Jimmy Carr and his tax buggery on 8 Out Of 10 Cats

[MojoJojo]

You don't need to earn millions to pay 40% tax.  You need to earn £35k or so before you start paying tax at that rate.

This has been repeated as a fact, but it's wrong because you're not counting the personal allowance. In 2012, you need to earn £42,476 to be paying tax in the 40% tax band.

I earn enough to pay higher rate tax, just about.

[Dead kate moss]

Another, perhaps more useful question, is not 'what is the minimum you have to earn to pay that tax rate' but 'what are the average earnings of someone in that tax bracket'?

Anyone want to google that for me?

[Dead kate moss]

I don't think £50k is that much if you have a family and a mortgage in London, for instance.

Yes, yes it is. There are people with families, who cannot afford a mortgage, living on £5k or less a year. £50k is roughly double the average UK wage. That's 'rich.'

But no, compared to Adele or Didier Drogba, it's 'not that much.'

[mook]

you know that's not "rich", are you just repeating it just so you have something to type?

[Dead kate moss]

you know that's not "rich", are you just repeating it just so you have something to type?

Define rich then.

[Jemble Fred]

"Rich" is a meaningless, relative term.

£50k is, however, a LOT of money, and – LOndon weighting aside – double what most people I know even dream of earning p.a.

[Dead kate moss]

Yes, but once you take off the money for the private schools, the nanny, the cars and the holidays, it really doesn't stretch very far!

[mook]

i'd say it starts when a person can afford to privately educate 2 children (i that the national average now?), pay a mortage, afford one family holiday a year, and maybe a couple of breaks. um... put aside provision for retirement. pay for hobbies for their children and themselves. eat out whenever they want. afford all transport costs. and... well i'm fed up with typing now. so i say to be on the very lower end of rich would need at least £200000 per annum and that would be cutting it fine.

[Jemble Fred]

And of course full ownership of an entire mouthful of gold teeth. And pearls for eyeballs.

And fucking THIS:

[mook]

christ.

[Dead kate moss]

i'd say it starts when a person can afford to privately educate 2 children (i that the national average now?), pay a mortage, afford one family holiday a year, and maybe a couple of breaks. um... put aside provision for retirement. pay for hobbies for their children and themselves. eat out whenever they want. afford all transport costs. and... well i'm fed up with typing now. so i say to be on the very lower end of rich would need at least £200000 per annum and that would be cutting it fine.

I'd say it starts roughly when you earn twice the average wage. And also live in a rich country of course, though that is shifting the goalposts a little. The point I keep making is that richer people - and I don't know how much you earn mook - just will not accept they are rich. You can substitute the term 'well-off' but I bet the same people would reject that one too. There's always someone better off, who can afford to send all their kids to the poshest private schools and go skiiing twice a year - 'they're the rich ones! Not little old me! I'm just doing alright, even though I'm in the top earning tax bracket which would suggest I'm doing pretty fucking well comparatively.'

£200000 a year to be considered rich? Just amazing.

[Jemble Fred]

christ.

I am unemployed (previous job, worked my way up to £19k after 8 years service) and I accidentally left the emergency water heater switch (which my estate agent warned to never leave on for more than half an hour) on ALL FUCKING NIGHT. I will be spending the rest of my life in the fucking Workhouse.

If you earn £25k or more and live outside London, you may as well be King cunting Midas to me.

[mook]

but didn't you choose to follow a career you actually wanted (i believe you were a professional writer) rather than pursue a career that would just pay more?

if that choice left you in the position you find yourself in now, well that isn't the fault of any "rich" bugger is it?

[Jemble Fred]

I never said it was. I'm just making it clear that your head is financially in the clouds, and you have no idea what most people actually live on in the real world. There are plenty of folk a lot worse off than me, even bearing in mind the water heating bill heading my way.

[mook]

would you at least agree that the majority of "high earners" had to postpone many things they loved doing in the pursuit of a more secure life? if so, is that having my head in the financial clouds?

[Jemble Fred]

In my experience most "high earners" mainly love pursuing money anyway, so they're merry either way.

[Dead kate moss]

I would agree that many rich people had to work to become rich yes mook. What does that prove?

Also what Jemble just said.

[Default to the negative]

If anyone here buys any kind of drugs, they are contributing to a non-taxable income and tacitly supporting tax avoidance.

[Jamie Oliver is fat]

Yes, but once you take off the money for the private schools, the nanny, the cars and the holidays, it really doesn't stretch very far!

I think you're thinking about 100k, not 50k

In my experience most "high earners" mainly love pursuing money anyway, so they're merry either way.

Maybe true for the people you know, but a nonsensical generalization otherwise

A lot of "well paid" people are simply paid a salary to compensate them for the skills they have and have acquired over the years, nothing to do with pursuing money directly, but bettering themselves and finding better jobs and wanting a better life

[mook]

ignore... for the moment.

[Dead kate moss]

I think you're thinking about 100k, not 50k

No I'm not, you can pretty much afford those things on 50k, especially if you don't live in a really expensive part of London for example. Also, as I said many families have two high wage earners don't they? So they bring in maybe 80k a year. Which is a rich household.

[Jamie Oliver is fat]

No I'm not, you can pretty much afford those things on 50k

You don't know what you're talking about

[Dead kate moss]

I can't be arsed to do the maths to prove that someone on 50k - and you are ignoring my point that a family will probably have another earner bringing in an extra 20-40k - can probably afford a nanny/some kind of home help, private schooling, cars and holidays. So believe what you want.

[Jamie Oliver is fat]

Either we're talking about 50k, or two salaries

I agree a two salary household could afford these things, one not one person earning 50k

[Kishi the Bad Lampshade]

The problem with measuring how 'rich' you feel is that the quality of your stuff/lifestyle goes up, which then means you don't have as much money left over as you would if your lifestyle was the same as on a lower salary, therefore you don't feel any richer even though you live in a better house, have a holiday further away, buy nicer food etc. It's for similar reasons as to why a lot of lottery owners piss all their money away - the human brain considers 'rich' to be some vague point beyond countable money where you can go out and buy a car and a watch and a summer home and a fancy purebred cat on a whim. To lottery winners that's what their winnings mean, it's seven figures so that somehow means it'll never run out. But 'rich' isn't some far-off point where you have infinite cash, it's a point where your lifestyle is much better than the average and you might not even realise it.

There was something along these lines on Cracked:

Hell, you've probably heard it in real life, from a boss or some guy sitting nearby at Starbucks. "I guess I'm considered rich now! Well, if I'm so 'rich,' why am I broke at the end of the month?!?" Uh, I think it's because your mortgage is $3,000 a month, since you live in a fucking palace. And because you took your family on that Disney cruise last summer. And because you pay for your kids' college, so that, unlike us, they won't be crushed under six figures of student loan debt at age 22. And because you eat all the best foods and drink the finest liquids.
Or, as Hamilton Nolan at Gawker put it, "'Sure, it's an objectively large sum of money,' they say. 'But it is far smaller after I spend it.'"For people who are grinding through overtime just to keep up with their bank's late fees, this induces an urge to storm a gated community with pitchforks and torches and make those people go spend a year in a trailer park or in a city apartment so small that when you flush the toilet, little droplets of piss splatter onto the bed.
But don't get too mad at the rich for saying this -- we shouldn't, as a rule, get as angry at people for being oblivious as we should when they're being intentionally evil. Besides, they can't help it -- that obliviousness is hard-wired, a product of evolution that, really, kind of explains all class tension in the world. The rich, along with all of us, are biologically programmed to not notice their advantages. This came up a while back in a previous Cracked article. Basically, your brain drains the pleasure from the current things you own and do in order to motivate you to keep hunting and gathering. And I don't care where you are on the economic ladder, you've experienced this yourself.

Now obviously earning, say, £40k doesn't mean you live in a palace and eat off gold plates. You might still worry about the mortgage, might not be able to afford private school if you have more than one kid, might only be able to take one holiday that year. But it is rich, by UK standards (not even mentioning international standards).

Some snooty magazine that was delivered to my mum's house (who was apparently 'hand-selected' i.e. they only deliver it to houses in the right sort of area) had an full-page ad in it for a firm of accountants specialising in tax avoidance. It was so fucking smug it put me off avoidance for life.

[Smeraldina Rima]

I get that magazine too

yes sometimes people take advantage but there's a lot of fun to be had in the rich bracket

and you can't take it with you.

[Brundle-Fly]

I bet this post was made by one of those "norms" who go around being popular and having girlfriends!

I'm absolutely livid.

And I bet he's over eighteen years old.

[Steve Williams]

Was Does Doug Know? the original format of this show, which got reprogrammed this way in response to its failure?

Er, no, that was a Talkback production anyway. For what it's worth, before anyone gets overexcited, please note that this episode was the last in the series and the compilations for the next two weeks were always billed, before we get any maconic conspiracy theories.

In addition, anyone with comments about the edit and the guest booking favouring Carr should remember that this programme is always edited unbeilevably badly and the same guests turn up over and over again so it's far likelier to be ineptitude than conspiracy.

[Famous Mortimer]

maconic conspiracy theories

Is this the thing that keeps exceptionally tedious people on TV?

[greencalx]

The problem with measuring how 'rich' you feel is that the quality of your stuff/lifestyle goes up, which then means you don't have as much money left over as you would if your lifestyle was the same as on a lower salary, therefore you don't feel any richer even though you live in a better house, have a holiday further away, buy nicer food etc.

This.

There's a very cruel bit of mathematics that kicks in as well. A feature of wealth distributions is that they have a heavy tail[nb]For non-geeks, this is the 80:20 rule; for geeks: a power-law tail; for the geekier: actually, the power-law part is debated, so the following statement is only approximately true[/nb]. If you look at everyone who is richer than you, and average their wealth, you will find this average to be some factor K times your own wealth. The mathematical cruelty is that this factor K does not depend on how rich you are[nb]once you've surmounted the 'hump' of the distribution, which seems to be ~25k pa net[/nb].  So if you only ever compare yourself with the richer segment of society (which I guess many people will), you will always view yourself to be "poor" by comparison.[nb]In case this sounds self-evidently true, I would point out that if the distribution doesn't have a heavy tail, the richer you get, the closer you get in relative terms to those who are richer than you.[/nb]

Anyway, if you want to know where you fit in, here's a ready reckoner.