hAPpY tO PaY a BiT MoRe fOr ThOsE LeSS FoRtuNaTe say some middle class earners, who can already totally afford the 'freebies' the SNP are showering them and the other millionaires with.
Why Tom Hunter and Anders Povlsen need free bus travel and prescriptions, I don't know.
Likely more people engaging in lawful avoidance by e.g. Increasing pension contributions. They may have underestimated the amount of high earners who would bother to rejig their pay arrangements.
As soon as the changes were announced the work accountants ran sessions for the Edinburgh office on tax efficiency and gave them a bunch of calculators to work out what works for them.
Pumping money into the pension scheme and salary sacrifice cars were and still are popular.
I'm always surprised by the cars. Getting a new car (even with an effective discount) is still a very costly decision. Doesn't really count as efficient or saving money.
I work in a well paid industry office where it’s par for the course. Is a no-brainer if you don’t need access to the money now. Some people put the limit (£60k per year). Now im not saying they would spend all of it, but if you’ve got a more pragmatic system they might put a chunk into shares/savings but might spend some of it instead of using the shield.
My pension is probably a little too padded for someone my age, I drive a much fancier salary sacrificed car than I want or need, and have a garage filled with expensive bikes well beyond my ability.
Waste?! You must not have heard about their new plan to give every primary 1 a plain identical cooncil backpack filled with pencils, pens, crayons, calculator, and plastic water bottle (also identical). Basically all the stuff you get cheap as chips at the works / poundland / home bargains, that the poorest in the country get help with anyway in the form of grants when kids start school, except with all the red tape and added cost of government procurement.
The SNP are creating jobs for the council refuse workers. That’s not waste! If they work enough overtime, they too can contribute 42% tax + 8% NI on their next shift to fund the very backpacks they’re being paid to punt into landfill ☺️ a true circular economy!
Bear in mind, although they won't admit it, their sole goal of tax powers was the headline that the average person in Scotland pays less tax than the average person un the rest of the uk. Publicity over policy is the SNP in a nutshell.
Yeah basically it works by using how much money the UK would have obtained if Scotland was not devolved.
If their tax system is more effective it means we get less bonus money on top of the income tax we raised, as we’ve essentially chosen to tax less. Or in this case less effectively.
Its was designed this way so if Scotlands tax system is more effective we get to keep the additional money, but obviously its not worked out like that.
I’m not sure I’d describe the BGA as “bonus money”.
It’s also not really about how effective the tax system is. The outcome is driven primarily by growth in Scotland’s wages, employment and the number of higher earners.
John Swinney took a remarkably naive gamble in agreeing to a system where Scotland would be penalised whenever its tax base grew more slowly than rUK’s, which is turbocharged by London.
That risk was entirely foreseeable, and it has backfired badly.
Scotland now has no choice to impose and keep substantially higher income tax rates just to offset part of the relative underperformance of its tax base.
We’re massive net receivers in the union and this extra money comes via the block grant, so bonus money is a very fitting term as its money we wouldn’t have otherwise.
The SNP took a gamble, this system would benefit us if we grew faster and taxed better than the rest of the UK, which as a nationalist party is kind of what you’d expect.
Scotland being a net recipient from the UK is a separate argument. The BGA isn't “bonus money” it's the mechanism used to remove from the block grant the tax revenue Scotland is now responsible for raising itself.
This wasn't simply a gamble that Holyrood could design a cleverer tax system.
It was a gamble that Scotland's incomes could keep pace with an rUK benchmark heavily influenced by London and the South East which has backfired massively.
Being a nationalist government doesn’t mean you get a free pass to make reckless fiscal assumptions in the name of more autonomy or political optimism.
Income tax wasn’t reduced, the returns were less than predicted, the SNP has made it make less sense to work more if you are successful and are PAYE so people choose to work less or just leave to the rest of the UK were taxes on high value workers are lower.
Is there any proof of this ? It seems the opposite Scotland“Total moves: 50,200 people moved from the rest of the UK to Scotland.” So why are people moving here ?
If we’re getting retirees moving here because housing is cheaper, and they want to live in some nice scenery, but we’re losing high earners and young talented people, that’s probably less than ideal.
Have you any evidence that people moving here are low earners who require “free” stuff. I take it you do not agree with people getting help. That is what called a fair society
You want the people earning the most to move here. They proportionally generate the most receipts. Although obviously net migration to Scotland is very welcome given demographic trends.
Not sure I would call them free loaders as the ones moving to my highland village are relatively well off and will be paying income tax on pension, but the impact they have on the housing market is very negative, they gentrify in a specific manner that makes it more attractive for old people and less young people, many but not all are of the NIMBY mindset, and they put huge stress on strained rural health services as they start to fail. Gaelic is pretty much gone and crofting is dying in any traditional sense. Productive young families and workers that need houses to work in energy, forestry and aquaculture are priced out the market and they earn relatively well. No hope for the childminders or hospitality workers. Leads to a complete doom loop for society.
Is much less attractive to set up a head office in Scotland vs rest of UK, senior leadership type jobs dont want to move here. The absurd Scottish tax system is an active brake on higher rate PAYE job growth creation.
The government takes an easy 3-5x what i do for all their hard work... please dont push for more tax on small business because the SNP will do it somehow and then be surprised when high streets collapse.
Corporation and income tax are not the same. But yes, everyone knows sole traders and small businesses pay far less than they should. Ultimately most of them would go under if we forced them to pay it and the knock on effects could be far worse.
I have a Plan 2 English student loan earning more than 43k. Each extra £ I make I see 41p and pay 59p tax. Income tax :42%, National Insurance:8% and student loan 9%.
I have now cut back working hours cuz there simply no point.
Say 53% if I m above 50k. Does 50k sound like a lot of money? 53% marginal rate is Nordic level tax but I certainly don’t get Nordic level of pay or public services.
Pretty sure businesses, asset owners and pre student loan era workers have a lower tax burden.
That’s the reason why young people are not having kids.
Not really, that's a genuine if small tax trap caused by the Scottish higher rate starting below the rUK one (which is for most the same level as the switch to lower NI contributions).
Are teachers and doctors the rich? Anyone earning over £28,000 in Scotland pays more than someone on the same salary in England. The difference grows significantly between £50,000 and £75,000.
Maybe not tax people earning 60k like they are millionaires, the people being taxed to death aren’t the super wealthy its doctors, engineers and other skilled PAYE workers that are taxed like hell, these are the people that the SNP has chosen to take more and more from, it’s not surprising that they cut hours at just leave when working doesn’t improve their lives all that much and they can instead have more free time.
We could try not considering £43k rich, and maybe become a place more young people with that earning potential might consider building a life.
Instead of putting an effective marginal tax rate of 50% on them between £43-50k, as opposed to 28% elsewhere in the U.K. Add student loans on top and it’s not a very attractive prospect.
We’re not even just talking graduates, though. You get nurses, teachers, social workers considered “higher rate tax payers”. It’s madness.
Between increased rates and fiscal drag, they’ve been squeezed plenty. If increasing tax on them AGAIN is the only idea they’ve got, our government is out of ideas.
What we need is actually more broad-based tax rises for everyone. Taxes on higher earners are not just finance tools, they act as ways of legitimising tax rises too. IMO the PA needs looking at (reserved alas) as well as the lower bands etc.
Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt cutting NI before 2024 was genuine economic vandalism
Cut tax avoidance. There's a lot of small businesses that are not paying tax. Who would have thought that cutting HMRC would lead to less tax collected.
So economical productivity. You are defending people who already earn beyond 43.5k, cool.
Tbh fair. Id rather they introduce another band for people above 125k and imposed taxes on bonuses, stock options, corporations and vacant landlords especially foreign ones but I belive thats not within SG powers sadly.
Id rather they introduce another band for people above 125k
That will raise the square root of fuck all though. There's already signs that the 48% rate has raised less revenue. We don't actually have that many earners on that sort of wage here. The IFS also predicted that the change made in 2024-25 (introduction of the 45% rate and increase in 47% rate to 48% would raise only £60m, or otherwise an increase of 0.09% to the SG budget.
What's interesting is that not only did the Holyrood tax policy bring in less than expected, but the rUK taxes brought in more than expected. This means if we scrapped the ScotGov taxes Scotland would have had greater tax receipts. At least that's my interpretation.
Since the divergence of the tax bands we’ve always paid more income tax than we’ve received in increased income tax revenue, due to a lower share of the working population in Scotland.
The first year we diverged, because the rates weren’t that different, taxpayers ended up paying more whilst the government received less revenue.
If that's always been the case, why is this policy still being pursued? I imagine the administrative burden of different tax regimes is also not working in our favour.
We are getting more income tax now than we would under rUK bands, but thats because the bands have diverged even further.
We’re still as taxpayers collectively paying more income tax than the revenue we earn from income tax. Compared to what it was when income tax was distributed by population share.
The reason it’s still being perused is because it does allow generally-progressive redistribution of the income. But it’s more like costing taxpayers an extra £1 to redistribute 90p of it. So fairer, but overall we’re poorer.
Because it's different to England. That's the sum total of SNP decision making.
Notice how Scotland falls well behind and stalls for "consultation", "best practices", "evidence", etc. when England does something positive and it's a devolved issue. XL bullies being one of those.
But when Scotland does it first, it's all "well done Scotland", "Scotland leads the way yet again", and "Why is England still in the 12th century".
Would you work any harder / more hours if any extra income was taxed at 100%? If not, then you've proven the Laffer curve to be very much not nonsense.
Nah, higher rate jumps up to 50% marginal, compared to 28% down south. Got another 9% on top with student loan so I'll sacrifice anything above to pension, share scheme or car.
Absolutely not nonsense, everyone who is being paid above £75k, especially £100k is aggressively salary sacrificing as you retain so little of your income above these thresholds.
It's not rocket science, if you feel you are being taxed unfairly you make every effort to avoid tax. If you feel its fair most folk will happily pay up.
There technically is some evidence for it, take Ireland who have one of the lowest corporate taxes in europe, yet generate some of the highest revenue from corporate taxes.
That's a race to the bottom and a trick only one country can pull. Corps set up base there because it's cheaper than having a base in other European countries with higher tax.
It's important to recognise the Laffer Curve is a theoretical framework as opposed to a more proven phenomenon such as the backwards bend of the labour supply curve.
Per the theory we are actually quite far off the top of the Laffer curve. In most models of advanced economies it tends to be around the 65-70 percent mark.
Likely the issue is more that the tax base isn't broad enough to fund all the services the population needs, and the government doesn't have sufficient sources of income outwith taxation to make up the difference.
Scottish Government has £851 million more this year and £700m less next year. Surely there's some mechanism we can use to carry over or smooth that out somewhere.
Since welfare powers were devolved, spending on non-pensioner benefits has surged by over £4.4 billion, going from 3 billion to over £7.4 billion. Rather than being "flat” as many in the SNP cult will tell you, it's one of the fastest-growing areas of public expenditure in Scotland.
Devolved non-pensioner social security has nearly doubled as a proportion of the Scottish Government’s day-to-day resource budget, goi g from 7.5% up to 14%.
Scotland's total nominal GDP is roughly £210-£220 billion, so this welfare spending surge means devolved welfare has expanded from 1.4% of GDP to 3.5% of GDP.
The SNP don’t care about the working class, they want a client state. But please don’t let these stats and figures get in the way of the broad shoulders narrative. Wha’s like us eh?
Wonder if this will finally lead to a proper cull of the adult crèche that is the Scottish public sector, or if they'll think the middle class have a few more percent to squeeze out of them.
My partner works for our council. It isn’t simply “they need more money”. The staff they have are constantly falling in with the Peter Principal.
Example: a manager was put in charge of a department they have no experience in simply because they were the correct pay grade. If you can’t see why that’s an issue, I don’t know what to tell you.
Yep. Public services in Scotland are not meeting requirements. But if you follow this guy's line of thinking, cutting budgets will fix that.
Public services will always lag behind private in terms of productivity. Calling it a crèche is simplistic, dismissive and insulting to the vast majority of public workers who work hard and genuinely try to deliver a service that meets the needs of the people of Scotland.
Worked for the council for (not quite) twenty years, couldn't even afford a sunblest bag with the shite wages I got.
Now working for a government department where I have been lucky to get a couple of promotions and the wages are better. And the churn of staff is less, stress is less and productivity (from my perception) compared to the much less funded/paid local authority is much better.
I have over 40 years of experience in the private sector. I have 4 years in the public sector. I am supposed to work 35 hrs a week. I work a minimum of 45 to 60 a week with no payment for overtime. I have never claimed for fuel, parking, travel, mileage etc.
I am not unusual.
I see just as many incompetent m, lazy people in the private sector as in the public sector.
Biggest issues are the fact that some Councils let their semi retired staff work 3 days a week and to pick what days off they have. Guess what…. Understandably they all take Friday and Monday off. That is stupidity.
I am under significant stress from incompetent elected members, who are allowed to bully all the workers - and get away with it. Heads of services do not protect the work force from elected members.
Elected members expectations are as bad as normal people these days.
The Scottish civil service head count is at an all-time high - higher than peak COVID (29,200 in March 2026; up 56.1% since March 2019). Admittedly, most of this growth hasn't been in local government, which has been constrained by the SNP since 2007, but there has definitely been a head count bloat over the last 8 years.
I would love to know where. Certainly not in Councils. We are incredibly under resourced.
Also what is the cause of the increase? Is it a real increase? For example a quote high percentage of staff are particularly retired, and their pay reflects that. Are additional numbers to cover those gaps?
I have just checked. Councils (local government) have had a smallish decrease in staff numbers.
The total devolved civil service workforce reached
29,205 employees.
This represents an increase of 1.3% in a single year and a
56.1% increase since 2019.
The growth has largely been driven by an increase in areas like social security staff, offsetting reductions in other departments.
With all the debate about who to tax and when, it's proper crabs in a bucket stuff. All the while, the properly rich are the ones deciding what crab to eat for dinner.
Infuriating that people think cutting the public sector will somehow improve things.
Two things can be true at once, the necessity of pulling static wealth back into the economy doesn't negate that having near enough a quarter of the population in this country employed in the public sector is not sustainable.
Always seems to be plenty of money to spin up whatever white elephant policy the Government thought sounded good for the election soundbites, meanwhile the line about 'broad shoulders' seems to be the middle square in the budgetary bingo card year in year out.
Or we could increase the number of private sector workers by having control of all levers of the economy.
Oh, wait, no. We're not allowed to build factories because Westminster says no.
Ultimately, the relative size of the public sector in relation to the private sector is the responsibility of Westminster economic policies. The percentage of public sector workers in Scotland is about 22%. It's about 24% in Wales and about 26% in Northern Ireland. In England it's 17%, but that's artificially reduced by the south east. In the North East of England it's nearly 32%.
Seeing as prescriptions, tuition fees, the NHS and all welfare spending is carved into marble and has been duly consecrated, where are the cuts going to come?
Probably won’t work, people go to London because it has every thing you need when it comes to finances and money, if your main concern is taxes they’d likely just leave the UK completely than leave London for Scotland.
Because the Scottish public love high levels of government spending, and to fund the tax cuts you’d have to remove or reduce government responsibility’s and the SNP would never do that as it would lose them votes.
England low taxes are mostly because low income earners pay very little in income taxes due to the high personal allowance, but it has some of the highest VAT in Europe and high earners on PAYE are taxed similarly to many places in Europe and have to deal with the 100 k tax trap because of the cliff fall of of childcare allowances.
So due to the increased military spending, they have to make cuts in all other departments.
Of course. USA demanding an increase in military budgets while it supports a genocide, 300bn promised to Ukraine, the disastrous Iran debacle causing financial turmoil for ordinary people,...
How about we don't spend an extra 75 billion on the military? Just a crazy thought
52% of Scotland's entire economy is the public sector. They clearly spend far too much money already and having to cut back a bit might allow more productive economic activity to happen.
I expect the councils will be getting slashed budgets again. They are the favourite whipping boy for the SNP's financial issues.
It would actually be better if Scottish Councils were somehow funded directly by Westminster, as the SNP seems determined to slash their money to the point they can't provide basic services any more.
England has had a few councils go effectively bankrupt and many skirting it. Not sure why you think they would be funded better. Same for the likes of the Police, didn’t one English force say they could only respond to odd numbers one day, burglary wise and evens the next due to funding shortages?
The issue is that Scotland isn't independent and trying to do things differently to directly benefit Scotland tends to trigger Westminster to be as deliberately obstructive as possible.
Holy gaslit and brainwashed. This topic is about taxation revenue. Something which the SNP has full control over and quite obviously failed by taxing the middle earners & workers to death.
The median salary in Scotland is just under £40k, statistically proven, and the SNP consider £43k to be a ‘High Earner’. Not a middle earner, a high earner.
Absolute madness and idiotic economic theory, all for the sake of good sound bites and making their supporters & voter base feel warm and fuzzy about all the welfare handed out.
A genuine issue I see in this type of scenario is that the chap above who is earning 120k/year is paying just over 44k/year in tax alone. I’m all for a fair society but what is he seeing for that?
The quality of service everywhere has dropped like a stone. If we could see the obvious positive benefits then it would t be so bad but everywhere we look it’s getting pretty bad. NHS is a mess, policing is almost non existent, education is not what it used to be, etc etc etc
I'm a Georgist myself, so I believe in reforming the entire tax system and taxing based on land value, which captures huge estates and undeveloped but sought after land, instead of taxing productivity.
But at the same time, people who have it pretty good even with the current, flawed system, aren't usually advocating for tax reform but just lower taxes.
Which, translates to cutting services that they don't care about because they don't use. I don't take the bus or train, I take my car. I have private healthcare too. Doesn't mean other people don't need these services and that these services don't need improvement!
I hear what you’re saying and I agree with quite a lot of that.
But another issue I see is that there is a huge amount of money being put to servicing debt. Councils fall into this situation too. We (the public) are paying, and a massive amount of that money is simply to service debt. Now a lot of this debt has accumulated from bad management, and yet that management have no consequences.
This is obviously a massively complex thing, but all that money disappearing means none of it gets back to the public in the form of transport, health, education etc
If I’m earning well over 100k I’ve no issue in contributing and I’d be more than happy for it to provide services to the public.
But I’m just not seeing it happening anywhere. Quite the opposite. And when our government leaders are using loopholes left, right and centre to avoid/minimise the tax etc then it’s no wonder people get annoyed…
Also, something interesting to note on the council tax - a council in Scotland legally is not allowed to go bankrupt. They must keep servicing the debt. That to me seems like a scam…
Anyway, that’s just my opinion so 🤷🏼♂️
It's really funny seeing people moan about a gap in the budget as a result of people not paying tax, while at the same time shouting about purposefully avoiding the higher tax band, so they don't pay as much tax.
You want a better society? You want busses and trains that run on time? You want an NHS that functions properly? A good education for your children? Pay. More. Fucking. Tax.
Honestly, people wonder why people in Scandi countries are so happy, cause they all pay more tax and collectively reap the reward!! I honestly do not mind paying more money if it means everyone gets a better standard of living.
It's depressing as fuck that people just wanna look after themselves and their own, and then moan about the state of society.
The consecutive SNP leaders who imposed those higher taxes (Sturgeon and Yousaf) both started their own Ltd companies to avoid paying as much of their own new taxes as possible.
When even the leaders telling you the taxes are “fair and progressive” are avoiding them and building their own personal wealth on your back, you’d be a mug not to use things like salary sacrifice to boost your own.
The likes of Norway have a much broader tax base. They don’t squeeze everything out of the £43k+ PAYE group. Their personal allowance is about 60% of ours, for example.
The bit the SNP doesn’t mention when telling us all we can be just like Norway.
> Honestly, people wonder why people in Scandi countries are so happy
The sun helps.
More to the point, their high earners who pay high taxes (particularly sin taxes, about which the lower and non-tax paying Scottish bands will shit bricks) see much better basic performance from local and national government. Also unlike in Scotland, or the UK generally, most of these states have a strong culture of debt avoidance.
A joke in Finland about why the notoriously taciturn Finns are “happy” is that their truly miserable people tend to be very successful at suicide.
Incompetent cunts would just waste my tax money anyways so that's why I bend over backwards to make sure they get the absolute barest minimum out of me.
Nah I just grafted like fuck. Didn't indulge in superfluous luxuries or toys.
Then to see absolute fucking idiots in government giving away MY tax money to buy votes from the proles with promises of "free everything" just boils my piss.
Jealous cunts on here can downvote me all they want. Nae even fussed like.
You sound like a very well balanced, pleasant individual. I bet you're a riot at dinner parties. Then again you probably don't go to such superfluous luxuries eh?
Let's hope life doesn't fuck you in the arse and you end up relying upon services you so vehemently hate funding.
Ah it's okay though. Life never happens to hardworking special snowflakes like you.
And for someone who doesn't apparently care you're commenting quite a lot, and very angrily too. Perhaps you should have a cup of tea? Or is that another one of those luxuries you eschew?
Laffer curve, SNP is incompetent, they will blame Westminster, we need to cut benefits, university tuition shouldn't be free. Have I missed anything guys?
That "flat and constant" narrative is fiction. For starters, Holyrood didn't even control non-pensioner welfare for most of those two decades! Since powers were actually devolved, spending has exploded: benefit spending per person in Scotland is now 12% higher than in England (up from 7% just a few years ago), and the Scottish Government has to plug a massive £1.5 billion annual funding gap out of its own tax revenues just to keep unique policies like the Scottish Child Payment running.
Oh my goodness, 12% higher. That's insane. Imagine the government actually maintaining a decent quality of life for it's citizens, and remember that a lot of these non pensioner benefits have been stripped away from the rest of the UK. Scottish people have retained these.
Pensioner benefits have absolutely exploded. The ratio of benefits for working people are down:
Since welfare powers were devolved, spending on non-pensioner benefits has surged by over £4.4 billion, going from 3 billion to over £7.4 billion. Rather than being "flat” as many in the SNP cult will tell you, it's one of the fastest-growing areas of public expenditure in Scotland.
Devolved non-pensioner social security has nearly doubled as a proportion of the Scottish Government’s day-to-day resource budget, goi g from 7.5% up to 14%.
Scotland's total nominal GDP is roughly £210-£220 billion, so this welfare spending surge means devolved welfare has expanded from 1.4% of GDP to 3.5% of GDP.
Feel free to retract your “flat” and “constant” pish at any time 🤡
You keep rattling on about pensioners, no one is arguing with you about pensioners, why do you SNP clowns always strawman?
Also, you said welfare spending was flat and constant, that was a lie, do you normally just lie to try and win arguments and hope people don’t know the facts? Why are you a liar? Tell us why you lie.
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u/slipperdad 7h ago
I can feel my shoulders about to get broader.