Hacker News Reader

Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

That's very interesting, thanks for posting the HMRC link, I didn't know the data was that readily available.

I tried plotting the difference 1999-2013 by percentile, first in absolute terms (£ difference):

Which support that the wealthiest part of the population (upper middle class) benefited the most from the past 15 years.

However if you do the same in relative terms:

http://imgur.com/JVH4rFB

it is the lowest part of the income distribution who benefited the most, seeing their wages doubling. The very much upper end too. But not the middle class.

Depending on how you look at it, it can be used as an argument both ways. Which is why I hate when people reduce something as complex as a distribution into one number. It's too easy to lie with statistics.

View on HN

Imgur is blocked at the office but I'd like to add there must be a very strong effect of the personal allowance (you don't pay any tax up to 11k) increase when comparing changes over the last decade.

There are exception if your income is in the top bracket.

Logically I would expect the same though I do not know what was the tax system like in 1999, but it actually doesn't change much:

http://imgur.com/JzUziar

The only key impact of taxes is to cancel the revenue increase of the upper class. Even the top 1%.

From ~1932 to 1987, the top tax rate wasn't less than 50%. For more than 10 years it was above 90%. Basically it was a way to keep a handful of people from getting all of the marbles. If you don't like how the government spends money, grow a business or start a business, those expenses are all tax deductible. The idea is to keep money moving.

And this perfect system culminated with the UK going nearly bust. And if Thatcher didn't end that, you just need to look at the other side of the Channel to see what the UK would have become.

I'm looking at the U.S. and it thrived and built major infrastructure because it could afford to.

A country could tax the crap out of the rich and misspend. No matter what, we should expect and insist on competency. Not this Reaganesque idea that the government is shit no matter what.

That spreadsheet includes tables for effective income before + after tax.

As he's quoting the £160k, which is from the table before tax, he must have used the before tax figures so that's not relevant.

Did you adjust for inflation and (very tricky if not in the source data) benefits?

I am interested here in the relative income growth between percentiles, so the inflation applies in the same way to all revenues (the value of the same £1 goes down, irrespective of how many £ you have). So as a %, you would have to shave the cumulative inflation between 1999-2013, but that's subtracting a flat line, it doesn't affect the shape of the % change curve.

The point is not so much that low incomes did 200%, it is that low income did much better than the rest of the distribution (relatively).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com