£100000 is only £65000 after taxes

No, the richer person has worked harder or smarter to get more money. They shouldn't be punished for working hard by being given a much bigger tax bill. That is so unfair.

Working hard doesn't equal more pay.

A doctor working full time, and on weekends as well as doing extra private clinics gets payed more (and rightly so) than a part time doctor who turns up three times a week.

But your right its not always about hard work, which is why I said Working Smarter. A City Trader works smarter therefore they earn more than a bin cleaner. The cleaner may have woked harder but if he was smarter he may use his time to trade stocks and shares instead in order to make more money. Thats called working smarter.

Oh please. Trading is smart?

Google LTCM. Supposedly some of the smartest people in the field.

Most of the smartest people on the planet don't go for money.

Lol, you choose the one blow up and not any of the successful quantitative trading firms.

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But your right its not always about hard work, which is why I said Working Smarter. A City Trader works smarter therefore they earn more than a bin cleaner. The cleaner may have woked harder but if he was smarter he may use his time to trade stocks and shares instead in order to make more money. Thats called working smarter.

This works on the assumption that more money is better and a worthy achievement. Beyond that stock traders taxes (which they probably do their best to avoid as much as possible), what actual social value do they bring to society. I value the bin cleaners contribution far, far, more highly. Obviously, individual traders may be wonderfully upstanding pillars of the community who do excellent things with their money - however the profession itself is vacuous and damaging to society (the pursuit of wealth, for the sake of wealth with no inherent intention to use that wealth to further any culture, society, research or anything). Again, individual organisations or people may do these things, but the profession doesn't exist to do that. Contrast that with Apple (whatever your views on them are), at least they innovate and produce things people want.

I completely agree with you, but I was just responding to comment saying working harder does not mean you make more money.

This works on the assumption that more money is better and a worthy achievement. Beyond that stock traders taxes (which they probably do their best to avoid as much as possible), what actual social value do they bring to society. I value the bin cleaners contribution far, far, more highly. Obviously, individual traders may be wonderfully upstanding pillars of the community who do excellent things with their money - however the profession itself is vacuous and damaging to society (the pursuit of wealth, for the sake of wealth with no inherent intention to use that wealth to further any culture, society, research or anything). Again, individual organisations or people may do these things, but the profession doesn't exist to do that. Contrast that with Apple (whatever your views on them are), at least they innovate and produce things people want.

You're twisting my words and misrepresenting reality. Firstly, I didn't say it was "easy" to get a six figure salary (unless you're born into money and you're living off investments). I said that there are plenty of lower paying jobs that are very challenging too, so the logic "Person A earns less than Person B therefore Person A works harder than Person B" may be correct in some circumstances but as a blanket statement is grossly incorrect. Not everybody goes for the highest paying career that they can possibly get into. This is why we have many incredibly hard working, highly educated people working in professions that pay comparatively little. They're not earning less because they're not working hard, they're earning less because they're job is further away from the money.

Yeah, you don't really know what you're on about here.
And apple? You mean the organisation that utilises effectively slave-workers to produce their 'innovative' (read: nice marketing) products?

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I beg to differ, you'll find the 'mo money, mo problems' saying is quite apt here.
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A doctor working full time, and on weekends as well as doing extra private clinics gets payed more (and rightly so) than a part time doctor who turns up three times a week.

But your right its not always about hard work, which is why I said Working Smarter. A City Trader works smarter therefore they earn more than a bin cleaner. The cleaner may have woked harder but if he was smarter he may use his time to trade stocks and shares instead in order to make more money. Thats called working smarter.

A percentage of rich people want lower taxes because they are nothing more than greedy, they want more money, for whatever reasons and don't care about any effect that might have. Personally I have no sympathy for this point of view.

Another percentage of rich people want lower taxes because they feel penalised for earning more (whether their chosen profession coincidently earns more, or they specifically chose that career). As has been said, they don't necessarily work harder in a quantitative sense, but these careers often require longer and harder work up (study, experience, etc.) and come with larger responsibility. A neurosurgeon and bin collector may quantitatively work as hard as one another, but the doctor has significantly more weight on their shoulders. There will be countless examples and counter examples, but I'm confident that it will generally ring true. I have a lot of sympathy with this point of view, fundamentally, it is not fair.

The argument about reducing inequality and the resulting overall improvement in life chances, the economy, crime and so on are a strong one for maintaining a higher tax rate on the richer people in society. Coupled with the fact that they are much more able to shoulder that burden and that they used the 'free' services available to scale the ladders they did - you can see why people get angry when they say that their £65,000 take home salary isn't enough or when they hide it offshore.

It's an argument that will never be solved. The economic model of capitalism means that the majority of the wealth will fall into the hands of the few, the social structures that enable a workforce to continue operating at the required level of efficiency requires a lot of money which means it has to be taken mostly from the rich. The rich people are annoyed that their income is savaged to achieve this, paying way over the odds for other people to live and so want lower tax. The poorer people mostly just want enough money to buy some food and are angry at the richer people for 'quibbling' over losing more in tax than they get in a year, or two, or five.

Generally in these things, the answer is somewhere in the middle. Closing the gaps between the boundaries and emphasising the social investment in the future would build some bridges - lower taxes also gives the government a stronger footing for getting tougher on tax avoiders. The other thing to consider is that generally we all need each other, you might look at a hairdresser earning £16k and think that, well, the job is not that hard, they don't actually deserve more - however, someone has to cut people's hair, they may enjoy it and even be good at it. Disregarding their desire to have a comfortable life, just because you chose to pursue a more profitably and/or challenging career is not very helpful to social cohesion.



This works on the assumption that more money is better and a worthy achievement. Beyond that stock traders taxes (which they probably do their best to avoid as much as possible), what actual social value do they bring to society. I value the bin cleaners contribution far, far, more highly. Obviously, individual traders may be wonderfully upstanding pillars of the community who do excellent things with their money - however the profession itself is vacuous and damaging to society (the pursuit of wealth, for the sake of wealth with no inherent intention to use that wealth to further any culture, society, research or anything). Again, individual organisations or people may do these things, but the profession doesn't exist to do that. Contrast that with Apple (whatever your views on them are), at least they innovate and produce things people want.

Then the question exists what separates all these people? The desire for better pay? The yearning to get the most out of life? So why are these people, who are higher achievers, forced to pay a higher percentage of their income?

My father didn't the same level of education as his peers. He was born in Nepal in an area where people only stayed at school until they were 15. And yet, years later, we own a 5 bedroom house in Hyde Park that only is used during the school term times. Would he not be justified in claiming that he made something of himself?

I think you misunderstand the term 'cost of living' versus 'I can afford lots more things, woah, that's expensive, I need more money'
If you earn more than ~50-60k per year and don't have abnormal monetary circumstances (i.e. existing debts) and still have money problems, then well... yeah.

Mortgages? Bills? What if you have a larger house? More insurance payments for larger properties. And yes they could live in a small one bedroom house in a run down hovel, but why limit the ambition of people telling them that they should all live in little four bedroom houses!
What this person means by "mo money mo problems" is that not everyone has the same cost of living.