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Comment by rich_sasha | Hacker News Reader

As you pay more tax, you get less services, and I dont just mean, where you elect to avoid them. You get less (or none at this point) free childcare. No umemployment benefits if you get fired. No child benefit. You can't save as much in your pension.

Then there are the semi-elective things like healthcare, education, home security. These kinda dont work for the whole society. The rich are thus paying for their own out of pocket. But they are also paying for the semi-working system for everyone else.

I think introducing a wealth tax just to balance the books without rethinking who and how accesses public funds, will just end with the rich leaving. Some may say good riddance, but the UK budget is now beyond creaking and heading for collapse.

Oh and when I say "the rich", that probably covers many people here. IIRC earning 90k per year puts you in the top 1%. A 10-15 year experience NHS doctor is in that bracket.

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People earning 90k aren’t “the rich” that are doing the most egregious tax avoidance. They’re still working class. They still have to work or face destitution.

The very top sliver who own the majority of the land and assets and who never need to work a day in their life are who must be looked at; that hereditary wealth needs to begin to find itself flowing into public services more and more.

millionaires looking at billionaires: "really, I'm not that rich, more middle class really"

90k / year is not a millionaire, if it's pre-tax. With 35% tax (picked a random reasonable sounding number), it would take 17years to earn a million if you have 0 expenses.

They are, I fear, the ones that pay this tax. The actual millionaires will surely figure out how to avoid it, just as they did with all the other ones.

Of course this will be an unpopular comment, but when it comes to things like this .. have you ever simply looked up the total net worth of all billionaires in the UK, and divided it by the total number of people living in the UK? Like .. you need to do one single division between two numbers to prove that your idea of just "seizing and redistributing the rich people's wealth" will accomplish nothing you think it will. A single division is all it takes.

At no point did I say “just”. You’re making a strawman.

Really? Because 50% of the UK wealth is in the hands of billionaires. So everyone in the country would suddenly be twice as wealthy (excluding the billionaires of course).

Perhaps you should check the facts before making statements like that!

In the times of AI it's really easy to verify the question above. I had literally just copied it to the chat and made a research (also asked to cite and manually verified the links).

So it says there are 57 billionaires in UK with total worth of £182 billion. Non-billionaire wealth is £10.13 trillion, btw, so it's definitively not 50%. UK population is 68.3 million people. So everyone gets their £11,311 and that's it.

UPDATE there are £772.8 billions if you include non-UK citizens, but happen to live here. If you seize their money as well that will give you the total of £11K

It’s a straw man cause you don’t have a windfall redistribution as only option

> IIRC earning 90k per year puts you in the top 1%.

According to the public data for 2023-2024, top 1% is around £180-200k, so you're off by quite a bit. £90k is around 5-6%. This is gross, not net.

In the U.S., the top 1% is around $570-600k according to 2024 census numbers.

To maybe explain the confusion, there’s a difference between national and global. I bet it is true that if you earn 90k/year in the UK then you are in the global 1%, but that is different from what most people in the UK mean when they talk about “the 1%”.

Fine. I'll take top 5%.

In the mind of probably at least 75% electorate, the top 5% are filthy rich who should make up any tax shortfall. But also 90k puts you, I believe, out of reach of all the services I listed above.

I'm all for paying tax, and even more tax if need be, where I get equal access to services. But not when I'm literally excluded for paying more tax.

Interestingly, according to an FT article, high earners in the UK pay comparable amounts of tax as they would on the "high tax" continent. It is the low earners who oay substantially less, bringing down the effective average. But they in turn pay outsized housing rent, so arent better off either.

Renting doesn’t go to government but to landlords and aristocracy

The rich benefit most from a stable society and the rule of law though.

No point owning most of Mayfair if you don't feel safe enough to enjoy your lifestyle.

And it's not just funding the police and courts that leads to this - it's making sure there aren't too many desperate people with no hope. ie paying unemployment benefit so people can live while looking for work - is all part of that stable society from which everyone benefits - but particularly the rich as they have more to lose.

It's why some much money ( doubious sources or clean ) ends up in places like London.

Often it's looted ( or comes from exploitation ) from unstable countries where the weak rule of law has allowed the looting ( corruption or whatever ), and then moved to London to ensure nobody can then steal it back directly or via political revolution.

Taxes are the price of civilisation - if you want the good life - you have to help support civilisation - not free load.

The rich generally derive their wealth from the labours of a healthy and educated population. In most Western countries, these are proceeded at least in part paid by taxes and amount to a massive subsidy to those who need labour. Arguably this includes the "free childcare" mentioned above.

“As you pay more tax, you get less services”

This is a lie. In US, most food our rules, legal system, government agencies (that are not direct transfers like doc security & Medicare) exist to protect properties and interest of the rich.

That higher income people are not seeing much of direct transfers does not mean they are not getting more benefits from the government. Even our bloated military and foreign policy is primarily still protecting US business interests globally. It’s not minimum wage peon that benefits from that. It’s owners of large capital

> This is a lie. [Followed by nonsense about other countries, rather than the UK]

I earn over £90k in the UK. It is very much true, a lot of things are "means tested".

Yes. Progressive taxation. That's the point. Tax those who can afford it, fund equal opportunity and a basic standard of living for those who can't. Pull society up from the bottom.

As much as one can complain about specific inefficiencies or not being able to send young Jasper and Tabitha to private school because of VAT and tapered tax relief, I do think we don't take it far enough.

The reason it not working is that we have stapled our personal wealth and economy to housing. 60 years of financiers pushing for higher lending limits with looser regulation resulted in more people able to "afford" a £1m house. That drags up all the prices.

There's no simple way to reverse it this distortion but it had a knock on effect: the generationally rich, the landed gentry through to farmers have become insanely rich, through no work but HODLling all the land until they got planning permission.

I agree, wealth tax is scary but not addressing how wealth works won't fix things either.

For now only earnings are taxed.

Earn £300k a year, you pay 65% on more than half of it, and obviously 45, 40, and so on of the first half of it)

Get £3 million from the stocks? You pay 20% (above £50k threshold)

People are obsessed with workers paying all their taxes and letting off the wealthy avoiding the most.

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