The politics of a 50p top rate

jon

You could keep the 40% rate or lower by making anybody with a British Passport pay tax on worldwide income, wherever they live, like the american system. End non-domicile status would also raise money.

TrevorsDen

50p? What about the remains of the 10p fiasco. Where is Frank Field?

Darling has just continued Browns farcical tax credits scheme.

The IMF has just torpedoed Darlings growth forecasts so really this 50p is no issue to the Tories. They can ignore it on the back of rubbishing the govts figures and saying they will have to see the books.

Dog Snob

Hello, here we go. The rattle's out of the pram.

Pips squeak? I feel so sorry for those earning 150 grand a year. After all it's they who 'create wealth' while all us grunts just splash out on beer, chips and bingo.

Let's be honest you've had a good twenty odd years. Just graciously accept the fact that the party's over.

Mike, Brighton

I'm hit by this tax for financial incontinence and frankly I'm not going to pay it.
I'm happy to pay my dues but my pips are fully squeaking. I pay the tax of more than 10 basic rate tax payers and I've had enough.
To high earners, it costs about £5,000 in fees to put £100,000 of income into a totally-legitimate tax avoidance scheme. So you get back the £40K in tax for £5K in costs. Now you will get back £50K in tax for £5K in costs.

The tax avoidance specialists are going to be very busy.

On another point, my job is global. Why should I pay 51% tax (don't forget the NI!) when I can move to New York, live across ths Hudson in New Jersey and pay around 25% in total tax?

If you pay more than 50% in any tax you are no longer a citizen but a vassal. A slave of the state.

Mike, Brighton

Dog Snob: I pay the tax of 10+ people. It's a big loss to the tax man if I leave the country and work from the US. I've had a good twenty years. Riiiight, this and previous governments use me as a walking cheque book to pay for their incompetence. Why should I pay????? I consume few government services.
- My children are in private education
- My family uses private healthcare
- I pay the taxes for 2x cars
What do I get in return for all my hard earned cash paid in tax. NOTHING

Bocephus

Cameron fell straight in to Labour's trap. As soon as he agreed to the 45% rate a blind man could have seen Labour would increase it to 50%. If he agrees to 50% Labour will soon announce an increase to 60%.

Cameron's decision to back the 45% rate was idiotic.

Tiberius

The tragedy is, Dog Snob, that we could all have had more of a party if the country had never been diseased with Gordon Brown.

Ian C

What, a Brown gov't putting up the top rate of tax? Well blow me down.

This will come as a surprise to those who believed for the past15 years that this man is not an old fashioned socialist and engineer of society.

Peter Wilson

@Dog Snob: Pips squeak? I feel so sorry for those earning 150 grand a year. After all it's they who 'create wealth' while all us grunts just splash out on beer, chips and bingo.

Oh yes the party's well and truly over. The Treasury admits that the top rate of tax will actually raise less than the increased fuel duty. So most of the taxes will go on hard working people.

Still, at least you're at home, on benefits, watching Jeremy Kyle, safe in the knowledge that your beer (going up) chips and bingo are funded by the rest of us.

Johnathan Pearce

Some of the vindictive comments on this post remind me of why I loathe socialism so much. If you are an entrepreneur, you incomne is not not even; one year you break even, the next year you might earn over £150K. Result: you pay half of that to the government but won't get anything back for the lean times. And as a consequence, new business formation and investment will fall.

Weirdly, the government has kept capital gains tax at 18 per cent, so many people will get their lawyers and accountants to restructure their affairs to they are liable for CGT rather than income tax. This will be a boon to tax planners.

what a way to run a country.

THX1138

Well I'm F**cked off. Over to you George is Tory Government going to give me my money back! If not what is the point of you?

Russ

Adam Boulton is slaughtering Yvette Cooper on Sky News right now

William

'On another point, my job is global. Why should I pay 51% tax (don't forget the NI!) when I can move to New York, live across ths Hudson in New Jersey and pay around 25% in total tax?'

Why don't you do so?

As another poster has stated, the Americans have a global tax system because they presume, rightly, that the benefits of being an American citizen in any part of the world are worth having and therefore worth payment.

You could always renounce your British citizenship. I'm sure many in Africa, Asia, etc. would gladly buy it from you.

The Preston Park Panther

Dear Dog Snob,

The point is not about whether high earners should or should not be allowed to keep their own money. The bigger point is that the more money overmighty governments steal, the worse everything becomes for everyone at all levels of society. Apart from which, to look back a little, my father paid tax through the nose to the last load of socialist lunatics who wrecked the country. And if they wasted all that money then (and... just checking... yes, they did!), they have no right to ask for any more now.

Nick Kaplan

Dog Snob is completely correct, the rich should be really grateful that the government has been kind enough not to appropriate 50% of their income until now.

Likewise the rest of us should humbly venerate our political masters who have been kind enough to take by force just 45% of all we produce (GDP) when they could have stolen much much more! How kind of them! How unworthy we are to have such benevolent masters.

What is really fantastic about this new level of legalised theft is how it is guised in the language of moral virtue. I have already lost count of the number of ministers who have, in interviews, declared how ‘fair’ the new 50% rate is, as if, by calling something fair, it automatically becomes so.

But there is nothing ‘fair’ about the appropriation, by force, of 50% of someone else’s earnings in order to win the votes of a few envious socialists. Fairness requires treating people in roughly similar ways, not treating the minority (the rich) as a cash cow for the rest of us, who we can milk for all they’re worth every time our monumentally incompetent overlords fancy buying us off to win the next election.

Susan Hill

Mike, Brighton. You`d be paying a hell of a lot more than 25% by the time Obama is done.

THX1138

As ever the West Wing nails it

From Sam Seaborn

Henry, last fall, every time your boss got on the stump and said, "It’s time for the rich to pay their fair share," I hid under a couch and changed my name. I left Gage Whitney making $400,000 a year, which means I paid 27 times the national average in income tax. I paid my fair share, and the fair share of 26 other people. And I’m happy to, ‘cause that’s the only way it’s gonna work. And it’s in my best interest that everybody be able to go to schools and drive on roads. But I don’t get 27 votes on Election Day. The fire department doesn’t come to my house 27 times faster and the water doesn’t come out of my faucet 27 times hotter. The top one percent of wage earners in this country pay for 22 percent of this country. Let’s not call them names while they’re doing it, is all I’m saying."

I bet all going to be well is only bloody bankers earning over 150K they got into this mess in the first place, don't the f**ckers deserve it.

Dog Snob

Mike, Brighton.

No you don't my friend, you pay the tax due from one person: yourself. Just like I do.
Private education? I would if I could, lucky you and your kids. Private healthcare? Great until you kidneys pack up and then pop down the local infirmary for some long term.
Two cars? Lucky you again. In fact looking at it all you have a lot to be grateful for. Why would you want to leave all that?

Tiberius.
The disease started early 80s I think. About the time when we started believing the horseshit that put all our faith in the financial and services sectors. Yeah right, we're gonna maintain a nation on pension fiddling, overpriced haircuts and pret a bleedin manger.

cuffleyburgers

Brown's best biographer was surely Bower who skewered the bastard good and proper.

This story does showup two things though; one is his financial incompetence - any fule kno' that this tax rise will not increase revenues, and the other is his utter cycnicism, ie. he don't care, it's all about marking lines with the tories and not about doing the right thing.

There seems to be no admission that one of the reasons the economy has gone off the cliff is because of crippling regulation, tax on employment , tax on this tax on that, this illegal that compulsory...and it can never get better until this is changed.

The benefit for the tories is that once the elcetion has been one, massive improvements can be achieved immediately by making such changes, but how much more suffering in the mean while...

Tiberius

Dog Snob: The disease started on 2 May 1997 (I felt the stomach churning all morning as Blair and Cherie preened themselves in the sunshine), but if you want to go back to an earlier set of symptoms, remember that the economics of the 1980s saved the country from oblivion following the Trade Union militantism of the 1960s and 1970s.

Paul B

Point is as, high earner pay more tax than low earner whatever the rate- apart from 2 rates (0 & 100pc) Zero, because you don`t pay anything as you are not taxed, and at 100pc, again you do not anything, as who in the right mind would work all year round for nothing, think about that one Dog Snob.

However for sake of arguement, we have a flat rate tax of 20pc on all earned income, who pays more? The person on 20grand or the person on 100grand.Simple maths.

What Brown and Darling have dome to day is vicious, dog whistle politics of the lowest kind. It vile and divisive, its form of ethnic cleansing, anyone with an iota of humanity and common sense should able to see what a repugnant bunch of shysters and lowlife Browns bunch is. God help us all.

Dog Snob

Nick Kaplan

Girlie stomping is not your style. Meanwhile, nobody, including yourself, has offered anything to counter my points, other than the seemingly conventional wisdom that higher taxes for the rich will be counter productive and will drive away the 'wealth creators'. The lesser beings, the proles, providing nothing but a lumbering leadweight.

Because of my views I have been accused of being on benefits, of being a socialist, of espousing the politics of envy, of being anti-business; yet not one has the slightest idea of my background and what I actually do.

Never mind. An eventful day draws to its close and it's around this time I like to go round to the boozer and get all tanked up for tomorrow's fray. Maybe some chips too.

fragmeister

As someone who pays tax and is paid by the state (I teach for a living), what I want to know is what right any goverment has to take any tax from anyone when they are so incompetent as to manage it as badly as Brown did for all those years?

I think I have a right to a say in how my money is spent and I don't feel much like I've been asked recently. How about an election now?