Top 1% earn 14% of total income, own 21% of total wealth and pay about 30% of total income tax. They also receive 0% of total benefits/welfare.
How are we affording all this welfare?
- Thread starter jsmoke
- Start date
Top 1% earn 14% of total income, own 21% of total wealth and pay about 30% of total income tax. They also receive 0% of total benefits/welfare.
Soldato
Yea, i think you need to brush up on whats going on before having any strong opinions about it tbh
Lol.
Money is relative, and fictional.
Relatively speaking, everyone is fubar so we can fairly safely print money and not risk spooking the markets. The printed money is the fictional bit.
You can hide a lot of things behind stats.
14% of total income is ~£170 Billion and 30% of income tax is around ~£80 Billion, which if they were all equal income amounts to ~170k a year remaining.
86% of total income is ~£1050 Billion and 70% of income tax is around ~£185 Billion, which if they were all equal income amounts to ~27k a year remaining.
*for 2019 FY, ignoring other taxes.
Looks fine to me frankly, I certainly wouldn't be moaning about having that amount. The 1% may not receive benefits, but some of them certainly receive special considerations by governments if they use some of that to coerce and leverage further ability to make more money at the expense of the rest of the country. They also benefit from not having to pay a reasonable income to their employees and they benefit from keeping the proles happy rather than agitated.
A functioning state is not a one-way street, we shouldn't need to constantly remind ourselves with what happens when it is.
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Soldato
I think it's all too convenient to decide that I have a right to x% of *my* income, but my rich neighbor doesn't "need" their money, so they should keep a smaller percentage of theirs.
We can't have an honest debate on the proper size and scope of government when we can basically mug the rich guy in the corner to pay for said government.
I would like to see a sales tax system with an annual tax pre-bate. The collective can come up with a number that an individual "needs" to live on. Then send a check for the tax that would be paid on that amount of money to every person. (Parents, get the tax pre-bate money for their children, of course, but every citizen gets it.) -Poor people with no income at all, and the richest person in the system. One check for everyone at the beginning of the year. Thus, no one can be said to get taxed on the money the "need."
Once we are only taxing money above and beyond what people "need" *and* we will all pay the same rate, we can discuss what we want to pay the government to do. Military, welfare...all of it.
Such a system could deter the temptation to demand more and more government services that benefit certain groups while sticking other groups with the bill. Moving the "need" line up and/or expanding government programs will directly increase the sales tax rate we all pay.
We can't have an honest debate on the proper size and scope of government when we can basically mug the rich guy in the corner to pay for said government.
I would like to see a sales tax system with an annual tax pre-bate. The collective can come up with a number that an individual "needs" to live on. Then send a check for the tax that would be paid on that amount of money to every person. (Parents, get the tax pre-bate money for their children, of course, but every citizen gets it.) -Poor people with no income at all, and the richest person in the system. One check for everyone at the beginning of the year. Thus, no one can be said to get taxed on the money the "need."
Once we are only taxing money above and beyond what people "need" *and* we will all pay the same rate, we can discuss what we want to pay the government to do. Military, welfare...all of it.
Such a system could deter the temptation to demand more and more government services that benefit certain groups while sticking other groups with the bill. Moving the "need" line up and/or expanding government programs will directly increase the sales tax rate we all pay.
Soldato
This is in your head that all these people in the top 1% are leveraging the country to get better tax rates. Youre using the odd case you see in the news as a benchmark for the whole 1%.
Tax fraud is relatively small, like 5% of the expected government income is lost to tax fraud.
I wasn't really talking about tax there. I was talking about regulatory capture, which is much easier if you can bankroll a party to government and expect recompense.
Someone on 180k won't be getting that obviously, as it's exclusively the realm of millionaires and billionaires. There's no use in pretending that they don't leverage their privileged positions for personal gain, maybe it's just the way of things, but it's still inherently unfair and the public won't stand for it forever. The beleaguered peoples at the bottom (and I don't just mean those on benefits) are already abandoning the notion of a fair democracy as it is, open displays of classism is probably unwise.
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So they make £170b and pay £80b in tax. That’s 47% net tax rate. Do we expect them to pay 100% in taxes?
No, I don't. The problem isn't income.
Soldato
So you declare all rich people (with x amount of money) "guilty" and tax them accordingly?
I hope someday we will discourage class bigotry the way we discourage racial bigotry now.
No, we just stop the ability for them to impose upon the rest of us. I don't mind that some of them want to make more money, but they shouldn't do so while actively corrupting the state in the process.
It should be fair representation for every citizen regardless of their wealth.
Soldato
Ok, the way you worded sound like you were lumping in the majority of the top 1% in together. That's fair enough about multi multi millionaires and billionaires, again, its a small percentage of them that'll be doing it, but this why we're meant to have laws around this kind of stuff. No doubt its not 100% foolproof. You can't stop billionaires being friends with people in government though, its gonna happen to some degree, and we shouldn't automatically assume its nefarious as well
Soldato
What tax rate do you think is fair for *your* money?
Whatever the government is capable of proving it's worthy of. Honestly I think practically everyone in this country could do with more taxation, far too much entitlement to spend beyond their means on frivolous consumption.
Except that money can screw up.
Ie, using money we could end up in a situation where everybody loses their job and we all basically starve to death, because nobody can pay for anyone to do any work.
It's a frighteningly real prospect if financial systems "crash".
Whereas if everybody just kept working essentially nobody would need to starve. The food could keep being grown and distributed.
Ie, it isn't a problem due to lack of labour or resources, or inability to produce essentials.
But because everything is driven by money, the second people don't get paid they stop working, and if everybody stops working because your currency is worthless, then... we all starve. Yay. Go money
Soldato
Nice dodge, let me try a different approach:
Do you think rich people have just as much of a right to their money as you have to yours?
Soldato
More taxation? **** me! The government are literally in your pocket every step of the way. You are bank rolling all those civil servants and politicians secure pensions. Complete communism. The man on the street paying for the government trough.
Within reason, I don't see why the likes of Bezos should be worth nearly $200B while he treats his workers like **** and underpays them. He may have taken on all the risk, but that doesn't mean he can take all of the rewards as ultimately without his employees he's not worth anything. As long as people are being paid fairly, then the tax should be equitable.
We pay about average in comparison to other Western nations. Complete communism would imply everyone being paid the same regardless of their abilities, which is hardly what i'm saying when everyone should be taxed more.
The government wouldn't be a trough if people would stop voting for pigs.
Soldato
Worth 200b on paper remember, big difference to having 200b in cash. Unfortunately, walking round a warehouse and picking stuff off a shelf is not difficult work, anyone can do it. That's why it doesn't command a higher wage, its simply market forces.
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