I would buy property in the UK. One bed flats, new build in the poorer areas. Say 100k each, so you have 250.
Let them out at £400 pm equals £10,000 per month before tax.
You still own the flats and you are helping young people have somewhere decent to live. I would endeavour to be a good landlord so hopefully it would be a win win all round.

comment by manusince52 (U9692)
posted 6 minutes ago
I would buy property in the UK. One bed flats, new build in the poorer areas. Say 100k each, so you have 250.
Let them out at £400 pm equals £10,000 per month before tax.
You still own the flats and you are helping young people have somewhere decent to live. I would endeavour to be a good landlord so hopefully it would be a win win all round.
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This is why I like you as a poster. You might be a smidge too much a fan of Blanc but you do speak sense

Cheers Rpbb. Same for me, of course we don't always agree but you are adecent poster imo who enjoys a debate.

Robb sorry.
Not on the phone now, but the french azert keyboard on the laptop foxes me sometimes.

comment by manusince52 (U9692)
posted 2 hours, 55 minutes ago
The problem is, that whilst the law is clear cut, morals are much less so, they are tricky things to pin down, and everybody has their own interpretation.
Eg, you are in the car with your wife on a motorway and she is speeding, ie breaking the law, should you report her? I don't think anyone on here would;
Next example, same scenario but you know she has drunk more than she should, but seems to be driving capably, do you report her.
Third scenario, as above but turning into the street she hits a parked car, what do you do;
Fourth scenario, similar to above but she runs over and kills someones pet dog, what do you do.
Fifth, as above but knocks down and injures someone, its the local drunk.

And so on. Tricky concepts morals.
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Is it moral to tax people 45% of their earnings just because they earn more?

Comment deleted by Site Moderator

Is it fwck all of the kind.

Yes, its moral.

Moral and desirable.

Why is it moral?

Rather than ask the question, debate why you think it's immoral.

It's great when people start banging on about how unfair tax is. If you commit to living in a society and enjoy the benefits like roads, policing health care etc. then you commit to the structure of funding it, which is taxation.

It makes sense that top earners pay more. This argument that big earners should just get everything privately and everyone else can go bollcks doesnt make any sense (apart from being incredibly selfish). Surely you want to be wealthy in a nice healthy society, not wealthy in a crime ridden diseased one?

Or have the people who don't like paying tax worked out some magical way of getting everyone else to pay for the services that make society work?

So you have no answer then. Ok, but at least just admit it.

My answer is that the taxation laws are simply built upon layers and layers of aged simple percentage calculations and the more you earn the more able you are to use schemes to avoid a much fairer system. If you really innocently believe that just giving a percentage band based on earnings is getting the most benefit out of every UK resident the you are quite deluded.

And why when you pay more tax at this kind of level do you lose the basic right to have any of your earnings on any allowances whatsoever which everyone in the UK is supposed to be allowed?

Now for your answer. Take your time.

What's the magical way then? Workhouses I suspect

No. Create a simple and fair tax system that either doesn't enable people like this to evade the system an spreads the burden more fairly.

Nobody is suggesting that higher earners shouldn't pay more. They should, but the antiquated and ancient method of tax collection in the UK will only ever result in stuff like this.

It needs ripping up and starting again. We must have one the most expensive ways of collecting tax in the world and we fail miserably at it.

But we won't. Well keep on building layers of silent taxes where everyone suffers.

comment by Babyen møtte snikmorder (U9094)
posted 11 minutes ago
Rather than ask the question, debate why you think it's immoral.
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Because somebody works incredibly hard to move up in the world to get a good, well paid job, which is 99% of the time incredibly stressful and takes take away from your family, and for every 10 hours you work you're only paid for 5 of them.

Immoral.

*takes time away.

I'd like to see a flat 25% rate of tax, with the personal allowance in line with the minimum wage for everybody.

Lower tax and increase the tax take, simple.

Also a flat tax rate still means a higher earner pays more tax. Just at a fairer rate.

It's worse than that Emre

Half your earning go right away. You lose all benefits such as personal allowance, child benefits etc.

You probably buy a more expensive house and pay higher stamp duties and a higher council tax for exactly the same services.

You might buy a more expensive car and pay more VAT again and higher tax through fuel consumption.

You probably buy more luxury items or more expensive ones and pay more VAT. Some may have their children in private education and may even have private health care yet will pay more NI. They take nothing from the system as everyone else rightly does, yet they get no relief from it. Their employers pay more NI.

Even after your death your family get clobbered on any inheritance despite the fact that you've already paid the tax on it during your lifetime.

Yep, seems fair to me right enough

And I've never met anyone who could rationally explain why the taxation laws are as unfair on the better paid as they are on the lesser paid.

Other than "pay more" of course.

Good points. I feel the higher rate of tax is too high at 45%. But the more you make/take from society, the more you should give back if your moral compass is sound. Higher rate of tax should be capped at say 33%, with variants up to that point, depending on what you earn. Now I say this as someone who is on the cusp of going into the higher tax rate, and will probably be in that tax band next financial year.
The bigger issue for me though, is what we get for our taxes as of late.

Babyen

Agreed. Just increasing the layers complicates it even more and essentially, those with more can more easily avoid or at worse evade the laws.

That's what is needing sorted.

Even if they do manage somehow to do it, I don't expect to receive a tax refund (:

Some massive errors in a lot of these comments to be honest.

Firstly Cameron (although he could have handled it much better) actually hasn't done anything wrong. He has paid tax on the profits he made from the shares correctly and declared them as an interest in Parliament. There really is nothing to see here.

Holding funds offshore in and of itself isn't the real issue. The transparency of such schemes is certainly an issue and the UK is one of the most secretive (including the indexes of Crown Protectorates and Overseas Territories).

When funds from these schemes are brought back to the UK to buy items, property etc, they all incur tax, either VAT or Stamp Duty etc. They aren't inherently tax avoiding schemes. Certainly the hedge fund that Camerons father created is actually a terrible tax saving scheme, it really doesn't save anything. The fund itself doesn't pay tax but it's investors will when the money is repatriated in some way. I also believe that Cameron will have paid inheritance tax on his father's investments upon his death in 2010. Total non story not helped by Cameron being uncooperative from the beginning of the week that kept the story going.

Our own club also do this by the way. The business is registered in Delaware and has it's main office in the Caymens.

The disclaimer is there because in a global world it doesn't mean that you are doing anything illegal (or even very immoral) if you hold funds offshore. Clearly some of these schemes were used to launder money (London is considered to be the capital of money laundering globally) but not all of them are for this purpose. Not all of them are even to avoid paying tax.

As a government they could be doing more, especially in the overseas territories which are the very places named in all these papers (Bahamas, British (clue is in the name) Virgin Islands, Turks and Caicos etc etc).

comment by Gingernuts (U2992)
posted 2 hours, 1 minute ago


So you have no answer then. Ok, but at least just admit it.

My answer is that the taxation laws are simply built upon layers and layers of aged simple percentage calculations and the more you earn the more able you are to use schemes to avoid a much fairer system. If you really innocently believe that just giving a percentage band based on earnings is getting the most benefit out of every UK resident the you are quite deluded.

And why when you pay more tax at this kind of level do you lose the basic right to have any of your earnings on any allowances whatsoever which everyone in the UK is supposed to be allowed?

Now for your answer. Take your time.
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Rich people get all the same personal allowances as everyone else, what are you trying to say? They get 10k roughly tax free and up to 42k at 20% on personal taxes. Very often it's not them that has the funds, assets etc. it will be company, which pays corporation tax at 18% and they get a dividend and take loans from the company (which is what a lot of contractors do). Not sure what you are getting at really...

"Rich people get all the same personal allowances as everyone else, what are you trying to say? They get 10k roughly tax free and up to 42k at 20% on personal taxes. Very often it's not them that has the funds, assets etc. it will be company, which pays corporation tax at 18% and they get a dividend and take loans from the company (which is what a lot of contractors do). Not sure what you are getting at really.."

If you don't understand the basic principles that as soon as a household income goes above something like £50k you lose child benefits, or that above a very low income you lose free prescriptions and dental care, allied to the fact that as soon as your salary is above £100k you start to lose your personal allowance on a £1 for £2 basis, then no; you won't understand what I'm getting at will you?

"As soon as your salary is above £100k" you shouldn't really be whinging about a couple of grand tax free.