The imbalance is that people who are very rich are able to pay less tax because they can use the system to their advantage. This option isnāt open to the vast majority of people. Itās not illegal, itās just not balanced or fair.
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An example was the second largest tax payer in the UK leaving the UK. This has caused the tax take to drop and thus more money will be needed to bridge that gap. 2025 they paid circa Ā£330m in tax.
There is a chance I was in a mood and didnāt fully understand what was said 
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Itās worth being clear about thisā¦ when you say they pay less tax, @ravipatelās figures imply each rich person (top 1%) pays on average 148x more income tax than someone in the bottom 50%.
You might think āmeh, they can afford it,ā but at some point some of them may choose to up sticks and leave the UK.
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The problem is I donāt think people have much sympathy when people who have more wealth than they can spend in 100 lifetimes feel like theyāre hard done by and move to a tax haven. Oh no, Iām a billionaire and have more money than I can physically spend and have to pay more tax. And itās always a case of oh but they provide jobs, how many people in this country are paid minimum wage? And theyāre only paid that because itās illegal to pay them less, which everyone knows they would if they could otherwise theyād be paid more than minimum wage in the first place. I canāt have sympathy for a billionaire when thereās people having to work multiple minimum wage jobs to barely scrape a life together. If the billionaires are so hard up after having to pay more tax, maybe they should cancel Netflix and drink less coffee like regular people are told to do when theyāre struggling.
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Yes, that was exactly my point that I made earlier.
Some do pay their fair share but others are able to funnel money through others methods that means percentage wise they pay tax at much lower rates.
I donāt think anybody has any sympathy when it comes to billionaires paying taxes, we just want the taxes paid into our tax system rather than somebody elseās.
Exactly. Itās not about sympathy. Itās just having their tax here is really important, and we donāt want to push away too many rich people
Why would any business pay someone more than what the market commands for the role. Thatās business suicide. Theres no ceiling to how much people would command then, so it would spiral out of control.
If someone wants to earn more, they need to take on greater responsibility or learn new skills to change their role.
I agree on all the tax stuff, but this is nothing to do with millionaires.
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That isnāt the problem. Thatās an effect of not understanding how things work.
Same with this view.
Thereās little point trying to explain why here on this forum, generally speaking. The Guardian newspaper non-story the other day was enough to highlight that!
But, they really do provide jobs. They grow the economy and increase tax receipts. And things like NI increases and minimum wages have a stunting effect on that.
Iām not saying there shouldnāt be a minimum wage, but people seem to act like there isnāt a trade off of making employing people more expensive at the same time that AI is literally making some jobs obsolete and massively increasing efficiency.
People are too stuck on what is ārightā and not on what is actually going to help us get out of this mess (itās not higher taxes!).
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There is an inherent problem with holding up billionaires etc as wealth creators, in effect telling people they should grateful for their patronage in a system of neo-feudalism. It highlights the massive inequality resulting from neoliberalism. People see this group of ultra wealthy people swanning around whilst crying about how much tax they have to pay, the billionaire in question was literally photographed wearing a jewel encrusted crownā¦ All the while looking to their own lives and realising they are having to think twice about their use of their car or the cost of basic necessities in their lives. At the same time we have a media and sections of society telling them itās their fault and they should work harder, or more troublingly that its the fault of that person that doesnāt look like them.
I donāt really know what the answer is, Iām just trying to provide an alternative viewpoint to the hereās a graph that shows billionaires/millionaires are the goodiesā¦
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Ok, take out the billionaires. In @ravipatelās figures the next group down (top 10% excluding the top 1%) were each paying 18x more income tax than the bottom 50%, and the slightly above average group were each paying 4x more income tax.
These people, some paying an order of magnitude more income tax, are receiving exactly the same public services as everyone else (or possible less, if they use private healthcare and/or send their kids to private school).
FWIW, I asked ChatGPT to tell me what those percentiles mean in cash terms
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Yeah, fair, and maybe weāre talking at cross purposes here. Ruthless capitalism is as bad as ruthless wealth redistribution- they both have the capacity to make society much worse.
I think my main point was that ātax the rich more!ā is shouted by people who are unaware how much more the rich already pay - hence why I joined this topic in response to a comment about the rich paying less
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Fair, Iām trying to be careful about how I word things as I donāt intend to vex folks. I donāt really think weāre talking at cross purposes either. Iām in no way advocating for a ātankyā style redistribution of wealth.
What Iām trying to say is that while facts and figures are lovely. They hide what are the lived experiences of people and how that makes them feel the current tax system and distribution of wealth is unequal and unfair. There will no doubt be a lot of people in this community, such as myself, who are educated have professional jobs but still have a paycheck that often wonāt get them through the month and will be getting pay rises that amount to real world pay cuts when inflation is taken into account. All the while being told itās fine your paycheck is disappearing off in taxes etc just hush up and deal with it. While someone wearing a jewel encrusted tiara is crying about their taxes and using their vast amounts of wealth to swan off to a tax haven.
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I think the issue is that this works both ways. Letās exclude the Top 1% as thatās a different world.
Iām in the Top 10%. I have a good income, but weāre definitely not what I would consider rich. There are 5 of us living in a 3 bed semi with one bathroom. Now weāre obviously not poor and donāt have to worry about paying the bills day to day, but weāre also not living a luxury lifestyle.
I pay a lot of tax already, but am disincentivised from earning more as it would put me into the the 60% marginal tax bracket.
At the same time, there are plenty of couples earning a similar/higher combined income and paying way less tax than me (my Mrs doesnāt work).
No one should feel sorry for me. But at the same time, āfairnessā is such a subjective term.
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From my understanding and my personal viewpoint, itās not people in your situation whose wealth is seen as obscene or requiring redistribution. More the people that consider themselves āwealth creatorsā when in reality the only wealth they are creating is their own. While those further down the ladder, yourself included, are perceiving the tax burden shifting on to them.
In a lot of ways this is reminiscent of the situation with the Robber Barons from the 20ās in the states.
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A lot more than their used to be but that is due to the fact itās level has increased so much.
An unintended consequence of which is that pay differentials for non minimum wage employees has greatly reduced.
Sorry but this is one of the arguments I hate more than anything - we need to stop making it the workerās fault theyāre only making minimum wage and that itās not enough to live on, and making out people arenāt already working hard. If everyone could just go and get a higher paying job they would, but the job paying minimum wage is still going to be need to be done by some desperate enough to need to work for it, who will then also struggle only to be told itās their fault and to get a higher paying job. People arenāt struggling because they canāt be bothered to do better and itās such a depressing mindset to have.
This is essentially my view too, I agree with all of your posts here. Societies have always pushed back against people hoarding resources, including money, but these days itās seen as a good thing to have. Iām sorry but I cannot accept a world where we have people with superyachts and more wealth than one person can ever utilise complaining about being taxed more, which would still leave them with more money than they could ever utilise, while thereās households having to decide whether to put fuel in the car or money in the meter after coming home from a shift quite likely working for a company run by a billionaire based on how many jobs they supposedly create, only to be told itās their fault theyāre in that situation and they just need to work harder. We have frozen tax thresholds pulling everyday working people into paying more tax they canāt afford, while everything is going up in price with wages not rising in line with inflation, and all I see people saying online is that they have money management problems and just need to work harder. Itās no different to things like privatised water, paying out billions in dividends lining peopleās pockets only to come cap in hand saying they have no money and we all need to pay higher bills. People are over it. Something has gone wrong somewhere. But maybe Iām just in the minority in thinking itās not a sign of a healthy society to have people with 10-plus figure net worths complaining theyāre the ones being squeezed.
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Someone working full time on minimum wage (37.5 h a week) would be taking home ~Ā£21,595 itās hardly a fantastic salary to live on.
Whilst the median take home pay in the UK is ~Ā£31,628 again not exactly a great number. I do find it shocking how low the median wage is tbh.