The 50% Tax Rate

StevieJ

A._Badger wrote: »

Can you still remember why you decided to drag Murdoch into this?

The point at issue was your apparent surprise when the political party you supported began behaving to type.

It's hard to see what Murdoch had to do with that. Well, other than being another twerp who supported Blair, of course.

Of course, I was just trying to point out that the right wing Sun had supported Nu Labour at each election until Brown's, do you think that Murdoch thought they were a Left wing collectivist party under the wing of his mate Tony

You were genuinely surprised when a collectivist/socialist government 'attacked freedom'?

dtsazza

pqrdef wrote: »

But if the low-paid can barely manage, the answer can't be to reduce benefits to a level where people can't manage at all. The only way is to make low-paid work more profitable.

And the only way to make low-paid work more profitable, is to make it more skilled (or in other words, to do something that's in demand that less people can do).

If all you have to offer is sheer physical labour, then you're potentially competing with every other able-bodied human on the planet, as well as a large number of robots. Low-skilled labour is a commodity and as such its price will settle at the equilibrium point - if people in India are willing and able to do your job for £10 a day, and robots are willing to do it for 80p worth of electricity, why would an employer hire you?

The only way to get paid any amount of money is by being able to do a job better than, or different to, those who would accept lower wages. Generally speaking this means doing something more skilled and specialised.

There's no god-given right to high wages. The baseline is "self-employed" subsistence farming, using your own labour to directly obtain food and shelter. Anything above that is a result of specialisation of your skills increasing your useful yield and hence salary.

RJP33

I really hope they go ahead with combining income tax and NI, it’s effectively 61% rather than 50%.

In this climate we should be doing things that make sound economic sense, not what is popularist.