Originally posted by grizz
all you are doing there is quoting the lower bound figure for the top 10% which is meaningless. within that 10%, if you plotted each % on one axis and 'plutocratic oppressor sums' on another i suspect the curve wouldnt be far off exponential..... hence pp's point is still extremely valid imho...
I see you didn't actually bother to follow the links or do any research into them either. If you had, you'd realise that your comment is still pretty far off the mark.
Average UK male earnings are what ... ~ £18,000 or so last time I checked? If someone earning ~£7,500 falls into the "poorest 50%" of the population, then someone on average earnings of £18,000 is probably going to fall within the richest 25-30% of the population. On a salary which doesn't really equate to "rich".
But I agree, it would be interesting to plot each % on an axis to see what the curve looks like. Maybe instead of slating me and not quoting any backup yourselves, you and Dog might want to look into this?
Most of the "plutocratic oppressors" in terms of earnings are actually "non-domiciled" for UK tax purposes - meaning they pay little if any UK income tax. This is skewing the figures in those links I posted. Incidentally, that non-dom status is being maintained by the present Labour government, their justification being these people bring jobs to the UK. But that's by the by.
The "rich" in the UK are what you would consider "well off middle class" people - doctors, dentists, lawyers, MP's, office workers, civil servants, social workers, teachers etc etc etc. In other words, not people who generally have a mansion sized house, a few hundred acres of land and tell jeeves to take the bentley for a spin and run over some poor people while he's at it.
Barring a small percentage, I
think, but can't be sure that most will be earning under ~ £50,000 per year. Which, in the grand scheme of things, is not that much.
In other words, most of the UK tax burden is actually falling on people who are not exactly earning vast sums of money.
Originally posted by Dog
I've just got one thing to say:
Ofcourse if you level the playing field between wealthy and poor all those money / resources would magically disappear... 
In my view, that argument is a bit simplistic. I mean, the problem as I see it is not the lack of resources to fund public institutions like healthcare and education, but rather the allocation of those resources and the means by which they are used.
To use a trite example familiar to anyone in the UK: Labour come to power in 1997 after about 18 years of Tory rule. Labour say the Tories ran the National Health Service down. Fair enough point. Since then, Labour have raised taxes, including a 1% rise on National Insurance contributions, supposedly hypothecated to NHS spending alone. So, after almost 5 years of Labour government, what has changed? We pay more tax, and more money is given to the NHS. But, oddly enough, our hospitals are still a disgrace, there are more administrative staff than nurses or beds, and waiting lists grow ever longer.
The NHS will simply swallow as much money as your care to throw at it. Injecting huge amounts of unaudited money into the NHS will generally lead to 2 things:
1. After years of stored up grievances, staff strike for higher pay, knowing that they now have a chance to get it.
2. Suppliers to the NHS raise their prices, knowing that the NHS can now afford higher prices.
End result: very little of these "extra billions" actually make it to the front line of providing healthcare. It simply gets wasted in costs and overhead.
The NHS also apparently spends £2 Billion per year in legal bills - mainly compensating patients who had the wrong leg cut off or whatever, because stressed out over-worked doctors made a mistake.
The evidence is everywhere: most of the other European nations spend far less on healthcare than the UK. Yet their healthcare systems are in far better shape.
I would argue that we all pay enough tax as it is. The problem is that our politicians are not using it correctly. Or are you meaning something else?
And for someone who I recall originally claimed to barely visit these forums and considered them a waste of time, you sure seem to be getting into the swing of things and posting lots yourself.
