Most liked posts in thread: 1% Pay Rise for NHS.

See that's the problem that they never seem to realise. The NHS I believe is the largest employer in the UK so even a 1% increase adds a massive amount to what the country has to find to pay them. I believe if they gave what the Unions wanted it was over £4bn a year extra and even 1% is over £300mill a year extra. You could pay every MP around £400k (about a 5 times increase) a year and the total wage bill would be less than than 1% increase

And where do they find that 1% lets alone 12.5%? just to get us out of the COVID hole that things like Furlough have caused we are all already going to have to pay more.

And while you will see the NHS workers and their supporters all screaming tax the high earners and companies more they fail to see the problem. Currently, the top 1% of income taxpayers pay more than 1/3rd of all income tax collected. It's a similar situation on the corporation tax front. To be in the top 1% of income taxpayers you only need to be making £160k a year, that's alot but nowhere near where I'm sure most people think the top 1% would be. With technology, the world is getting smaller and smaller and the requirement for us to be based in the same area as our job is done is getting less. Just take me, despite being UK based and paying UK tax under 10% of my work each year is for UK clients, I have absolutely no need to be in the UK. Now I don't reach the higher tax bracket threshold let alone the additional tax threshold needed to be in the 1% and as such, I probably don't have the resources to make moving abroad an easy and painless experience but there are plenty of places I could move to, still be able to do my job and be better off so a large number of the top 1% certainly could move if the tax on them gets too high. Same with companies, just look at Amazon as an example. One of the reasons they pay what seems like such a small amount of tax is they absolutely don't need UK operations for most of their business. Outside of distribution, everything else can be carried out abroad, if tax in the UK isn't competitive there is less and less reason for companies to keep all parts (or any) of their business UK based.

So if we drive the rich individuals and big business away from the UK with excessive tax rates we have less to pay them. We also potentially have less jobs in the country making things even worse. Also any tax they do have to pay is likely to see us all paying more for items thus eating into their pay increase (and making things for people who didn't get a pay rise harder)


Oh and the NHS workers also forget all the perks they actually get. They get deals on a whole range of things including things like mortgages and big discounts on things like electronics. And they have been getting even more since COVID (and many of them have become greedy and demanding with it)