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Comment by jdimov9 | Hacker News Reader

So, everyone here is bothered that people like to eat well and take family vacations (is this really your definition of "luxury" lifestyle? You guys sound like coal mine workers.)

But you're all perfectly fine with the government taking close to half of that income in taxes.

Were you all raised in a communist regime?

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People scoff at these articles because they give the impression that the people involved are barely able to scrape by. The "we know how poor people feel because after our 2x mortgages 4x holidays 3x private school fees 3x car expenses and 2x weekly nights out, we don't have any money left either" syndrome ;) (A line of thinking that is surprisingly common. Keep an eye out for it!)

This tends to amuse me, but it does seem to make some people angry. Few of them seem to be in this thread, though. Certainly not enough to count as "everyone here".

"Were you all raised in a communist regime?"

No, just in an ordinary family at around median income for the UK. We ate well. We had holidays (not so many foreign ones during the days of exchange controls).

I resisted the temptation to reply in a humourous way to the parent post out of respect for HN norms. I could have mentioned those Three Yorkshiremen and The North.

Like it or not, it's a lifestyle that only about 10% of the UK can afford. £20k is the holiday budget for a whole decade for most people. And that tax number includes healthcare and pension.

Oh, I fully agree with that - in fact, in certain other European countries it is more like 0.10%, but that's not the point.

The point is - I don't understand all the whining going on here.

If I make £500K a year, and I gave it up for £20K a year, would that really make any of you better off? REALLY?

Replacing the £500k job with ten £50k jobs would make at least nine people better off, yes. The ten people could then manage at least four hundred hours a week of work. It's strange how indivisible the really high paid jobs are.

Given that London house prices are a function of supply and demand, if everyone on £500k did that then I personally would be a lot better off.

Alas, I suspect supply will be very carefully managed to ensure that voters in the UK do not have their main asset devalued over the next 10 to 15 years or so.

After that, enough younger people will be renting for the balance to flip and the price correction to occur.

Whilst population continues to rise, you'll be waiting a long time for your "correction".

What % of average wage do you think people will want to pay for housing? What is the limit? There has to be one.

Average wage has very little to do with it, at least when it comes to London. People there pay a lot more than the rest of the country, but they're earning a lot more too. And even within London the same kind of logic applies.

So what happens when you have no teachers, no retail staff, no police, no ambulance and no refuse collectors?

Really: there has to be a limit.

Partly those people's wages rise. But more commonly they live elsewhere. Those people's wages have no connection to the house prices in zone 1, because those people live further out and commute.

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