| Topic: | Re:Re:Re:West Middx Hospital Parking | |
| Posted by: | Christopher Gillie | |
| Date/Time: | 07/06/18 00:53:00 |
| Hi Lorne NI is just a tax, and is not hypothecated for the NHS, Pensions or anything else. Paying it does accrue pension entitlements, but your contributions are not saved up in order to fund it or anything else. It just goes into the big central pot. If you go to the ONS and download the statistics, 90% of income tax is paid by the top 50% (the number I think you are referring to), but to say the middle pays most of it is just not true. Middle income earners pay 22.6% of income tax. The top 5% of taxpayers pay almost half of all income tax. Looking it more closely: 0 - 1% - 0% 0 - 5% - 0.1% 0 - 10% - 0.4% 0 - 25% - 2.2% 25%-50% - 7.7% 50%-75% - 14.9% Top 25% - 75.6% Top 10% - 59.7% Top 5% - 48.4% Top 1% - 27.9% One penny more income tax for someone on £45k is about £330 a year. The changes to personal allowance from 10k to 11.85k have been a £370 tax cut. Just changing your bank account can easily earn you the cost of 1p on income tax. I am asking to go back to a tax take we had about 3 years ago, and freezing the increase in personal allowances. Your assertion that tax will collapse the economy is not true. Extremely high tax will do that (nobody can be bothered to work), as will extremely low tax (we would not be able to afford to even run the basics like defence and police). One penny will not make any difference, and I cannot understand why you think NI is ok but income tax is not. They are basically the same thing. Our tax as % of GDP is already very low. If you go to this list - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenue_to_GDP_ratio and sort by %, look at the countries at the top and at the bottom. Developed economies with high standards of living tend to be at the top of the list. It is true there are outliers like Switzerland and the USA, but the USA has almost no tax funded healthcare, and that costs them about 15% of GDP so that would put them at about 41%, more like Canada, and the Swiss are a tax haven with lots of millionaires, artificially distorting their numbers. The UK is at 34.4%, the same as Brazil. (Also next to Australia, which has had a China exports commodity boom for the last 2 decades so is not really comparable). |