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> “ yet single mums in their 20s in my family still get to live in nicer houses than me, get free cars from the government while not having to work a day in their lives. I'm driving a Fiat Punto with 90,000 miles on the clock while several people in my family on benefits have gotten new BMWs because of government schemes.”

What government schemes are giving free cars? I hadn’t heard of that. I guess there is Motability for people with disabilities?

Your situation sounds a lot like mine. We're even the same age and both bought a house last year, and have both been looking at starting a food business. Except I'm driving a Nissan Qashqai with 100k miles!

Something you realise when you travel around the UK is that only a handful of areas actually have a productive economy. In many towns, you find that the only outside money coming is from the government, either in the form of government organisations based there (councils, NHS, etc.) or benefits. That money then swills around the town on services like MOTs and hairdressers and so on.

That means the few productive areas like London, Birmingham and Manchester and a few others have essentially all of their production taken by the government and reallocated to these areas of zero/negative productivity. This isn't a new thing either. The UK has been in a "productivity crisis" since at least the late 2000s.

My family come from one of these productivity holes, and they are all on the take. Everyone's scamming the benefits system and any work they do is under the table.

Really I believe as a country, we need to face reality at some point. We have to turn off the tap that people have become dependent on and require that people figure out how to survive without it.

1. You cannot subsidise unproductive economies indefinitely. If there's no work in your local town, go somewhere else. It's a small country and somehow people from Eastern Europe manage to come here for work, so someone from Merthyr Tydfil can probably figure out how to get to Cardiff. Government spending should be on infrastructure to facilitate productivity.

2. The elderly are clogging up the system. Either we need to start cutting services to the old, such as reducing healthcare provision beyond a certain age, or we need to import massive amounts of productive labour from other countries to rebalance things, and build huge amounts of housing, hospitals, schools to support it.

3. We need to rebuild as a country of innovators. This means making the burden of regulations proportional to the size of your enterprise. But we also need a cultural shift here too. If you have an idea here, everyone will quickly tell you why it won't work and you shouldn't try. If you do it anyway and are successful, you become loathed. Tall poppy syndrome etc.

Everyone is blaming Brexit and sure, Brexit didn't help matters, especially over the last few years. But there are lots of countries doing fine outside the EU, and these problems started well before Brexit. Our problems are deeper rooted and, perhaps, in many ways EU membership was hiding them.

Are these accurate portrayals of benefit programs? In the US they are quite a challenge to get (say social security disability) and not particularly generous.

They're pretty easy to get but not particularly generous on paper. Certainly if I was to lose my job and claim what I was legally entitled to, it would be of zero help because I'm in London and mostly wouldn't kick in until I was destitute.

However, if you have no (documented) savings or property, the sorts of things you will get are a free council house, weekly allowance and child benefits.

People will often then supplement it by claiming disability, having multiple people in the house claiming benefits, subletting free property and working illegally.

The cost of living in these sorts of areas tends to be very low too.

> 2. The elderly are clogging up the system.

The elderly demographic is large and they all vote.

The number of towns where clearly nothing is going on but which are basically a stocked pond of Mercedes and BMWs is insane.

> I was looking for a weekend job to help with the bills, but given my tax rate it's basically pointless looking for extra work

What do you mean? It looks like the UK's income tax system is progressive, so you'd still be making more money, even if at a lower percentage of the real value. Do you mean that your net pay would be too low to warrant spending time on a weekend?

There are notoriously large and ordinary income ranges in the UK where significant increases in gross income bring essentially no increase in net income. The amount of extra income you would need just to clear that gap so that you can realize more net income in so large that it isn't worth the effort.

Naturally people optimize around the fact that there are salary ranges that exhibit no increase in net income. It creates a lot of perverse incentives.

Can you give an example of these? The only example I can think of is where you loose some child benefits when entering certain income levels. Even when you go above the £100k income the effective tax rate becomes 60% until £125k. You still get 40% of the income?

Would you bother working if you’re losing more than half of your income before other taxes like VAT kick in?

Yes? I mean, i wouldn't work more than 40 hours a week whatever my salary is, but my bonus this year was taxed at 55% and i still would have done the work i did to get it.

Your figures are incorrect. At 100k per year your effective tax is a little less than 35%, not 60%. Your net income would be about £65,000.

I'm surprised by the amount of tax illiteracy shown in these comments.

parent was talking about the marginal tax rate of course, which is what is relevant to the discussion.

The west is in the midst of a spiritual crisis. No economic policy will fix the prevailing nihilism.

What kind of spiritual crisis? What symptoms do you see? Is this a cause or effect of the system we have?

This is a dignified forum of intellectual engineers and hackers! I'm sure random_hackernews_poster has any fucking clue what they are talking about. Be worried, and freak out.

If you don't already understand and can't see plainly what is happening all around you, nothing I can say will enlighten you...but I'll say a few words anyway.

Life is a dream lived over an abyss. We invent all sorts of distractions and systems of order to seal the gates of hell, to keep the dream alive, but the truth cannot be ennchained forever. Like children, we go about our days unaware of the unfathomable darkness lying in the heart of the human soul. We look at men who do great evil, killers, tyrants, etc., and think evil begins and ends with their kind, but this is a comforting lie. It's in us all: the face of the most abominable monster is our face, yet we deftly conceal it with our many illusions that keep the darkness from rising within us.

We will all die and be forgotten. Humanity will be superceded and humiliated by its own progeny. Life, as we wish it to be, as a think that can be conserved, is futile. What happens when then the illusions fall, making life aware of it's own futility? Life can only be kept innocent as long as it believes in itself--that it has a future, that it can be preserved. Once life becomes aware of its own futility, it becomes self-destructive and hostile to life...demonic--if you will.

Our civilization has turned its back on this spiritual struggle against death(satan). Like children who ignore the wisdom of their fathers, we have chosen to pretend that it's not real. That material abundance will solve all of our problems. But no material abundance will compensate for the poverty of the soul of man.

As long as we ignore the eternal struggle, all that we build will fail and we will be utterly unable to know what causes our downfall because it fundamentally takes place in regions we refuse to acknowledge. Like an attack from some higher dimenson beyond our understanding, it will appear as if we were undone by some unaccountable magical force.

There is no shared myth, and hence little to no shared values or goals, dissolving social cohesion and failing institutions. The phrase "burn it all down" is often thrown about.

Likewise there is a profound disconnect between such societies and nature, even by those who claim to want to "save the planet".

Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell and many others have gone into depth on this.

That's a bit of a rant, but for two of the points you make:

1) you own the house you live in, someone on benefits does not;

2) for the point "I have the benefit of getting literally no help", this is literally incorrect, your ability to earn a living in the UK is contingent on a wide range of public services, from roads, to public education, to the NHS, to a functioning civil service and justice system (as flawed as these may be).

2. His point is everyone shares the same help so he's correct in saying he got no (extra) help.

> 20 year olds on benefits

how do you afford a house on benefits?

You don't, it's just low income housing you rent. Comparing it to owning a house is of course quite silly.

Your rent is paid for by the government. It’s called housing benefit in the UK. You can receive up to £20,000 a year in benefits which is equivalent to about £32,000 in pre-tax salary.

That overstates the benefit somewhat. Housing benefit is capped at the lowest third of local market rates, and further capped at £20,000/yr.

So a single person reliant on benefits will at best be able to live in shared accommodation. Larger families in more expensive locations (e.g. most of London) would not have their rent fully covered. A single bedroom flat in the cheaper parts of London rents for about £15,000/yr.

Speaking as a landlord, it's even sillier than you say. My agent explicitly refuses to deal with people on housing benefits, because "it's too difficult to get the money out of the government".

I think this is bad for everyone. Poor people for obvious reasons, and everyone else because even when it works it drives up rents and by extension house prices, with the extra money going to people like me (and I left the UK).

I think the UK government should be building more council houses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_house

Great post. Also the same age as you in the UK. Haven’t bought a house yet but feel the same way in many respects. The worst example of these tax disincentives surely has to be with NHS doctors and their pensions - the tax system is so distorting that in many cases the doctor is literally paying to go to work. This has been going on for several years and has still not been fixed.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/jun/24/nhs-consulta...

> given my tax rate it's basically pointless looking for extra work.

but you can claim £1,000 of trading allowance per year if registered as a sole trader!

Just last year I brought a house which put in me hundreds of thousands of pounds of debt because of how ridiculous house prices are

This is a policy choice that can and should be changed: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/29/opinion/biden-liberalism-....

england taxes like a Scandinavian country and yet does not have the public services of one

The UK's tax rates are much closer to the US than the Scandinavian countries.

High earners in Sweden for instance pay nearly 11% higher effective rate compared to the UK.

Would you really prefer it if anyone could sell any food to customers without any health and safety checks?