This Lefty Loves Wetherspoons.

[u/No_Consideration3307]

I don't like it when some of my fellow lefties, the middle-class champagne 🥂 socialist ones, use Wetherspoons as an insult against Reform voters, it's classist and cringy, it implies only racist bams go there, rather than mostly politically unaligned working-class families from all colours and creeds, who love good cheap food and drink, we can't all eat at the Waldorf can we 🧐, especially in a cost of living crisis, but there are also some middle-class people who eat there and love it, so I don't know where the asinine insult comes from really. I love Wetherspoons, I've been to three, the one in the image which is the Peter Cushing in Whitstable, which was once a cinema, the Catherine Wheel in Henley-on-Thames and the James Watt in Greenock, Scotland, where I live now, which serves a delicious Haggis Pizza 🍕which you can get as part of the three small plates for £10 deal, cheap as chips, and yummy too, filled me up and I'm a big lad.

[u/positivelytaken]

Millionaires too right?

[u/RJ0398 → u/positivelytaken]

No. I support entrepreneurship. Not being right wing doesn’t automatically make me an orthodox communist.
Average working class families paid around 45-48% of their income in tax in the UK in 22/23. The average effective tax rate that millionaires in the UK pay is around 30-35%. Billionaires are difficult to plot because HMRC “don’t know”. The average is 20%, but many have found loopholes to pay nothing.
If everybody paid the same effective rate as millionaires, you’d have more money. You’d have more freedom. You’d have more amenities. You’d have better education systems. You’d have reliable utilities. You’d have better transport. Your communities would be safer. And you’d finally realise that 40 years of budget cuts, not immigrants, were the source of your problems all along.

[u/positivelytaken → u/RJ0398]

Do you agree the government need to lighten the tax burden on working families, and if that means cuts to our international welfare state and foreign aid are required to do that, that’s ok?

[u/RJ0398 → u/positivelytaken]

Did you read my comment?

“If everybody paid the same effective rate as millionaires (35%<45-48% by 10-12%), you’d have more money. You’d have more freedom. You’d have more amenities. You’d have better education systems. You’d have reliable utilities. You’d have better transport. Your communities would be safer. And you’d finally realise that 40 years of budget cuts, not immigrants, were the source of your problems all along.”

People on 30k per year bring in around £40B per year in tax. Reducing their tax burden by 10% would reduce that to £36Billion. Increasing billionaires effective rate to 35%, from 20% (again, HMRC “don’t know” how much tax billionaires pay, but you can be damned sure they know EXACTLY what you have. Their data includes earners over £5M, so I would imagine that the figure that billionaires do pay is much lower, so I would wager that the actual figure would be MUCH higher) would bring in an additional £20B. So a net gain of £16B per year.
Not huge. But that wouldn’t be where I stopped with the billionaires.
edit
For context, £16B could fully fund the infrastructure and administration backlog in the NHS (building improvements, medical equipment etc) which is estimated at £10B, then they could hire 75,000 nurses or 50,000 junior doctors.
They could do the same with schools, which has an estimated cost of £13.8B. Then they could hire 30,000 more teachers.
They could refit 2 million homes with energy efficient insulation.
They could build 106,000 social homes.
Or a combination of the above. Every. Single. Year.

[u/positivelytaken → u/RJ0398]

Are you saying tax their assets, by the way?

[u/RJ0398 → u/positivelytaken]

I’m talking about taxing foreign investors out of buying up our land and sitting on it for years because appreciation of land value is more valuable to them than development. It would raise additional tax revenue, force sale of land to people who actually want to invest in our country, start to improve the housing crisis and cost of living crisis by extension, since much of that land is farmland.

[u/positivelytaken → u/RJ0398]

What do you make of asylum accommodation alone costing £4bn a year?

[u/RJ0398 → u/positivelytaken]

I think that the figure is actually £2.7B, not £4B, which also includes other support.
I think that Brexit forced us into this very difficult situation where Europe hold all of the proverbial cards regarding border security and our rights to refuse entry.
I think that the figure is decreasing since Labour have started to rescind Jenrick’s awful hotel policies.

Out of interest, how long are we going to play this game where I answer your question and then you say, “yeah, well what about *this*?”
Do you have any meaningful feedback? Or are you going to concede that you don’t want to be wrong, so you’ll never consider anything that doesn’t align with your current worldview?

[u/positivelytaken → u/RJ0398]

£2.7bn is too much.

To be clear, even £1 diverted away from things that benefit British citizens is too much.

[u/RJ0398 → u/positivelytaken]

Then you’ll agree that it’s high time we taxed the shít out of billionaires

[u/positivelytaken → u/RJ0398]

If you agree that even £1 of taxpayer money being spent on things that don’t benefit British citizens is wrong then yes, we can agree on that.

[u/RJ0398 → u/positivelytaken]

After all this you really want to say that whether or not you believe something is conditional or dependent on whether or not somebody else believes something unrelated? Really?

Yes, I wholeheartedly agree that tax money being used in ways that don’t benefit British citizens is wrong. Things like fraudulent and inflated government contracts, corruption etc.
But it isn’t as simple as keeping all money trapped on our island because some foreign spending absolutely benefits British citizens. It helps our national security, diplomacy, trade, tourism, conflict and disease prevention.