add perhaps another 5 to 10% onto the above.

    Anyone arguing that we should be increasing employment taxes needs their heads checked given how much we already do, and how little we tax wealth.
    The Sole reason why Employers NI is the mess it is, is because it's been used to quietly increase taxes after the Government's been elected with a manifesto that once again promises not to increase Employee NI, income tax and VAT leaving few places left to pull additional tax revenue from.
  • LostPasswordLostPassword Posts: 14,772
    Pagan2 said:

    On the Employer National Insurance debate is there a comparison we can do with wages in another broadly similar country which doesn't have analogous taxes on employment?

    For example, I haven't checked whether Ireland has a similar tax, but if it doesn't would that explain why salaries are generally higher there?

    Its not quite so simple due to things like cost of living variance sadly
    True enough. One might also look at average earnings growth in the years around an increase in employer's NI.

    You might be able to correlate average earnings growth with other indicators, like GDP growth per capita, the unemployment rate and the inflation rate, and then you could see if average earnings growth was markedly suppressed relative to that following an increase in Employer's NI.
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826
    Ratters said:

    The implication of simplifying the employment tax system is that employment taxes would have to fall - simply because if people realised how high they were they would be outraged.

    Broadly speaking, we have the following total marginal rates:

    • >£8k pa - employee's NI @ 12% and employer's NI @ 13.8% = 25.8% total
    • >12.5k pa - base income tax @ 20% = 45.8% total
    • >50k pa - higher rate income tax @ 40%, but employee's NI drops to 2% = 55.8% total
    • £100k to £125k pa - lose tax-free threshold = 75.8% total
    • £125k to £250k pa - tax-free threshold already lost = 55.8% total
    • >£150k pa - income tax up to @ 45% = 60.8% total
    For people with student loans, add perhaps another 5 to 10% onto the above.

    Anyone arguing that we should be increasing employment taxes needs their heads checked given how much we already do, and how little we tax wealth.
    Absolutely agreed!

    But I would also add on as a direct cost for workers on low incomes the effect of losing Universal Credit, if they have it. From memory that's a further 63% of their income that vanishes for every pound they earn, although since its from their post-tax wages you need to do some maths to get to the right figure.

    It essentially means for base 20% income tax if somebody is on that and getting UC then for every extra pound their employer spends, HMRC gets about 90p and the employee gets about 10p.
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826
    eek said:

    Ratters said:

    The implication of simplifying the employment tax system is that employment taxes would have to fall - simply because if people realised how high they were they would be outraged.

    Broadly speaking, we have the following total marginal rates:

    • >£8k pa - employee's NI @ 12% and employer's NI @ 13.8% = 25.8% total
    • >12.5k pa - base income tax @ 20% = 45.8% total
    • >50k pa - higher rate income tax @ 40%, but employee's NI drops to 2% = 55.8% total
    • £100k to £125k pa - lose tax-free threshold = 75.8% total
    • £125k to £250k pa - tax-free threshold already lost = 55.8% total
    • >£150k pa - income tax up to @ 45% = 60.8% total
    For people with student loans, add perhaps another 5 to 10% onto the above.

    Anyone arguing that we should be increasing employment taxes needs their heads checked given how much we already do, and how little we tax wealth.
    The Sole reason why Employers NI is the mess it is, is because it's been used to quietly increase taxes after the Government's been elected with a manifesto that once again promises not to increase Employee NI, income tax and VAT leaving few places left to pull additional tax revenue from.
    On this we agree.

    And it is a giant con on the public.
  • eekeek Posts: 24,797

    eek said:

    Ratters said:

    The implication of simplifying the employment tax system is that employment taxes would have to fall - simply because if people realised how high they were they would be outraged.

    Broadly speaking, we have the following total marginal rates:

    • >£8k pa - employee's NI @ 12% and employer's NI @ 13.8% = 25.8% total
    • >12.5k pa - base income tax @ 20% = 45.8% total
    • >50k pa - higher rate income tax @ 40%, but employee's NI drops to 2% = 55.8% total
    • £100k to £125k pa - lose tax-free threshold = 75.8% total
    • £125k to £250k pa - tax-free threshold already lost = 55.8% total
    • >£150k pa - income tax up to @ 45% = 60.8% total
    For people with student loans, add perhaps another 5 to 10% onto the above.

    Anyone arguing that we should be increasing employment taxes needs their heads checked given how much we already do, and how little we tax wealth.
    The Sole reason why Employers NI is the mess it is, is because it's been used to quietly increase taxes after the Government's been elected with a manifesto that once again promises not to increase Employee NI, income tax and VAT leaving few places left to pull additional tax revenue from.
    On this we agree.

    And it is a giant con on the public.
    But the thing we disagree on is that you think it can be fixed, and I know it really can't be fixed without losing a whole pile of money.

    Heck the only way to fix things properly would be to redefine, for the 21st century the current UK legal definition of employment / self employment and no one in the UK wants to do that, for there be dragons there and a lot of disappearing tax revenue.
  • RochdalePioneersRochdalePioneers Posts: 27,006

    Pulpstar said:

    On the Employer National Insurance debate is there a comparison we can do with wages in another broadly similar country which doesn't have analogous taxes on employment?

    For example, I haven't checked whether Ireland has a similar tax, but if it doesn't would that explain why salaries are generally higher there?

    @Philip_Thompson is absolutely correct about the reality of it,
    Psychologically on both an individual and employer level it functions much more as @Pagan2 and @RochdalePioneers describe.
    The meta effect may well be one of wage depression as you point out.
    As I said at the end of the other thread, my experience of managing staffing and recruitment budgets must be very different from Philip. I have to assume that he also has personal direct real world experience of it given his black and white absolutism on the subject?

    Salary costs end up with all kinds of quirky names and acronyms. My experience of managing "SG&A" to use one example is that the pressure is always to reduce it. Philip's example is of a one-off cut in costs thanks to the abolition of ENIC. In the real world a more realistic example is expensive salary employee leaves the business. Thanks to a smart bit of recruitment their replacement is on 70% of the salary.

    The 30% saved doesn't stay in my team's SG&A for me to increase the rest of the team's wages. At best it goes into another team who need to add a head and have no budget left, or most often is taken as part of the cost reduction demand during the year.

    Salary is package - offer x salary y car z pension and other totalling bang. Does that compare well in the market, can we get the person we need for that? That is the market comparison, not one where we add in employer costs. Unless Philip's greater than mine personal experience says otherwise?
    You're conviently ignoring the fact that your competitors are all paying their tax obligations too (unless they're engaged in fraud which is more common in some sectors than others) and so will be factoring taxes into their salaries too. If the tax rates change then your competitors have more or less money available for salaries just as you do.

    Lets simplify this a bit - do you believe that in the end market prices respond to tax changes? Or do you think the market just absorbs tax changes without any response whatsoever to prices?
    What a fabulous swerve away from the question.

    Is your expertise on employee budget management based (a) on your direct professional experience or (b) theory?
    (a)
    Good. So, you are managing your staff budget as you have done with your real world experience. You end up where thanks to an event, your staff budget is in surplus. My suggestion for this event is that someone leaves and their replacement is cheaper, yours that NI is no longer paid by employers. Whatever.

    The saving is not part of your employee's package, competitor employee's package, any benchmark at all. You insist that all of this money would be handed to employees because "market forces". Which sounds so detached from reality based on what I have seen from global blue chips right down to little SMEs that I have to wonder what industry you are in. Must be one with fabulous endless profit growth is here is no annual push to claw back unspent elements of budgets.
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 49,614
    eek said:

    Ratters said:

    The implication of simplifying the employment tax system is that employment taxes would have to fall - simply because if people realised how high they were they would be outraged.

    Broadly speaking, we have the following total marginal rates:

    • >£8k pa - employee's NI @ 12% and employer's NI @ 13.8% = 25.8% total
    • >12.5k pa - base income tax @ 20% = 45.8% total
    • >50k pa - higher rate income tax @ 40%, but employee's NI drops to 2% = 55.8% total
    • £100k to £125k pa - lose tax-free threshold = 75.8% total
    • £125k to £250k pa - tax-free threshold already lost = 55.8% total
    • >£150k pa - income tax up to @ 45% = 60.8% total
    For people with student loans, add perhaps another 5 to 10% onto the above.

    Anyone arguing that we should be increasing employment taxes needs their heads checked given how much we already do, and how little we tax wealth.
    The Sole reason why Employers NI is the mess it is, is because it's been used to quietly increase taxes after the Government's been elected with a manifesto that once again promises not to increase Employee NI, income tax and VAT leaving few places left to pull additional tax revenue from.
    Which has directly led to all the IR35 problems, a massive tax avoidance industry for small businesses, and large businesses trying to sub-contract their primary workforce.

    But, like stamp duty, it raises too much for the exchequer, so they have little choice but to double down on it.

    The combination of the recovery from the pandemic, the exit from the EU, and suggestions of rapidly increasing automation, provide an ideal time to have a serious look at employment taxes - but it’s still sitting next to social care, in the “too difficult” pile for ministers.
  • eekeek Posts: 24,797
    Sandpit said:

    eek said:

    Ratters said:

    The implication of simplifying the employment tax system is that employment taxes would have to fall - simply because if people realised how high they were they would be outraged.

    Broadly speaking, we have the following total marginal rates:

    • >£8k pa - employee's NI @ 12% and employer's NI @ 13.8% = 25.8% total
    • >12.5k pa - base income tax @ 20% = 45.8% total
    • >50k pa - higher rate income tax @ 40%, but employee's NI drops to 2% = 55.8% total
    • £100k to £125k pa - lose tax-free threshold = 75.8% total
    • £125k to £250k pa - tax-free threshold already lost = 55.8% total
    • >£150k pa - income tax up to @ 45% = 60.8% total
    For people with student loans, add perhaps another 5 to 10% onto the above.

    Anyone arguing that we should be increasing employment taxes needs their heads checked given how much we already do, and how little we tax wealth.
    The Sole reason why Employers NI is the mess it is, is because it's been used to quietly increase taxes after the Government's been elected with a manifesto that once again promises not to increase Employee NI, income tax and VAT leaving few places left to pull additional tax revenue from.
    Which has directly led to all the IR35 problems, a massive tax avoidance industry for small businesses, and large businesses trying to sub-contract their primary workforce.

    But, like stamp duty, it raises too much for the exchequer, so they have little choice but to double down on it.

    The combination of the recovery from the pandemic, the exit from the EU, and suggestions of rapidly increasing automation, provide an ideal time to have a serious look at employment taxes - but it’s still sitting next to social care, in the “too difficult” pile for ministers.
    It would be nice if any of the quango's that deal with employment actually had a head at the moment.

    They don't which is allowing the Government to pretend to merge 3 of them while not fixing the major issue that wide scale tax scheme promotions for greedy people who know no better.
  • Stark_DawningStark_Dawning Posts: 9,232

    https://twitter.com/spectator/status/1419978875656970282

    It's all going downhill, Tory vote is collapsing!

    Hmm. I'm starting to think the old Boris magic is fading. It has to be due to the Leavers. Whilst they may still agree with Brexit in theory, are they seeing the mess Boris and Frosty made of it with their own eyes and feeling cheated? There can be no other explanation.
    I was speaking to someone a few weeks ago and they were saying all the Leaver triumphalism they previously saw all over Facebook (something I strenuously avoid myself, for my sanity's sake) had gone very quiet.

    If it really becomes squeaky bum time with food shortages it will be interesting to see if any perceptions are changed if the shops in the EU don't seem to be similarly affected.
    I think that could be right. What would be deadly for Boris is not that everyone suddenly wants to re-join the EU (that would never happen), but rather if the idea takes hold that Brexit was a good idea that Boris screwed up through short-termism, flippancy and laziness. When Brexit, inevitably, fails to live up to expectations, that will be the path many Leavers will choose.
  • algarkirkalgarkirk Posts: 10,341
    While it seems overwhelmingly probable that Boris's wheels will come off at some point I'm not sure that it is now or soon.

    Lockdowns and clear rules are both comprehensible and fairly popular with a large group of Tory voters who have an unfortunate propensity for authoritarianism. SFAICS a few would be quite pleased if they all went on for ever.

    Obvs it and they are all bonkers, but they all vote.

    The current stage has nothing in it for any of the Toryish groups. Libertarians are ATM a lost cause. Authoritarians don't like the opening up or the uncertainty. Boris is far from his best at a moment where he has to explain there are no Covid laws, except that there are, and lots more to come.

    Many older Tory voters don't like either freedom or the talk of 'passports', especially if it involves digital gadgets, for some of them are less comfortable with that than they are with proper blue passports you can wave at Johnny foreigner.

    And the absence of actual laws of distancing, masks etc means that everyone has to do what is right in their own eyes. Many older Tories prefer being told what to do. And they don't like the confusion in government.

    So I don't think Boris's wheels have come off, but we are in for a season of confusing trench warfare for most of the rest of the year.
  • Dura_AceDura_Ace Posts: 12,880
    Sandpit said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    Sandpit said:




    Ouch. Airflow issue starving the engine?

    'Cold Cat' is an insufficiency of steam pressure in the catapult caused by a fault in the system or setting it for the incorrect TO weight or a/c type.

    I have been off the front of Invincible in 0 deg nozzle instead of 10 deg. A similar mistake with flaps was almost always a death sentence but I prevailed through a cloud of spray and later an artfully raised eyebrow from Cdr Air. I was shaking like Michael J. Fox shitting a penknife out for hours after. Happy days..
    Ooh, so the catapult only half goes, and the engine alone can’t provide sufficient flying speed for the weight of the aircraft. Which in mil ops, includes the weapons complement and can vary wildly even with the same aircraft type.
    That's it. The possibility of a cold cat was always front of mind in the F-14 as we regularly used to launch at 70,000lbs plus. In the D model we couldn't use afterburner on the cat as it didn't have enough yaw authority in case of an engine failure in reheat so we needed a very heavy cat shot.
  • contrariancontrarian Posts: 5,818
    The revelations on misleading hospitalisation number are astounding enough in themselves, but they do not reveal whether the data has been completely bogus just for this wave, or for all waves.

    If true hospitalisations because of covid were bogus for all waves, for example, then the peak of hospitalisations primarily owing to covid was not more than 4,000 a day, it was actually less than two thousand a day....??

    If that is the case, then the notion the NHS was going to be overwhelmed at any stage in the pandemic was one of the biggest lies ever told to the people of Britain by its own government...??

    Am I missing something?
  • eekeek Posts: 24,797
    edited July 2021

    https://twitter.com/spectator/status/1419978875656970282

    It's all going downhill, Tory vote is collapsing!

    Hmm. I'm starting to think the old Boris magic is fading. It has to be due to the Leavers. Whilst they may still agree with Brexit in theory, are they seeing the mess Boris and Frosty made of it with their own eyes and feeling cheated? There can be no other explanation.
    I was speaking to someone a few weeks ago and they were saying all the Leaver triumphalism they previously saw all over Facebook (something I strenuously avoid myself, for my sanity's sake) had gone very quiet.

    If it really becomes squeaky bum time with food shortages it will be interesting to see if any perceptions are changed if the shops in the EU don't seem to be similarly affected.
    I think that could be right. What would be deadly for Boris is not that everyone suddenly wants to re-join the EU (that would never happen), but rather if the idea takes hold that Brexit was a good idea that Boris screwed up through short-termism, flippancy and laziness. When Brexit, inevitably, fails to live up to expectations, that will be the path many Leavers will choose.
    Brexit, where did it all go wrong

    image

    (not going for point scoring, just designing a labour 2023 election poster campaign)
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,595

    Pulpstar said:

    On the Employer National Insurance debate is there a comparison we can do with wages in another broadly similar country which doesn't have analogous taxes on employment?

    For example, I haven't checked whether Ireland has a similar tax, but if it doesn't would that explain why salaries are generally higher there?

    @Philip_Thompson is absolutely correct about the reality of it,
    Psychologically on both an individual and employer level it functions much more as @Pagan2 and @RochdalePioneers describe.
    The meta effect may well be one of wage depression as you point out.
    As I said at the end of the other thread, my experience of managing staffing and recruitment budgets must be very different from Philip. I have to assume that he also has personal direct real world experience of it given his black and white absolutism on the subject?

    Salary costs end up with all kinds of quirky names and acronyms. My experience of managing "SG&A" to use one example is that the pressure is always to reduce it. Philip's example is of a one-off cut in costs thanks to the abolition of ENIC. In the real world a more realistic example is expensive salary employee leaves the business. Thanks to a smart bit of recruitment their replacement is on 70% of the salary.

    The 30% saved doesn't stay in my team's SG&A for me to increase the rest of the team's wages. At best it goes into another team who need to add a head and have no budget left, or most often is taken as part of the cost reduction demand during the year.

    Salary is package - offer x salary y car z pension and other totalling bang. Does that compare well in the market, can we get the person we need for that? That is the market comparison, not one where we add in employer costs. Unless Philip's greater than mine personal experience says otherwise?
    You're conviently ignoring the fact that your competitors are all paying their tax obligations too (unless they're engaged in fraud which is more common in some sectors than others) and so will be factoring taxes into their salaries too. If the tax rates change then your competitors have more or less money available for salaries just as you do.

    Lets simplify this a bit - do you believe that in the end market prices respond to tax changes? Or do you think the market just absorbs tax changes without any response whatsoever to prices?
    What a fabulous swerve away from the question.

    Is your expertise on employee budget management based (a) on your direct professional experience or (b) theory?
    (a)
    Good. So, you are managing your staff budget as you have done with your real world experience. You end up where thanks to an event, your staff budget is in surplus. My suggestion for this event is that someone leaves and their replacement is cheaper, yours that NI is no longer paid by employers. Whatever.

    The saving is not part of your employee's package, competitor employee's package, any benchmark at all. You insist that all of this money would be handed to employees because "market forces". Which sounds so detached from reality based on what I have seen from global blue chips right down to little SMEs that I have to wonder what industry you are in. Must be one with fabulous endless profit growth is here is no annual push to claw back unspent elements of budgets.
    Actual tax incidence is an interesting area - partly psychology, partly information and partly negotiation power.
  • RobDRobD Posts: 58,941

    The revelations on misleading hospitalisation number are astounding enough in themselves, but they do not reveal whether the data has been completely bogus just for this wave, or for all waves.

    If true hospitalisations because of covid were bogus for all waves, for example, then the peak of hospitalisations primarily owing to covid was not more than 4,000 a day, it was actually less than two thousand a day....??

    If that is the case, then the notion the NHS was going to be overwhelmed at any stage in the pandemic was one of the biggest lies ever told to the people of Britain by its own government...??

    Am I missing something?

    Even if that were the case, which I doubt, it only buys you an additional doubling. So about a week.
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 26,279
    Just had this scam call. The one that says someone has used your card to spend £400 on Amazon and £1,300 on an international transfer.

    https://mobile.twitter.com/bgriffiths21/status/1418250146429784067
  • CorrectHorseBatteryCorrectHorseBattery Posts: 21,436
    edited July 2021
    Voters will surely only take so much nonsense.

    They were told Brexit was done in the 2019 GE, that's why many voted for Johnson. Yet it's evidently not done, patience will surely run out
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 91,392

    BoJo is absolutely hated by Remainers, goodbye Tory southern seats!

    They loved him in 2019 :)
  • eekeek Posts: 24,797
    edited July 2021

    Pulpstar said:

    On the Employer National Insurance debate is there a comparison we can do with wages in another broadly similar country which doesn't have analogous taxes on employment?

    For example, I haven't checked whether Ireland has a similar tax, but if it doesn't would that explain why salaries are generally higher there?

    @Philip_Thompson is absolutely correct about the reality of it,
    Psychologically on both an individual and employer level it functions much more as @Pagan2 and @RochdalePioneers describe.
    The meta effect may well be one of wage depression as you point out.
    As I said at the end of the other thread, my experience of managing staffing and recruitment budgets must be very different from Philip. I have to assume that he also has personal direct real world experience of it given his black and white absolutism on the subject?

    Salary costs end up with all kinds of quirky names and acronyms. My experience of managing "SG&A" to use one example is that the pressure is always to reduce it. Philip's example is of a one-off cut in costs thanks to the abolition of ENIC. In the real world a more realistic example is expensive salary employee leaves the business. Thanks to a smart bit of recruitment their replacement is on 70% of the salary.

    The 30% saved doesn't stay in my team's SG&A for me to increase the rest of the team's wages. At best it goes into another team who need to add a head and have no budget left, or most often is taken as part of the cost reduction demand during the year.

    Salary is package - offer x salary y car z pension and other totalling bang. Does that compare well in the market, can we get the person we need for that? That is the market comparison, not one where we add in employer costs. Unless Philip's greater than mine personal experience says otherwise?
    You're conviently ignoring the fact that your competitors are all paying their tax obligations too (unless they're engaged in fraud which is more common in some sectors than others) and so will be factoring taxes into their salaries too. If the tax rates change then your competitors have more or less money available for salaries just as you do.

    Lets simplify this a bit - do you believe that in the end market prices respond to tax changes? Or do you think the market just absorbs tax changes without any response whatsoever to prices?
    What a fabulous swerve away from the question.

    Is your expertise on employee budget management based (a) on your direct professional experience or (b) theory?
    (a)
    Good. So, you are managing your staff budget as you have done with your real world experience. You end up where thanks to an event, your staff budget is in surplus. My suggestion for this event is that someone leaves and their replacement is cheaper, yours that NI is no longer paid by employers. Whatever.

    The saving is not part of your employee's package, competitor employee's package, any benchmark at all. You insist that all of this money would be handed to employees because "market forces". Which sounds so detached from reality based on what I have seen from global blue chips right down to little SMEs that I have to wonder what industry you are in. Must be one with fabulous endless profit growth is here is no annual push to claw back unspent elements of budgets.
    Actual tax incidence is an interesting area - partly psychology, partly information and partly negotiation power.
    I really wouldn't recommend trying to avoid paying HMRC the tax they are expecting.

    Trying to explain to people that HMRC's approach is one of waiting until the other side has lost the paperwork is a painful experience.

    Case in point someone currently claims that HMRC has the data to fix a problem within their sector and could do it in real time when the reality is that HMRC gets the data on a delayed basis so it's 6-9 months before they have any idea something is wrong.
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826

    Pulpstar said:

    On the Employer National Insurance debate is there a comparison we can do with wages in another broadly similar country which doesn't have analogous taxes on employment?

    For example, I haven't checked whether Ireland has a similar tax, but if it doesn't would that explain why salaries are generally higher there?

    @Philip_Thompson is absolutely correct about the reality of it,
    Psychologically on both an individual and employer level it functions much more as @Pagan2 and @RochdalePioneers describe.
    The meta effect may well be one of wage depression as you point out.
    As I said at the end of the other thread, my experience of managing staffing and recruitment budgets must be very different from Philip. I have to assume that he also has personal direct real world experience of it given his black and white absolutism on the subject?

    Salary costs end up with all kinds of quirky names and acronyms. My experience of managing "SG&A" to use one example is that the pressure is always to reduce it. Philip's example is of a one-off cut in costs thanks to the abolition of ENIC. In the real world a more realistic example is expensive salary employee leaves the business. Thanks to a smart bit of recruitment their replacement is on 70% of the salary.

    The 30% saved doesn't stay in my team's SG&A for me to increase the rest of the team's wages. At best it goes into another team who need to add a head and have no budget left, or most often is taken as part of the cost reduction demand during the year.

    Salary is package - offer x salary y car z pension and other totalling bang. Does that compare well in the market, can we get the person we need for that? That is the market comparison, not one where we add in employer costs. Unless Philip's greater than mine personal experience says otherwise?
    You're conviently ignoring the fact that your competitors are all paying their tax obligations too (unless they're engaged in fraud which is more common in some sectors than others) and so will be factoring taxes into their salaries too. If the tax rates change then your competitors have more or less money available for salaries just as you do.

    Lets simplify this a bit - do you believe that in the end market prices respond to tax changes? Or do you think the market just absorbs tax changes without any response whatsoever to prices?
    What a fabulous swerve away from the question.

    Is your expertise on employee budget management based (a) on your direct professional experience or (b) theory?
    (a)
    Good. So, you are managing your staff budget as you have done with your real world experience. You end up where thanks to an event, your staff budget is in surplus. My suggestion for this event is that someone leaves and their replacement is cheaper, yours that NI is no longer paid by employers. Whatever.

    The saving is not part of your employee's package, competitor employee's package, any benchmark at all. You insist that all of this money would be handed to employees because "market forces". Which sounds so detached from reality based on what I have seen from global blue chips right down to little SMEs that I have to wonder what industry you are in. Must be one with fabulous endless profit growth is here is no annual push to claw back unspent elements of budgets.
    You keep mentioning competitor employee's packages without acknowledging the fact that the competitors are shaping their packages around the fact that they have to pay their taxes. Reality means this is already taken into account, but you're discounting the fact its taken into account by benchmarking against the fact its already taken into account. 🤦‍♂️

    If you're working on a package then either your senior has already taken NI into account, or your competitors have, either way it is there.

    And yes there's always push to claw back unspent elements of budgets if possible, but often its not possible because of yes for wont of a better word, market forces. Yes that includes your competitors etc too.

    In a previous role I once had to renegotiate a valued colleague's salary because he was threatening to leave. I wanted to keep him. He was demanding lets say for the sake of example £100 per week extra but he was demanding it in take home pay. So whatever numbers we discussed, he was calculating tax and NI changes to see what he'd be taking home extra. I was doing the same but the other way around, adding in rather than subtracting NI changes to see how it affected my overall costs. The reality is if I can afford to pay him but not HMRC then HMRC won't turn a blind eye and ignore it, they will still demand the money they are owed.

    The problem is once you look at overall costs, versus takehome pay, you can end up with very disparate results. The £100 per week extra that he wanted, would cost me much, much, much more than that.

    In the end I couldn't meet his demands as I couldn't afford them. I know from acquaintances he ended up at a competitor that was paying him £100 cash in hand per week on top of his salary. That's cost them £100 cash (which no doubt has dodged VAT and other taxes too) rather than the many multiples of that you end up with once you properly account for all taxes.
  • TimTTimT Posts: 6,328
    RobD said:

    The revelations on misleading hospitalisation number are astounding enough in themselves, but they do not reveal whether the data has been completely bogus just for this wave, or for all waves.

    If true hospitalisations because of covid were bogus for all waves, for example, then the peak of hospitalisations primarily owing to covid was not more than 4,000 a day, it was actually less than two thousand a day....??

    If that is the case, then the notion the NHS was going to be overwhelmed at any stage in the pandemic was one of the biggest lies ever told to the people of Britain by its own government...??

    Am I missing something?

    Even if that were the case, which I doubt, it only buys you an additional doubling. So about a week.
    And what about the real world images of ambulances waiting to deliver their patients to hospitals? I guess those were bogus too?
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,595

    The revelations on misleading hospitalisation number are astounding enough in themselves, but they do not reveal whether the data has been completely bogus just for this wave, or for all waves.

    If true hospitalisations because of covid were bogus for all waves, for example, then the peak of hospitalisations primarily owing to covid was not more than 4,000 a day, it was actually less than two thousand a day....??

    If that is the case, then the notion the NHS was going to be overwhelmed at any stage in the pandemic was one of the biggest lies ever told to the people of Britain by its own government...??

    Am I missing something?

    Yes, you are.

    At the peak the number of people in hospital, in the first wave was beyond the maximum for the hospital system. This was possible (but only just) because of heroic efforts to increase capacity.

    And not so heroic efforts to dump patients out of the hospitals as fast as possible.

    That is, the *actual* number of people in hospital.
  • RochdalePioneersRochdalePioneers Posts: 27,006
    kle4 said:

    BoJo is absolutely hated by Remainers, goodbye Tory southern seats!

    They loved him in 2019 :)
    Loved Boris? Or feared Jeremy Corbyn?
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 38,840

    The revelations on misleading hospitalisation number are astounding enough in themselves, but they do not reveal whether the data has been completely bogus just for this wave, or for all waves.

    If true hospitalisations because of covid were bogus for all waves, for example, then the peak of hospitalisations primarily owing to covid was not more than 4,000 a day, it was actually less than two thousand a day....??

    If that is the case, then the notion the NHS was going to be overwhelmed at any stage in the pandemic was one of the biggest lies ever told to the people of Britain by its own government...??

    Am I missing something?

    I think so. You're missing that the NHS was on the very edge of being overwhelmed - and arguably was in places - at 2 stages during the pandemic.
  • kle4 said:

    BoJo is absolutely hated by Remainers, goodbye Tory southern seats!

    They loved him in 2019 :)
    I believe it was the fear of Corbyn, rather than a love of BoJo
  • contrariancontrarian Posts: 5,818
    RobD said:

    The revelations on misleading hospitalisation number are astounding enough in themselves, but they do not reveal whether the data has been completely bogus just for this wave, or for all waves.

    If true hospitalisations because of covid were bogus for all waves, for example, then the peak of hospitalisations primarily owing to covid was not more than 4,000 a day, it was actually less than two thousand a day....??

    If that is the case, then the notion the NHS was going to be overwhelmed at any stage in the pandemic was one of the biggest lies ever told to the people of Britain by its own government...??

    Am I missing something?

    Even if that were the case, which I doubt, it only buys you an additional doubling. So about a week.
    I'm sorry, but the arbitrary swan dive we have seen in cases in recent days, independent of any action by government at all, has buried that argument.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,595
    TimT said:

    RobD said:

    The revelations on misleading hospitalisation number are astounding enough in themselves, but they do not reveal whether the data has been completely bogus just for this wave, or for all waves.

    If true hospitalisations because of covid were bogus for all waves, for example, then the peak of hospitalisations primarily owing to covid was not more than 4,000 a day, it was actually less than two thousand a day....??

    If that is the case, then the notion the NHS was going to be overwhelmed at any stage in the pandemic was one of the biggest lies ever told to the people of Britain by its own government...??

    Am I missing something?

    Even if that were the case, which I doubt, it only buys you an additional doubling. So about a week.
    And what about the real world images of ambulances waiting to deliver their patients to hospitals? I guess those were bogus too?
    They were fake ambulances with fake patients with fake COVID waiting outside fake hospitals.

    No, wait, the waiting was fake as well.......
  • RobDRobD Posts: 58,941

    RobD said:

    The revelations on misleading hospitalisation number are astounding enough in themselves, but they do not reveal whether the data has been completely bogus just for this wave, or for all waves.

    If true hospitalisations because of covid were bogus for all waves, for example, then the peak of hospitalisations primarily owing to covid was not more than 4,000 a day, it was actually less than two thousand a day....??

    If that is the case, then the notion the NHS was going to be overwhelmed at any stage in the pandemic was one of the biggest lies ever told to the people of Britain by its own government...??

    Am I missing something?

    Even if that were the case, which I doubt, it only buys you an additional doubling. So about a week.
    I'm sorry, but the arbitrary swan dive we have seen in cases in recent days, independent of any action by government at all, has buried that argument.
    How, exactly?
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 26,279
    Double-checked the figures from last night, and the number is 366.

    366 opinion polls that Labour led in during Neil Kinnock's time as leader between 1983 and 1992.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_1987_United_Kingdom_general_election
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_1992_United_Kingdom_general_election
  • rottenboroughrottenborough Posts: 58,038

    What's interesting about these approval figures is that ABC1 Leavers are the people in the Tory twittersphere, and there's quite a disconnect between them and the C2DE Leavers they need to keep the votes of for the next election.

    Labour aren't the only party at risk of listening only to people in their bubble.

    Culture wars putting them off perhaps?
    Johnson is all talk and no trousers, except when he manages to appoint someone to run something who can actually make that thing happen. We've seen that twice now, with Gilligan and cycle lanes in London, and Bingham with the vaccine taskforce.

    My guess is that eventually the C2DE Leavers will tire of the routine if they don't see any real improvements. So what Johnson needs now is someone he can put in charge of "Levelling-Up" who can deliver something tangible.
    He's put a Tory MP (O'Neil?) in charge of levelling hasn't he?
  • eekeek Posts: 24,797
    edited July 2021

    Pulpstar said:

    On the Employer National Insurance debate is there a comparison we can do with wages in another broadly similar country which doesn't have analogous taxes on employment?

    For example, I haven't checked whether Ireland has a similar tax, but if it doesn't would that explain why salaries are generally higher there?

    @Philip_Thompson is absolutely correct about the reality of it,
    Psychologically on both an individual and employer level it functions much more as @Pagan2 and @RochdalePioneers describe.
    The meta effect may well be one of wage depression as you point out.
    As I said at the end of the other thread, my experience of managing staffing and recruitment budgets must be very different from Philip. I have to assume that he also has personal direct real world experience of it given his black and white absolutism on the subject?

    Salary costs end up with all kinds of quirky names and acronyms. My experience of managing "SG&A" to use one example is that the pressure is always to reduce it. Philip's example is of a one-off cut in costs thanks to the abolition of ENIC. In the real world a more realistic example is expensive salary employee leaves the business. Thanks to a smart bit of recruitment their replacement is on 70% of the salary.

    The 30% saved doesn't stay in my team's SG&A for me to increase the rest of the team's wages. At best it goes into another team who need to add a head and have no budget left, or most often is taken as part of the cost reduction demand during the year.

    Salary is package - offer x salary y car z pension and other totalling bang. Does that compare well in the market, can we get the person we need for that? That is the market comparison, not one where we add in employer costs. Unless Philip's greater than mine personal experience says otherwise?
    You're conviently ignoring the fact that your competitors are all paying their tax obligations too (unless they're engaged in fraud which is more common in some sectors than others) and so will be factoring taxes into their salaries too. If the tax rates change then your competitors have more or less money available for salaries just as you do.

    Lets simplify this a bit - do you believe that in the end market prices respond to tax changes? Or do you think the market just absorbs tax changes without any response whatsoever to prices?
    What a fabulous swerve away from the question.

    Is your expertise on employee budget management based (a) on your direct professional experience or (b) theory?
    (a)
    Good. So, you are managing your staff budget as you have done with your real world experience. You end up where thanks to an event, your staff budget is in surplus. My suggestion for this event is that someone leaves and their replacement is cheaper, yours that NI is no longer paid by employers. Whatever.

    The saving is not part of your employee's package, competitor employee's package, any benchmark at all. You insist that all of this money would be handed to employees because "market forces". Which sounds so detached from reality based on what I have seen from global blue chips right down to little SMEs that I have to wonder what industry you are in. Must be one with fabulous endless profit growth is here is no annual push to claw back unspent elements of budgets.
    You keep mentioning competitor employee's packages without acknowledging the fact that the competitors are shaping their packages around the fact that they have to pay their taxes. Reality means this is already taken into account, but you're discounting the fact its taken into account by benchmarking against the fact its already taken into account. 🤦‍♂️

    If you're working on a package then either your senior has already taken NI into account, or your competitors have, either way it is there.

    And yes there's always push to claw back unspent elements of budgets if possible, but often its not possible because of yes for wont of a better word, market forces. Yes that includes your competitors etc too.

    In a previous role I once had to renegotiate a valued colleague's salary because he was threatening to leave. I wanted to keep him. He was demanding lets say for the sake of example £100 per week extra but he was demanding it in take home pay. So whatever numbers we discussed, he was calculating tax and NI changes to see what he'd be taking home extra. I was doing the same but the other way around, adding in rather than subtracting NI changes to see how it affected my overall costs. The reality is if I can afford to pay him but not HMRC then HMRC won't turn a blind eye and ignore it, they will still demand the money they are owed.

    The problem is once you look at overall costs, versus takehome pay, you can end up with very disparate results. The £100 per week extra that he wanted, would cost me much, much, much more than that.

    In the end I couldn't meet his demands as I couldn't afford them. I know from acquaintances he ended up at a competitor that was paying him £100 cash in hand per week on top of his salary. That's cost them £100 cash (which no doubt has dodged VAT and other taxes too) rather than the many multiples of that you end up with once you properly account for all taxes.
    The answer to his question was then very simple:-

    You are responsible for your tax, when HMRC come knocking for that money (and they may very well do so) I hope you are saving the 60% that you will need to pay them (HMRC will seek the employer NI from the employee in that type of case because the law says they can).

    As an employee you really do want all your income tax being reported correctly via RTI PAYE, if the company goes bankrupt before the tax bill is paid HMRC doesn't have the right to go after you.

    If however HMRC discovered that schemes were being used (even ones as simple as cash in hand payments) then HMRC could play a whole heap of nasty games to recover the money they want (and that money will be their estimate that you need to disprove rather than an agreed amount).
  • algarkirkalgarkirk Posts: 10,341
    edited July 2021

    What's interesting about these approval figures is that ABC1 Leavers are the people in the Tory twittersphere, and there's quite a disconnect between them and the C2DE Leavers they need to keep the votes of for the next election.

    Labour aren't the only party at risk of listening only to people in their bubble.

    Culture wars putting them off perhaps?
    Johnson is all talk and no trousers, except when he manages to appoint someone to run something who can actually make that thing happen. We've seen that twice now, with Gilligan and cycle lanes in London, and Bingham with the vaccine taskforce.

    My guess is that eventually the C2DE Leavers will tire of the routine if they don't see any real improvements. So what Johnson needs now is someone he can put in charge of "Levelling-Up" who can deliver something tangible.
    Michael Heseltine? 😉
    Levelling up is, of course, a slogan without meaning. As with all slogans it is only meaningful if it is a real alternative or choice among options. What might it be a choice between? Levelling Down With Boris? More Servitude, Greater Poverty Bigger Hierarchy Vote Tory? Vote for Bias Against The North?

    So whether it is delivered is not is not measurable by any distinct criteria different from how social change generally is measured.

    What it could mean in non measurable ways is that Tories are saying they 'get' the WWC in the north (and elsewhere) is ways which politicians have failed to get. For example that aspiration doesn't only mean doing PPE at Balliol or Classics at Christ Church. An astonishing number of people (don't tell PBers) have no such aspiration, and are indifferent about those who have.

    Equally aspiration for millions of WWC has nothing to to with trade union activism either. Which is one of the reasons Labour has started to the past for them and not the future, especially outside the public sector.

  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,595
    eek said:

    Pulpstar said:

    On the Employer National Insurance debate is there a comparison we can do with wages in another broadly similar country which doesn't have analogous taxes on employment?

    For example, I haven't checked whether Ireland has a similar tax, but if it doesn't would that explain why salaries are generally higher there?

    @Philip_Thompson is absolutely correct about the reality of it,
    Psychologically on both an individual and employer level it functions much more as @Pagan2 and @RochdalePioneers describe.
    The meta effect may well be one of wage depression as you point out.
    As I said at the end of the other thread, my experience of managing staffing and recruitment budgets must be very different from Philip. I have to assume that he also has personal direct real world experience of it given his black and white absolutism on the subject?

    Salary costs end up with all kinds of quirky names and acronyms. My experience of managing "SG&A" to use one example is that the pressure is always to reduce it. Philip's example is of a one-off cut in costs thanks to the abolition of ENIC. In the real world a more realistic example is expensive salary employee leaves the business. Thanks to a smart bit of recruitment their replacement is on 70% of the salary.

    The 30% saved doesn't stay in my team's SG&A for me to increase the rest of the team's wages. At best it goes into another team who need to add a head and have no budget left, or most often is taken as part of the cost reduction demand during the year.

    Salary is package - offer x salary y car z pension and other totalling bang. Does that compare well in the market, can we get the person we need for that? That is the market comparison, not one where we add in employer costs. Unless Philip's greater than mine personal experience says otherwise?
    You're conviently ignoring the fact that your competitors are all paying their tax obligations too (unless they're engaged in fraud which is more common in some sectors than others) and so will be factoring taxes into their salaries too. If the tax rates change then your competitors have more or less money available for salaries just as you do.

    Lets simplify this a bit - do you believe that in the end market prices respond to tax changes? Or do you think the market just absorbs tax changes without any response whatsoever to prices?
    What a fabulous swerve away from the question.

    Is your expertise on employee budget management based (a) on your direct professional experience or (b) theory?
    (a)
    Good. So, you are managing your staff budget as you have done with your real world experience. You end up where thanks to an event, your staff budget is in surplus. My suggestion for this event is that someone leaves and their replacement is cheaper, yours that NI is no longer paid by employers. Whatever.

    The saving is not part of your employee's package, competitor employee's package, any benchmark at all. You insist that all of this money would be handed to employees because "market forces". Which sounds so detached from reality based on what I have seen from global blue chips right down to little SMEs that I have to wonder what industry you are in. Must be one with fabulous endless profit growth is here is no annual push to claw back unspent elements of budgets.
    Actual tax incidence is an interesting area - partly psychology, partly information and partly negotiation power.
    I really wouldn't recommend trying to avoid paying HMRC the tax they are expecting.

    Trying to explain to people that HMRC's approach is one of waiting until the other side has lost the paperwork is a painful experience.

    Case in point someone currently claims that HMRC has the data to fix a problem within their sector and could do it in real time when the reality is that HMRC gets the data on a delayed basis so it's 6-9 months before they have any idea something is wrong.
    Oh absolutely. Death, taxes and W88.....

    I've worked in environments where they used total cost of employment for department budgets, and ones where only salaries and some costs were counted.
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826
    eek said:

    eek said:

    Ratters said:

    The implication of simplifying the employment tax system is that employment taxes would have to fall - simply because if people realised how high they were they would be outraged.

    Broadly speaking, we have the following total marginal rates:

    • >£8k pa - employee's NI @ 12% and employer's NI @ 13.8% = 25.8% total
    • >12.5k pa - base income tax @ 20% = 45.8% total
    • >50k pa - higher rate income tax @ 40%, but employee's NI drops to 2% = 55.8% total
    • £100k to £125k pa - lose tax-free threshold = 75.8% total
    • £125k to £250k pa - tax-free threshold already lost = 55.8% total
    • >£150k pa - income tax up to @ 45% = 60.8% total
    For people with student loans, add perhaps another 5 to 10% onto the above.

    Anyone arguing that we should be increasing employment taxes needs their heads checked given how much we already do, and how little we tax wealth.
    The Sole reason why Employers NI is the mess it is, is because it's been used to quietly increase taxes after the Government's been elected with a manifesto that once again promises not to increase Employee NI, income tax and VAT leaving few places left to pull additional tax revenue from.
    On this we agree.

    And it is a giant con on the public.
    But the thing we disagree on is that you think it can be fixed, and I know it really can't be fixed without losing a whole pile of money.

    Heck the only way to fix things properly would be to redefine, for the 21st century the current UK legal definition of employment / self employment and no one in the UK wants to do that, for there be dragons there and a lot of disappearing tax revenue.
    I don't think it can easily be fixed. I agree that it can't be fixed without losing a whole pile of money.

    However I think its still the right thing to do, despite the whole pile of money. And I think tackling it properly would then see things improve so that in the long run, even the Treasury gains, since if people are losing 50-90% of their marginal income in taxes then that means they either seek to gain marginal income (which means the Treasury doesn't gain the taxes anyway, as well as harming the economy) or they engage in tax fraud or minimisation (which measn the Treasury still doesn't gain the taxes anyway).

    Over the long term, I think reducing taxes from 70%+ for many brackets (eg 100k+, UC + taxes) would see the Laffer Curve work and the Treasury will regain much of those losses or even be better off as well as the taxpayers better off.
  • CarlottaVanceCarlottaVance Posts: 59,540
    R4 has just spent 15 minutes covering the scandal of the Lambeth Council child abuse scandal. Without once mentioning the political party in control for almost all of the period. They did mention that one reason was they were distracted fighting with the Conservative government.
  • Pagan2Pagan2 Posts: 8,629

    eek said:

    Pulpstar said:

    On the Employer National Insurance debate is there a comparison we can do with wages in another broadly similar country which doesn't have analogous taxes on employment?

    For example, I haven't checked whether Ireland has a similar tax, but if it doesn't would that explain why salaries are generally higher there?

    @Philip_Thompson is absolutely correct about the reality of it,
    Psychologically on both an individual and employer level it functions much more as @Pagan2 and @RochdalePioneers describe.
    The meta effect may well be one of wage depression as you point out.
    As I said at the end of the other thread, my experience of managing staffing and recruitment budgets must be very different from Philip. I have to assume that he also has personal direct real world experience of it given his black and white absolutism on the subject?

    Salary costs end up with all kinds of quirky names and acronyms. My experience of managing "SG&A" to use one example is that the pressure is always to reduce it. Philip's example is of a one-off cut in costs thanks to the abolition of ENIC. In the real world a more realistic example is expensive salary employee leaves the business. Thanks to a smart bit of recruitment their replacement is on 70% of the salary.

    The 30% saved doesn't stay in my team's SG&A for me to increase the rest of the team's wages. At best it goes into another team who need to add a head and have no budget left, or most often is taken as part of the cost reduction demand during the year.

    Salary is package - offer x salary y car z pension and other totalling bang. Does that compare well in the market, can we get the person we need for that? That is the market comparison, not one where we add in employer costs. Unless Philip's greater than mine personal experience says otherwise?
    You're conviently ignoring the fact that your competitors are all paying their tax obligations too (unless they're engaged in fraud which is more common in some sectors than others) and so will be factoring taxes into their salaries too. If the tax rates change then your competitors have more or less money available for salaries just as you do.

    Lets simplify this a bit - do you believe that in the end market prices respond to tax changes? Or do you think the market just absorbs tax changes without any response whatsoever to prices?
    What a fabulous swerve away from the question.

    Is your expertise on employee budget management based (a) on your direct professional experience or (b) theory?
    (a)
    Good. So, you are managing your staff budget as you have done with your real world experience. You end up where thanks to an event, your staff budget is in surplus. My suggestion for this event is that someone leaves and their replacement is cheaper, yours that NI is no longer paid by employers. Whatever.

    The saving is not part of your employee's package, competitor employee's package, any benchmark at all. You insist that all of this money would be handed to employees because "market forces". Which sounds so detached from reality based on what I have seen from global blue chips right down to little SMEs that I have to wonder what industry you are in. Must be one with fabulous endless profit growth is here is no annual push to claw back unspent elements of budgets.
    Actual tax incidence is an interesting area - partly psychology, partly information and partly negotiation power.
    I really wouldn't recommend trying to avoid paying HMRC the tax they are expecting.

    Trying to explain to people that HMRC's approach is one of waiting until the other side has lost the paperwork is a painful experience.

    Case in point someone currently claims that HMRC has the data to fix a problem within their sector and could do it in real time when the reality is that HMRC gets the data on a delayed basis so it's 6-9 months before they have any idea something is wrong.
    Oh absolutely. Death, taxes and W88.....

    I've worked in environments where they used total cost of employment for department budgets, and ones where only salaries and some costs were counted.
    I suspect that if Phillip got his wish what we would see is that those near the top of the pay deciles got rises covering most if not all of the extra they were getting docked and it would decrease as you went down through the pay deciles and by the time you got to minimum wage workers they would be having to find almost all of the extra tax
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826
    eek said:

    Pulpstar said:

    On the Employer National Insurance debate is there a comparison we can do with wages in another broadly similar country which doesn't have analogous taxes on employment?

    For example, I haven't checked whether Ireland has a similar tax, but if it doesn't would that explain why salaries are generally higher there?

    @Philip_Thompson is absolutely correct about the reality of it,
    Psychologically on both an individual and employer level it functions much more as @Pagan2 and @RochdalePioneers describe.
    The meta effect may well be one of wage depression as you point out.
    As I said at the end of the other thread, my experience of managing staffing and recruitment budgets must be very different from Philip. I have to assume that he also has personal direct real world experience of it given his black and white absolutism on the subject?

    Salary costs end up with all kinds of quirky names and acronyms. My experience of managing "SG&A" to use one example is that the pressure is always to reduce it. Philip's example is of a one-off cut in costs thanks to the abolition of ENIC. In the real world a more realistic example is expensive salary employee leaves the business. Thanks to a smart bit of recruitment their replacement is on 70% of the salary.

    The 30% saved doesn't stay in my team's SG&A for me to increase the rest of the team's wages. At best it goes into another team who need to add a head and have no budget left, or most often is taken as part of the cost reduction demand during the year.

    Salary is package - offer x salary y car z pension and other totalling bang. Does that compare well in the market, can we get the person we need for that? That is the market comparison, not one where we add in employer costs. Unless Philip's greater than mine personal experience says otherwise?
    You're conviently ignoring the fact that your competitors are all paying their tax obligations too (unless they're engaged in fraud which is more common in some sectors than others) and so will be factoring taxes into their salaries too. If the tax rates change then your competitors have more or less money available for salaries just as you do.

    Lets simplify this a bit - do you believe that in the end market prices respond to tax changes? Or do you think the market just absorbs tax changes without any response whatsoever to prices?
    What a fabulous swerve away from the question.

    Is your expertise on employee budget management based (a) on your direct professional experience or (b) theory?
    (a)
    Good. So, you are managing your staff budget as you have done with your real world experience. You end up where thanks to an event, your staff budget is in surplus. My suggestion for this event is that someone leaves and their replacement is cheaper, yours that NI is no longer paid by employers. Whatever.

    The saving is not part of your employee's package, competitor employee's package, any benchmark at all. You insist that all of this money would be handed to employees because "market forces". Which sounds so detached from reality based on what I have seen from global blue chips right down to little SMEs that I have to wonder what industry you are in. Must be one with fabulous endless profit growth is here is no annual push to claw back unspent elements of budgets.
    You keep mentioning competitor employee's packages without acknowledging the fact that the competitors are shaping their packages around the fact that they have to pay their taxes. Reality means this is already taken into account, but you're discounting the fact its taken into account by benchmarking against the fact its already taken into account. 🤦‍♂️

    If you're working on a package then either your senior has already taken NI into account, or your competitors have, either way it is there.

    And yes there's always push to claw back unspent elements of budgets if possible, but often its not possible because of yes for wont of a better word, market forces. Yes that includes your competitors etc too.

    In a previous role I once had to renegotiate a valued colleague's salary because he was threatening to leave. I wanted to keep him. He was demanding lets say for the sake of example £100 per week extra but he was demanding it in take home pay. So whatever numbers we discussed, he was calculating tax and NI changes to see what he'd be taking home extra. I was doing the same but the other way around, adding in rather than subtracting NI changes to see how it affected my overall costs. The reality is if I can afford to pay him but not HMRC then HMRC won't turn a blind eye and ignore it, they will still demand the money they are owed.

    The problem is once you look at overall costs, versus takehome pay, you can end up with very disparate results. The £100 per week extra that he wanted, would cost me much, much, much more than that.

    In the end I couldn't meet his demands as I couldn't afford them. I know from acquaintances he ended up at a competitor that was paying him £100 cash in hand per week on top of his salary. That's cost them £100 cash (which no doubt has dodged VAT and other taxes too) rather than the many multiples of that you end up with once you properly account for all taxes.
    The answer to his question was then very simple:-

    You are responsible for your tax, when HMRC come knocking for that money (and they may very well do so) I hope you are saving the 60% that you will need to pay them (HMRC will seek the employer NI from the employee in that type of case because the law says they can).

    As an employee you really do want all your income tax being reported correctly via RTI PAYE, if the company goes bankrupt before the tax bill is paid HMRC doesn't have the right to go after you.

    If however HMRC discovered that schemes were being used (even ones as simple as cash in hand payments) then HMRC could play a whole heap of nasty games to recover the money they want (and that money will be their estimate that you need to disprove rather than an agreed amount).
    You're right of course - but that's assuming HMRC discovers the missing money. I have very little faith in that, from experience.

    I've always ensured my books are completely legit, but I know many competitors in the past have not been and only once has a competitor that I know of been tackled - and in that instance it was for their use of illegal immigration they were caught on, not the cash payments.
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826
    Pagan2 said:

    eek said:

    Pulpstar said:

    On the Employer National Insurance debate is there a comparison we can do with wages in another broadly similar country which doesn't have analogous taxes on employment?

    For example, I haven't checked whether Ireland has a similar tax, but if it doesn't would that explain why salaries are generally higher there?

    @Philip_Thompson is absolutely correct about the reality of it,
    Psychologically on both an individual and employer level it functions much more as @Pagan2 and @RochdalePioneers describe.
    The meta effect may well be one of wage depression as you point out.
    As I said at the end of the other thread, my experience of managing staffing and recruitment budgets must be very different from Philip. I have to assume that he also has personal direct real world experience of it given his black and white absolutism on the subject?

    Salary costs end up with all kinds of quirky names and acronyms. My experience of managing "SG&A" to use one example is that the pressure is always to reduce it. Philip's example is of a one-off cut in costs thanks to the abolition of ENIC. In the real world a more realistic example is expensive salary employee leaves the business. Thanks to a smart bit of recruitment their replacement is on 70% of the salary.

    The 30% saved doesn't stay in my team's SG&A for me to increase the rest of the team's wages. At best it goes into another team who need to add a head and have no budget left, or most often is taken as part of the cost reduction demand during the year.

    Salary is package - offer x salary y car z pension and other totalling bang. Does that compare well in the market, can we get the person we need for that? That is the market comparison, not one where we add in employer costs. Unless Philip's greater than mine personal experience says otherwise?
    You're conviently ignoring the fact that your competitors are all paying their tax obligations too (unless they're engaged in fraud which is more common in some sectors than others) and so will be factoring taxes into their salaries too. If the tax rates change then your competitors have more or less money available for salaries just as you do.

    Lets simplify this a bit - do you believe that in the end market prices respond to tax changes? Or do you think the market just absorbs tax changes without any response whatsoever to prices?
    What a fabulous swerve away from the question.

    Is your expertise on employee budget management based (a) on your direct professional experience or (b) theory?
    (a)
    Good. So, you are managing your staff budget as you have done with your real world experience. You end up where thanks to an event, your staff budget is in surplus. My suggestion for this event is that someone leaves and their replacement is cheaper, yours that NI is no longer paid by employers. Whatever.

    The saving is not part of your employee's package, competitor employee's package, any benchmark at all. You insist that all of this money would be handed to employees because "market forces". Which sounds so detached from reality based on what I have seen from global blue chips right down to little SMEs that I have to wonder what industry you are in. Must be one with fabulous endless profit growth is here is no annual push to claw back unspent elements of budgets.
    Actual tax incidence is an interesting area - partly psychology, partly information and partly negotiation power.
    I really wouldn't recommend trying to avoid paying HMRC the tax they are expecting.

    Trying to explain to people that HMRC's approach is one of waiting until the other side has lost the paperwork is a painful experience.

    Case in point someone currently claims that HMRC has the data to fix a problem within their sector and could do it in real time when the reality is that HMRC gets the data on a delayed basis so it's 6-9 months before they have any idea something is wrong.
    Oh absolutely. Death, taxes and W88.....

    I've worked in environments where they used total cost of employment for department budgets, and ones where only salaries and some costs were counted.
    I suspect that if Phillip got his wish what we would see is that those near the top of the pay deciles got rises covering most if not all of the extra they were getting docked and it would decrease as you went down through the pay deciles and by the time you got to minimum wage workers they would be having to find almost all of the extra tax
    Actually if we got my wish, then minimum wage workers would be seeing lower real marginal tax rates.
  • CarlottaVanceCarlottaVance Posts: 59,540
    Guess the replies to this:

    Wealth is more unequal in Sweden and Germany than in the UK (higher Gini coefficient = less equal): Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook 2021; see also https://credit-suisse.com/about-us/en/reports-research/global-wealth-report.html

    https://twitter.com/JohnRentoul/status/1419943259032412163?s=20
  • AslanAslan Posts: 1,673
    Sean_F said:

    BoJo is absolutely hated by Remainers, goodbye Tory southern seats!

    You do know, most Southern Tory seats voted Leave?
    Presumably the only categories of seats where most seats voted Remain are college towns, big cities and Scotland?

    Having said that, I think there is danger for the Tories. Gratitude among Leavers for Brexit won't last forever, and there isn't much else that Boris is liked for.
  • CarlottaVanceCarlottaVance Posts: 59,540
    IanB2 said:

    Brave of Linda Bellos to put herself up for interview over the Lambeth child sex abuse scandal; her interview nevertheless is a car crash for her. Those Labour councillors running the council in the 70s and 80s need to be held to account.

    So strange the Nonce Finder General didn't go after them!

    I wonder why?
  • eekeek Posts: 24,797

    eek said:

    Pulpstar said:

    On the Employer National Insurance debate is there a comparison we can do with wages in another broadly similar country which doesn't have analogous taxes on employment?

    For example, I haven't checked whether Ireland has a similar tax, but if it doesn't would that explain why salaries are generally higher there?

    @Philip_Thompson is absolutely correct about the reality of it,
    Psychologically on both an individual and employer level it functions much more as @Pagan2 and @RochdalePioneers describe.
    The meta effect may well be one of wage depression as you point out.
    As I said at the end of the other thread, my experience of managing staffing and recruitment budgets must be very different from Philip. I have to assume that he also has personal direct real world experience of it given his black and white absolutism on the subject?

    Salary costs end up with all kinds of quirky names and acronyms. My experience of managing "SG&A" to use one example is that the pressure is always to reduce it. Philip's example is of a one-off cut in costs thanks to the abolition of ENIC. In the real world a more realistic example is expensive salary employee leaves the business. Thanks to a smart bit of recruitment their replacement is on 70% of the salary.

    The 30% saved doesn't stay in my team's SG&A for me to increase the rest of the team's wages. At best it goes into another team who need to add a head and have no budget left, or most often is taken as part of the cost reduction demand during the year.

    Salary is package - offer x salary y car z pension and other totalling bang. Does that compare well in the market, can we get the person we need for that? That is the market comparison, not one where we add in employer costs. Unless Philip's greater than mine personal experience says otherwise?
    You're conviently ignoring the fact that your competitors are all paying their tax obligations too (unless they're engaged in fraud which is more common in some sectors than others) and so will be factoring taxes into their salaries too. If the tax rates change then your competitors have more or less money available for salaries just as you do.

    Lets simplify this a bit - do you believe that in the end market prices respond to tax changes? Or do you think the market just absorbs tax changes without any response whatsoever to prices?
    What a fabulous swerve away from the question.

    Is your expertise on employee budget management based (a) on your direct professional experience or (b) theory?
    (a)
    Good. So, you are managing your staff budget as you have done with your real world experience. You end up where thanks to an event, your staff budget is in surplus. My suggestion for this event is that someone leaves and their replacement is cheaper, yours that NI is no longer paid by employers. Whatever.

    The saving is not part of your employee's package, competitor employee's package, any benchmark at all. You insist that all of this money would be handed to employees because "market forces". Which sounds so detached from reality based on what I have seen from global blue chips right down to little SMEs that I have to wonder what industry you are in. Must be one with fabulous endless profit growth is here is no annual push to claw back unspent elements of budgets.
    You keep mentioning competitor employee's packages without acknowledging the fact that the competitors are shaping their packages around the fact that they have to pay their taxes. Reality means this is already taken into account, but you're discounting the fact its taken into account by benchmarking against the fact its already taken into account. 🤦‍♂️

    If you're working on a package then either your senior has already taken NI into account, or your competitors have, either way it is there.

    And yes there's always push to claw back unspent elements of budgets if possible, but often its not possible because of yes for wont of a better word, market forces. Yes that includes your competitors etc too.

    In a previous role I once had to renegotiate a valued colleague's salary because he was threatening to leave. I wanted to keep him. He was demanding lets say for the sake of example £100 per week extra but he was demanding it in take home pay. So whatever numbers we discussed, he was calculating tax and NI changes to see what he'd be taking home extra. I was doing the same but the other way around, adding in rather than subtracting NI changes to see how it affected my overall costs. The reality is if I can afford to pay him but not HMRC then HMRC won't turn a blind eye and ignore it, they will still demand the money they are owed.

    The problem is once you look at overall costs, versus takehome pay, you can end up with very disparate results. The £100 per week extra that he wanted, would cost me much, much, much more than that.

    In the end I couldn't meet his demands as I couldn't afford them. I know from acquaintances he ended up at a competitor that was paying him £100 cash in hand per week on top of his salary. That's cost them £100 cash (which no doubt has dodged VAT and other taxes too) rather than the many multiples of that you end up with once you properly account for all taxes.
    The answer to his question was then very simple:-

    You are responsible for your tax, when HMRC come knocking for that money (and they may very well do so) I hope you are saving the 60% that you will need to pay them (HMRC will seek the employer NI from the employee in that type of case because the law says they can).

    As an employee you really do want all your income tax being reported correctly via RTI PAYE, if the company goes bankrupt before the tax bill is paid HMRC doesn't have the right to go after you.

    If however HMRC discovered that schemes were being used (even ones as simple as cash in hand payments) then HMRC could play a whole heap of nasty games to recover the money they want (and that money will be their estimate that you need to disprove rather than an agreed amount).
    You're right of course - but that's assuming HMRC discovers the missing money. I have very little faith in that, from experience.

    I've always ensured my books are completely legit, but I know many competitors in the past have not been and only once has a competitor that I know of been tackled - and in that instance it was for their use of illegal immigration they were caught on, not the cash payments.
    You know that reported pay of Taxi drivers increased by 40% in real terms between 2010 and 2019?

    That's due to uber and other apps making it impossible to hide cash payments the way they used to do so.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,595
    IanB2 said:

    Brave of Linda Bellos to put herself up for interview over the Lambeth child sex abuse scandal; her interview nevertheless is a car crash for her. Those Labour councillors running the council in the 70s and 80s need to be held to account.

    In other, excellent news, Wes Streeting announces he is recovered from cancer and resuming his poltiics.

    Reminds me of the Baby P case - the idiot running the dept was too busy pursuing an allegation against the care worker who was upsetting everyone by insisting that Baby P was abused.

    The care worker was alleged to have sworn back at teenage girl who had been shouting threats and hate at her non-stop.....

    So process was being followed. Yes, a child died, but lessons will be learned......
  • OnlyLivingBoyOnlyLivingBoy Posts: 14,911
    The gap between ABC1 Leavers and C2DE Leavers is interesting. The current Tory party is basically a party of, by and for ABC1 Leavers, masquerading as one that has the interests of C2DE Leavers at heart (it doesn't give two shits about Remainers of any background).

    Are C2DE Leavers starting to get this? It would be nice to think so, but I'm sceptical for now.
  • RochdalePioneersRochdalePioneers Posts: 27,006

    eek said:

    Pulpstar said:

    On the Employer National Insurance debate is there a comparison we can do with wages in another broadly similar country which doesn't have analogous taxes on employment?

    For example, I haven't checked whether Ireland has a similar tax, but if it doesn't would that explain why salaries are generally higher there?

    @Philip_Thompson is absolutely correct about the reality of it,
    Psychologically on both an individual and employer level it functions much more as @Pagan2 and @RochdalePioneers describe.
    The meta effect may well be one of wage depression as you point out.
    As I said at the end of the other thread, my experience of managing staffing and recruitment budgets must be very different from Philip. I have to assume that he also has personal direct real world experience of it given his black and white absolutism on the subject?

    Salary costs end up with all kinds of quirky names and acronyms. My experience of managing "SG&A" to use one example is that the pressure is always to reduce it. Philip's example is of a one-off cut in costs thanks to the abolition of ENIC. In the real world a more realistic example is expensive salary employee leaves the business. Thanks to a smart bit of recruitment their replacement is on 70% of the salary.

    The 30% saved doesn't stay in my team's SG&A for me to increase the rest of the team's wages. At best it goes into another team who need to add a head and have no budget left, or most often is taken as part of the cost reduction demand during the year.

    Salary is package - offer x salary y car z pension and other totalling bang. Does that compare well in the market, can we get the person we need for that? That is the market comparison, not one where we add in employer costs. Unless Philip's greater than mine personal experience says otherwise?
    You're conviently ignoring the fact that your competitors are all paying their tax obligations too (unless they're engaged in fraud which is more common in some sectors than others) and so will be factoring taxes into their salaries too. If the tax rates change then your competitors have more or less money available for salaries just as you do.

    Lets simplify this a bit - do you believe that in the end market prices respond to tax changes? Or do you think the market just absorbs tax changes without any response whatsoever to prices?
    What a fabulous swerve away from the question.

    Is your expertise on employee budget management based (a) on your direct professional experience or (b) theory?
    (a)
    Good. So, you are managing your staff budget as you have done with your real world experience. You end up where thanks to an event, your staff budget is in surplus. My suggestion for this event is that someone leaves and their replacement is cheaper, yours that NI is no longer paid by employers. Whatever.

    The saving is not part of your employee's package, competitor employee's package, any benchmark at all. You insist that all of this money would be handed to employees because "market forces". Which sounds so detached from reality based on what I have seen from global blue chips right down to little SMEs that I have to wonder what industry you are in. Must be one with fabulous endless profit growth is here is no annual push to claw back unspent elements of budgets.
    You keep mentioning competitor employee's packages without acknowledging the fact that the competitors are shaping their packages around the fact that they have to pay their taxes. Reality means this is already taken into account, but you're discounting the fact its taken into account by benchmarking against the fact its already taken into account. 🤦‍♂️

    If you're working on a package then either your senior has already taken NI into account, or your competitors have, either way it is there.

    And yes there's always push to claw back unspent elements of budgets if possible, but often its not possible because of yes for wont of a better word, market forces. Yes that includes your competitors etc too.

    In a previous role I once had to renegotiate a valued colleague's salary because he was threatening to leave. I wanted to keep him. He was demanding lets say for the sake of example £100 per week extra but he was demanding it in take home pay. So whatever numbers we discussed, he was calculating tax and NI changes to see what he'd be taking home extra. I was doing the same but the other way around, adding in rather than subtracting NI changes to see how it affected my overall costs. The reality is if I can afford to pay him but not HMRC then HMRC won't turn a blind eye and ignore it, they will still demand the money they are owed.

    The problem is once you look at overall costs, versus takehome pay, you can end up with very disparate results. The £100 per week extra that he wanted, would cost me much, much, much more than that.

    In the end I couldn't meet his demands as I couldn't afford them. I know from acquaintances he ended up at a competitor that was paying him £100 cash in hand per week on top of his salary. That's cost them £100 cash (which no doubt has dodged VAT and other taxes too) rather than the many multiples of that you end up with once you properly account for all taxes.
    The answer to his question was then very simple:-

    You are responsible for your tax, when HMRC come knocking for that money (and they may very well do so) I hope you are saving the 60% that you will need to pay them (HMRC will seek the employer NI from the employee in that type of case because the law says they can).

    As an employee you really do want all your income tax being reported correctly via RTI PAYE, if the company goes bankrupt before the tax bill is paid HMRC doesn't have the right to go after you.

    If however HMRC discovered that schemes were being used (even ones as simple as cash in hand payments) then HMRC could play a whole heap of nasty games to recover the money they want (and that money will be their estimate that you need to disprove rather than an agreed amount).
    You're right of course - but that's assuming HMRC discovers the missing money. I have very little faith in that, from experience.

    I've always ensured my books are completely legit, but I know many competitors in the past have not been and only once has a competitor that I know of been tackled - and in that instance it was for their use of illegal immigration they were caught on, not the cash payments.
    As HMRC have had their budgets and staff levels slashed it isn't a surprise. They only audit where there is a smoking gun pointing the way.
  • AslanAslan Posts: 1,673

    Voters will surely only take so much nonsense.

    They were told Brexit was done in the 2019 GE, that's why many voted for Johnson. Yet it's evidently not done, patience will surely run out

    I think you misunderstand Brexit voters. For everyone in Great Britain, we are no longer subject to the rule of the European Commission, we can and are limiting EU immigration, and we can sign trade deals around the world. That is Brexit done, regardless of the endless difficulties in Northern Ireland.
  • DecrepiterJohnLDecrepiterJohnL Posts: 23,926

    Guess the replies to this:

    Wealth is more unequal in Sweden and Germany than in the UK (higher Gini coefficient = less equal): Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook 2021; see also https://credit-suisse.com/about-us/en/reports-research/global-wealth-report.html

    https://twitter.com/JohnRentoul/status/1419943259032412163?s=20

    Sweden is the most unequal country? (Sweden 87.2; USA 85.0; UK 71.7). That's unexpected.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,595
    eek said:

    eek said:

    Pulpstar said:

    On the Employer National Insurance debate is there a comparison we can do with wages in another broadly similar country which doesn't have analogous taxes on employment?

    For example, I haven't checked whether Ireland has a similar tax, but if it doesn't would that explain why salaries are generally higher there?

    @Philip_Thompson is absolutely correct about the reality of it,
    Psychologically on both an individual and employer level it functions much more as @Pagan2 and @RochdalePioneers describe.
    The meta effect may well be one of wage depression as you point out.
    As I said at the end of the other thread, my experience of managing staffing and recruitment budgets must be very different from Philip. I have to assume that he also has personal direct real world experience of it given his black and white absolutism on the subject?

    Salary costs end up with all kinds of quirky names and acronyms. My experience of managing "SG&A" to use one example is that the pressure is always to reduce it. Philip's example is of a one-off cut in costs thanks to the abolition of ENIC. In the real world a more realistic example is expensive salary employee leaves the business. Thanks to a smart bit of recruitment their replacement is on 70% of the salary.

    The 30% saved doesn't stay in my team's SG&A for me to increase the rest of the team's wages. At best it goes into another team who need to add a head and have no budget left, or most often is taken as part of the cost reduction demand during the year.

    Salary is package - offer x salary y car z pension and other totalling bang. Does that compare well in the market, can we get the person we need for that? That is the market comparison, not one where we add in employer costs. Unless Philip's greater than mine personal experience says otherwise?
    You're conviently ignoring the fact that your competitors are all paying their tax obligations too (unless they're engaged in fraud which is more common in some sectors than others) and so will be factoring taxes into their salaries too. If the tax rates change then your competitors have more or less money available for salaries just as you do.

    Lets simplify this a bit - do you believe that in the end market prices respond to tax changes? Or do you think the market just absorbs tax changes without any response whatsoever to prices?
    What a fabulous swerve away from the question.

    Is your expertise on employee budget management based (a) on your direct professional experience or (b) theory?
    (a)
    Good. So, you are managing your staff budget as you have done with your real world experience. You end up where thanks to an event, your staff budget is in surplus. My suggestion for this event is that someone leaves and their replacement is cheaper, yours that NI is no longer paid by employers. Whatever.

    The saving is not part of your employee's package, competitor employee's package, any benchmark at all. You insist that all of this money would be handed to employees because "market forces". Which sounds so detached from reality based on what I have seen from global blue chips right down to little SMEs that I have to wonder what industry you are in. Must be one with fabulous endless profit growth is here is no annual push to claw back unspent elements of budgets.
    You keep mentioning competitor employee's packages without acknowledging the fact that the competitors are shaping their packages around the fact that they have to pay their taxes. Reality means this is already taken into account, but you're discounting the fact its taken into account by benchmarking against the fact its already taken into account. 🤦‍♂️

    If you're working on a package then either your senior has already taken NI into account, or your competitors have, either way it is there.

    And yes there's always push to claw back unspent elements of budgets if possible, but often its not possible because of yes for wont of a better word, market forces. Yes that includes your competitors etc too.

    In a previous role I once had to renegotiate a valued colleague's salary because he was threatening to leave. I wanted to keep him. He was demanding lets say for the sake of example £100 per week extra but he was demanding it in take home pay. So whatever numbers we discussed, he was calculating tax and NI changes to see what he'd be taking home extra. I was doing the same but the other way around, adding in rather than subtracting NI changes to see how it affected my overall costs. The reality is if I can afford to pay him but not HMRC then HMRC won't turn a blind eye and ignore it, they will still demand the money they are owed.

    The problem is once you look at overall costs, versus takehome pay, you can end up with very disparate results. The £100 per week extra that he wanted, would cost me much, much, much more than that.

    In the end I couldn't meet his demands as I couldn't afford them. I know from acquaintances he ended up at a competitor that was paying him £100 cash in hand per week on top of his salary. That's cost them £100 cash (which no doubt has dodged VAT and other taxes too) rather than the many multiples of that you end up with once you properly account for all taxes.
    The answer to his question was then very simple:-

    You are responsible for your tax, when HMRC come knocking for that money (and they may very well do so) I hope you are saving the 60% that you will need to pay them (HMRC will seek the employer NI from the employee in that type of case because the law says they can).

    As an employee you really do want all your income tax being reported correctly via RTI PAYE, if the company goes bankrupt before the tax bill is paid HMRC doesn't have the right to go after you.

    If however HMRC discovered that schemes were being used (even ones as simple as cash in hand payments) then HMRC could play a whole heap of nasty games to recover the money they want (and that money will be their estimate that you need to disprove rather than an agreed amount).
    You're right of course - but that's assuming HMRC discovers the missing money. I have very little faith in that, from experience.

    I've always ensured my books are completely legit, but I know many competitors in the past have not been and only once has a competitor that I know of been tackled - and in that instance it was for their use of illegal immigration they were caught on, not the cash payments.
    You know that reported pay of Taxi drivers increased by 40% in real terms between 2010 and 2019?

    That's due to uber and other apps making it impossible to hide cash payments the way they used to do so.
    There's a reason that Black Cab drivers resisted card payments, for so long.....
  • Aslan said:

    Voters will surely only take so much nonsense.

    They were told Brexit was done in the 2019 GE, that's why many voted for Johnson. Yet it's evidently not done, patience will surely run out

    I think you misunderstand Brexit voters. For everyone in Great Britain, we are no longer subject to the rule of the European Commission, we can and are limiting EU immigration, and we can sign trade deals around the world. That is Brexit done, regardless of the endless difficulties in Northern Ireland.
    Why is Boris Johnson trying to rewrite his own Brexit deal if Brexit is finished?
  • NickPalmerNickPalmer Posts: 21,263

    Guess the replies to this:

    Wealth is more unequal in Sweden and Germany than in the UK (higher Gini coefficient = less equal): Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook 2021; see also https://credit-suisse.com/about-us/en/reports-research/global-wealth-report.html

    https://twitter.com/JohnRentoul/status/1419943259032412163?s=20

    Sweden is the most unequal country? (Sweden 87.2; USA 85.0; UK 71.7). That's unexpected.
    Seems to be simply wrong. Here's the official list:

    https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/gini-coefficient-by-country

    Sweden 28.8, UK 34.8, USA 48
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826
    eek said:

    eek said:

    Pulpstar said:

    On the Employer National Insurance debate is there a comparison we can do with wages in another broadly similar country which doesn't have analogous taxes on employment?

    For example, I haven't checked whether Ireland has a similar tax, but if it doesn't would that explain why salaries are generally higher there?

    @Philip_Thompson is absolutely correct about the reality of it,
    Psychologically on both an individual and employer level it functions much more as @Pagan2 and @RochdalePioneers describe.
    The meta effect may well be one of wage depression as you point out.
    As I said at the end of the other thread, my experience of managing staffing and recruitment budgets must be very different from Philip. I have to assume that he also has personal direct real world experience of it given his black and white absolutism on the subject?

    Salary costs end up with all kinds of quirky names and acronyms. My experience of managing "SG&A" to use one example is that the pressure is always to reduce it. Philip's example is of a one-off cut in costs thanks to the abolition of ENIC. In the real world a more realistic example is expensive salary employee leaves the business. Thanks to a smart bit of recruitment their replacement is on 70% of the salary.

    The 30% saved doesn't stay in my team's SG&A for me to increase the rest of the team's wages. At best it goes into another team who need to add a head and have no budget left, or most often is taken as part of the cost reduction demand during the year.

    Salary is package - offer x salary y car z pension and other totalling bang. Does that compare well in the market, can we get the person we need for that? That is the market comparison, not one where we add in employer costs. Unless Philip's greater than mine personal experience says otherwise?
    You're conviently ignoring the fact that your competitors are all paying their tax obligations too (unless they're engaged in fraud which is more common in some sectors than others) and so will be factoring taxes into their salaries too. If the tax rates change then your competitors have more or less money available for salaries just as you do.

    Lets simplify this a bit - do you believe that in the end market prices respond to tax changes? Or do you think the market just absorbs tax changes without any response whatsoever to prices?
    What a fabulous swerve away from the question.

    Is your expertise on employee budget management based (a) on your direct professional experience or (b) theory?
    (a)
    Good. So, you are managing your staff budget as you have done with your real world experience. You end up where thanks to an event, your staff budget is in surplus. My suggestion for this event is that someone leaves and their replacement is cheaper, yours that NI is no longer paid by employers. Whatever.

    The saving is not part of your employee's package, competitor employee's package, any benchmark at all. You insist that all of this money would be handed to employees because "market forces". Which sounds so detached from reality based on what I have seen from global blue chips right down to little SMEs that I have to wonder what industry you are in. Must be one with fabulous endless profit growth is here is no annual push to claw back unspent elements of budgets.
    You keep mentioning competitor employee's packages without acknowledging the fact that the competitors are shaping their packages around the fact that they have to pay their taxes. Reality means this is already taken into account, but you're discounting the fact its taken into account by benchmarking against the fact its already taken into account. 🤦‍♂️

    If you're working on a package then either your senior has already taken NI into account, or your competitors have, either way it is there.

    And yes there's always push to claw back unspent elements of budgets if possible, but often its not possible because of yes for wont of a better word, market forces. Yes that includes your competitors etc too.

    In a previous role I once had to renegotiate a valued colleague's salary because he was threatening to leave. I wanted to keep him. He was demanding lets say for the sake of example £100 per week extra but he was demanding it in take home pay. So whatever numbers we discussed, he was calculating tax and NI changes to see what he'd be taking home extra. I was doing the same but the other way around, adding in rather than subtracting NI changes to see how it affected my overall costs. The reality is if I can afford to pay him but not HMRC then HMRC won't turn a blind eye and ignore it, they will still demand the money they are owed.

    The problem is once you look at overall costs, versus takehome pay, you can end up with very disparate results. The £100 per week extra that he wanted, would cost me much, much, much more than that.

    In the end I couldn't meet his demands as I couldn't afford them. I know from acquaintances he ended up at a competitor that was paying him £100 cash in hand per week on top of his salary. That's cost them £100 cash (which no doubt has dodged VAT and other taxes too) rather than the many multiples of that you end up with once you properly account for all taxes.
    The answer to his question was then very simple:-

    You are responsible for your tax, when HMRC come knocking for that money (and they may very well do so) I hope you are saving the 60% that you will need to pay them (HMRC will seek the employer NI from the employee in that type of case because the law says they can).

    As an employee you really do want all your income tax being reported correctly via RTI PAYE, if the company goes bankrupt before the tax bill is paid HMRC doesn't have the right to go after you.

    If however HMRC discovered that schemes were being used (even ones as simple as cash in hand payments) then HMRC could play a whole heap of nasty games to recover the money they want (and that money will be their estimate that you need to disprove rather than an agreed amount).
    You're right of course - but that's assuming HMRC discovers the missing money. I have very little faith in that, from experience.

    I've always ensured my books are completely legit, but I know many competitors in the past have not been and only once has a competitor that I know of been tackled - and in that instance it was for their use of illegal immigration they were caught on, not the cash payments.
    You know that reported pay of Taxi drivers increased by 40% in real terms between 2010 and 2019?

    That's due to uber and other apps making it impossible to hide cash payments the way they used to do so.
    Precisely, which only goes to show the extent of cash payments that were there before then.

    Which are still just as prevalent in many other industries that haven't become entirely online.
  • Sean_F said:

    BoJo is absolutely hated by Remainers, goodbye Tory southern seats!

    You do know, most Southern Tory seats voted Leave?
    Seats like Winchester, Guildford, will almost certainly be going Lib Dem next time, I've put some bets down.
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