US vs UK taxes etc

[BigT]

Does Canada match london/USA for salary in general? Admittedly its not a place I've read much into.

Like for like roles I pay my folks in Toronto and Montreal about the same as London/SE and about 25% less than the coasts of the USA (except the SF Bay area where I can’t afford to employ anyone!)

 

[Reality|Bites]

BigT the Pimp?

 

[Deleted User 298457]

It does actually.

London isn't expensive at all. Compared to other major cities in larger developed countries.

Like I said before average house price is circa £5million for a detached in West end Vancouver (Richmond).

What's the average house price in West end London?

Top end I was talking about normal houses not mansions. Like a normal 5 bed house at high point is £10 million starting point. That's a normal sized house nothing special.

Presumably the houses in Richmond are actual houses rather than 1 bed flats though

 

[dowie]

London isn't expensive at all. Compared to other major cities in larger developed countries.

Like I said before average house price is circa £5million for a detached in West end Vancouver (Richmond).

What's the average house price in West end London?

West end of London is very expensive, you'd be hard-pressed to even get a detached house, most homes are terraces or apartments.

Anyway, you can do a quick comparison of general housing costs and other living costs easily enough online:

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/in/London

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/in/Vancouver

2,026.08 CAD = 1171.12 GBP according to google, so London is more expensive for housing according to the above. In fact, you'd have to have a rather run-down apartment in London to get a 1 bed for 1300 a month in the centre.

im talking a small semi-detached house far in the sub-urbs. You want a nice house close to Cupertino, then you are $5-8M

Plenty of homes in that range in nice parts of London too!

 

[Energize]

Ah, I see. For exaggerated effect you deliberately ignored the allowances for Income Tax and NI. For further exaggeration you assumed every penny of net income was spent on 20% VAT rated items.

Student loans aren't a tax and have no place in this discussion. If you go down that route you might at well deduct mortgage payments, personal loans, credit card payments etc. and claim basic rate taxpayers are only getting 20% net.

For exaggerated effected you gave the full extent of allowance and 0% of VAT on shopping items so it's tit for tat really.

And no, student loans are not comparable to credit card debt, they don't get deducted from your salary at the point of payment.

At the end of the day no one should be paying VAT on essentials like utilities, food and clothing.

 

[Surveyor]

For exaggerated effected you gave the full extent of allowance and 0% of VAT on shopping items so it's tit for tat really.

Giving the full extent of the allowances is far closer to reality than giving none at all.

Wrong re shopping. I gave you an example from my own shopping, that isn't the assumption I made in my calculations.

And no, student loans are not comparable to credit card debt, they don't get deducted from your salary at the point of payment.

They're still not a tax.

At the end of the day no one should be paying VAT on essentials like utilities, food and clothing.

That's an entirely different discussion.

 

[Energize]

Giving the full extent of the allowances is far closer to reality than giving none at all.

Wrong re shopping. I gave you an example from my own shopping, that isn't the assumption I made in my calculations.

What assumptions did you make and what calculations did you make in getting to a minimum of 75% net? As far as I can tell you've just plugged a salary of £50,270 into a tax calculator which gave you £37,848 as the take home pay, thus 75% net and made no allowances for VAT.

They're still not a tax.

They are considered to be in principle a graduate tax as the government charges interest (currently around 5.5%) on the loan which is well beyond that of price inflation as measured by the government's bogus basket of carefully selected goods.

We are not even considering council tax (a regressive tax), property taxes/stamp duty or the effects of things like customs duty and corporation tax on the prices of goods basic rate taxpayers buy. Admittedly I've used some basic assumptions, but the whole tax burden on the basic rate taxpayer is not simply 32% income tax/NI on the amount above the personal allowance, VAT places a heavy burden on basic rate taxpayers and the ONS in fact labels the tax as regressive, then there is a much more nuanced effect of indirect taxes.

The OECD paper (https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-united-kingdom.pdf) attempts to incorporate sales taxes and property taxes into the calculations and comes up with a tax to GDP ratio of 33%, and calculates the effective taxes on goods and services at an astonishing 33% partly because of the aforementioned customs taxes and taxes on property at 11% which is the highest in the world!