The Very Meh Humza Yousaf Thread.

[Aufc]

1 hour ago, Sherrif John Bunnell said:

I'll get the tiny Stradivarius out for folk earning over £100k.

Only 11% of Scottish adults pay the higher rate and only 0.7% pay the top rate. Yet they contribute about 65% of the total income tax take. So, despite your sarcasm, the country is pretty reliant on them. 

[scottsdad]

3 hours ago, Left Back said:

When our son went to Uni not only could he not get into any of the courses he applied for there were no clearing places for Scottish students at all that year because the funded places were all taken up.  We paid for him to go to Uni in London.

Whether this is better because of Brexit as was claimed I don't know.  2 minutes on google would indicate that isn't the case though.

https://www.strath.ac.uk/studywithus/clearing/scotland/

Interesting discussion on student finance in Scotland. A good explanation is given here. 

For my perspective, each uni has a cap on numbers and it isn't always easy to predict what the "market" will be. We launched a new programme 2 years ago in our uni expecting 20-30 students to apply initially. Over 500 applications came in. Far more popular than anticipated. Other programmes recruited fewer than expected so the new programme mopped up some of that availability. But ultimately it is no longer an absolute that if you meet the requirements of a programme you get in. And unis don't really want to go into clearing except for the students that bring extra cash (RUK, international or SIMD20).

The Scottish Government has pulled £100 million out of the Scottish HE sector this year and that is baked into future projections. The central money coming to unis for undergraduates has been declining in real terms for ages. Colleges also badly hit. 

Then there are things like graduate apprenticeships. Launched a few years ago this was a stream of "extra" money for unis. Unis got paid x amount per graduate apprentice, and they hired staff to manage these....then the Scottish Government changed it. Pulled all the funding and said that a) the GA's were now part of the cap and b) unis who had GAs had to keep them or the cap gets reduced. So for every GA student we have that's one less place on a mainstream programme. 

The uni I work in gets 9% of its total budget from the Scottish Government, to put it in perspective. But this keeps declining, and the insanity of the home office visa restrictions means our international recruitment is tanking also. University finances are under huge pressures at the moment. 

[ICTChris]

Article by Dr David Bell, formerly of Stirling University, about the marginal rates of tax etc. it’s quite a good explainer about the marginal rates discussion.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/better-ways-to-boost-scotlands-coffers-than-by-raising-income-tax-f7dztmkff
 

1 hour ago, Sherrif John Bunnell said:

I'll get the tiny Stradivarius out for folk earning over £100k.

As the article says above, the affect of having such higher tax rates could be more than some people who earn a lot paying a bit more.

Quote

my concern is that it will be difficult to attract the workers and investment to Scotland that are needed to generate sufficient growth to make these spending decisions less painful.

The cash raised by this, when behavioural affects are taken into account, is very small. From the Scottish Fiscal Commission the money raised from the top rate increase is £9m.

[Todd_is_God]

Humza says that taxing the wealthiest in Scotland more than elsewhere in the UK helps provide better public services.

Whilst those on £43k+ a year are certainly fairly comfortable, i'm not sure they are "wealthy"

Does the additional tax already generated in Scotland actually provide better public services in Scotland? Or is most/all of it swallowed up by paying the people providing those services more than in the rest of the UK to provide the same level of service?

Edited December 20, 2023 by Todd_is_God

[scottsdad]

And from today

Scottish ministers cut spending on free university places

[vikingTON]

The issue is not with the tax rise as much as it not even touching the sides of the ludicrous CT freeze which was announced on the back of a fag packet by Yousaf. The obsession with securing a handful of pet projects from cuts means that rest of the budget items (see above) get significant cuts once again too. That's simply not a sustainable choice after many years of the same practice.

The CT freeze is crap politics too as releasing local authorities to raise CT also means that they have to determine the trade-offs between generating revenue and cutting services. The budget doesn't deliver better services - at best, it delivers a decline in services that is less pronounced than in England/Wales. 

Edited December 20, 2023 by vikingTON

[Cardle is Magic]

The Council Tax freeze decision was fucking insanity tbh.

A deeply flawed and rather pathetic attempt to win over “aspirational” voters.

Edited December 20, 2023 by Cardle is Magic

[orfc]

Any money raised won't be going on better roads...

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-67771630

10 years is basically the SNP going "f**k it, someone else can sort it out"

[Leith Green]

30 minutes ago, orfc said:

Any money raised won't be going on better roads...

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-67771630

10 years is basically the SNP going "f**k it, someone else can sort it out"

Presumably the same party that was in power pre SNP and did the square root of f**k all about it then?

eta - also for some balance on the actual budget, the (Labour) Welsh govt gave their councils a 3.1% rise v Scotlands 5% rise. 

The Labour welsh govt has a £1.3 bn "black hole" to fill - and Labour (both there and nationally) are blaming the Tory govt for this.

In Scotland? Our £1.5bn black hole is blamed - by Labour - on the SNP.  

Its laughable.

Edited December 20, 2023 by Leith Green

[ICTChris]

16 minutes ago, Leith Green said:

Presumably the same party that was in power pre SNP and did the square root of f**k all about it then?

eta - also for some balance on the actual budget, the (Labour) Welsh govt gave their councils a 3.1% rise v Scotlands 5% rise. 

The Labour welsh govt has a £1.3 bn "black hole" to fill - and Labour (both there and nationally) are blaming the Tory govt for this.

In Scotland? Our £1.5bn black hole is blamed - by Labour - on the SNP.  

Its laughable.

Has the Welsh government frozen council tax, preventing councils from raising their own funds?

[Leith Green]

1 minute ago, ICTChris said:

Has the Welsh government frozen council tax, preventing councils from raising their own funds?

No, they are allowed to put it up by 5%.

They are also putting up tuition fees and other things like dental charges.

My point is that anyone suggesting that a Labour administration would do markedly better is living in cloud cuckoo land, as all any devolved administration is doing is slicing an ever thinner cake up in different ways - all of which are open to debate.

[Caledonian1]

4 hours ago, Aufc said:

Only 11% of Scottish adults pay the higher rate and only 0.7% pay the top rate. Yet they contribute about 65% of the total income tax take. So, despite your sarcasm, the country is pretty reliant on them. 

I had a quick look at Linkedin earlier - full of gammony tory greedy entitled p***ks - I really wish they would go ahead with their threats to move from Scotland now that they are paying around £150pa extra on their £80k salary - wait til they see house prices in England and have to pay for Uni, prescriptions, water bills and poorer services.

They would contribute more if they didnt use tax avoidance schemes and overseas bank accounts

[Leith Green]

4 hours ago, scottsdad said:

Interesting discussion on student finance in Scotland. A good explanation is given here. 

For my perspective, each uni has a cap on numbers and it isn't always easy to predict what the "market" will be. We launched a new programme 2 years ago in our uni expecting 20-30 students to apply initially. Over 500 applications came in. Far more popular than anticipated. Other programmes recruited fewer than expected so the new programme mopped up some of that availability. But ultimately it is no longer an absolute that if you meet the requirements of a programme you get in. And unis don't really want to go into clearing except for the students that bring extra cash (RUK, international or SIMD20).

The Scottish Government has pulled £100 million out of the Scottish HE sector this year and that is baked into future projections. The central money coming to unis for undergraduates has been declining in real terms for ages. Colleges also badly hit. 

Then there are things like graduate apprenticeships. Launched a few years ago this was a stream of "extra" money for unis. Unis got paid x amount per graduate apprentice, and they hired staff to manage these....then the Scottish Government changed it. Pulled all the funding and said that a) the GA's were now part of the cap and b) unis who had GAs had to keep them or the cap gets reduced. So for every GA student we have that's one less place on a mainstream programme. 

The uni I work in gets 9% of its total budget from the Scottish Government, to put it in perspective. But this keeps declining, and the insanity of the home office visa restrictions means our international recruitment is tanking also. University finances are under huge pressures at the moment. 

Genuine question - do you think this will change for the better under a new govt?

Presumably Labour, when they get in, will want to introduce tuition fees to "bring Scotland in line" with rUK?

Obviously this will bring in far more £££ to the individual Universities than they presently get from the Scot Govt - but the flipside is that many of our young people are then saddled with a large student debt for decades - or life*

 

*I await the first smartarse who comes along and says "aye, but xyz% of them will never repay that debt".

[Trogdor]

17 minutes ago, Caledonian1 said:

I had a quick look at Linkedin earlier - full of gammony tory greedy entitled p***ks - I really wish they would go ahead with their threats to move from Scotland now that they are paying around £150pa extra on their £80k salary - wait til they see house prices in England and have to pay for Uni, prescriptions, water bills and poorer services.

They would contribute more if they didnt use tax avoidance schemes and overseas bank accounts

I take it you are referring to comparing their tax in 23/24 to 24/25?

The divergence to an English taxpayer earning the £80k means c.£2,350 more income tax per year. That's significantly more than the £150 per annum and really should be the figure you quote when comparing especially when you cite house prices and tuition fees down south.

I don't really have much sympathy for those on £80k tbh. As I've said previously its those on £43k - £50k who are being hammered by the Scot Government's 'progressive' tax system.

[orfc]

14 minutes ago, Caledonian1 said:

I had a quick look at Linkedin earlier - full of gammony tory greedy entitled p***ks - I really wish they would go ahead with their threats to move from Scotland now that they are paying around £150pa extra on their £80k salary - wait til they see house prices in England and have to pay for Uni, prescriptions, water bills and poorer services.

They would contribute more if they didnt use tax avoidance schemes and overseas bank accounts

 

Anyone earning 80k would be dumb to pay any of this new band, as it would mean they were paying literally nothing into their pension already at a 42% tax rate

[Left Back]

2 minutes ago, Trogdor said:

I take it you are referring to comparing their tax in 23/24 to 24/25?

The divergence to an English taxpayer earning the £80k means c.£2,350 more income tax per year. That's significantly more than the £150 per annum and really should be the figure you quote when comparing especially when you cite house prices and tuition fees down south.

I don't really have much sympathy for those on £80k tbh. As I've said previously its those on £43k - £50k who are being hammered by the Scot Government's 'progressive' tax system.

I did some analysis on this earlier.  When you factor in the upcoming 2% reduction in NI it’s not until you start earning over £100k that you’ll be taking home less in April than you do today(ignoring the 3 months post Jan when you’ll be in net gain from the NI reduction).

The divergence is the stat that will be more widely used though.

[vikingTON]

40 minutes ago, Trogdor said:

I don't really have much sympathy for those on £80k tbh. As I've said previously its those on £43k - £50k who are being hammered by the Scot Government's 'progressive' tax system.

Can you identify a progressive system that doesn't tax objectively high earners to a significant degree? 

Once again, look at the actual median figures for full-time wages in Scotland. The only way that a progressive tax system to function is to tax groups who are well above the median at a higher rate than the actual average earner.

[Aufc]

2 hours ago, Caledonian1 said:

I had a quick look at Linkedin earlier - full of gammony tory greedy entitled p***ks - I really wish they would go ahead with their threats to move from Scotland now that they are paying around £150pa extra on their £80k salary - wait til they see house prices in England and have to pay for Uni, prescriptions, water bills and poorer services.

They would contribute more if they didnt use tax avoidance schemes and overseas bank accounts

Someone on 80k is not using tax avoidance schemes or overseas bank accounts unless you count putting into a pension as tax avoidance. What do you think would happen if all the higher rate tax payers left the country? 
 

I don’t mind paying a higher rate of rate with my salary. My point is purely based around the fact that there must come a point when you need to do something different. It’s not particularly sustainable for a country’s total income tax being so heavily reliant on such a small percentage of people. We need to be creating additional higher paying jobs and attracting additional highly skilled people and it will obviously be more difficult in a higher taxed situation.

59 minutes ago, virginton said:

Can you identify a progressive system that doesn't tax objectively high earners to a significant degree? 

Once again, look at the actual median figures for full-time wages in Scotland. The only way that a progressive tax system to function is to tax groups who are well above the median at a higher rate than the actual average earner.

As above, it’s so heavily reliant on a small number of people that it’s not sustainable 

[ICTChris]

16 minutes ago, Aufc said:

I don’t mind paying a higher rate of rate with my salary. My point is purely based around the fact that there must come a point when you need to do something different. It’s not particularly sustainable for a country’s total income tax being so heavily reliant on such a small percentage of people. We need to be creating additional higher paying jobs and attracting additional highly skilled people and it will obviously be more difficult in a higher taxed situation.

 

Not sure if this is just England and Wales or the whole UK but the top 1% of taxpayers pay 28% of all income tax.

[Trogdor]

2 hours ago, virginton said:

Can you identify a progressive system that doesn't tax objectively high earners to a significant degree? 

Once again, look at the actual median figures for full-time wages in Scotland. The only way that a progressive tax system to function is to tax groups who are well above the median at a higher rate than the actual average earner.

There is more to a progressive tax system than simply taxing higher earners more. You can lift the lowest earners out of tax as an example. The tax brackets/thresholds are important as thats where the progression in rate happens. On a purest point, you are correct a progressive tax system is ultimately about those who earn more paying more and those who earn less paying less.

I ignored your median salary point as it was only half of the equation and the point I was making. If you have a median salary graph over the years versus the higher rate threshold over the same period then I'd be interested to see it. The point is that salaries are growing (with inflation) and the tax thresholds have been left unmoved. In real terms, that simply increases the tax burden of that rump who have got stuck in the 'fiscal drag'. That group is very much those earning £43k to £50k.

More broadly, there are those who amass wealth whilst declaring very little income. The very people who designed the system to benefit themselves. Whilst the rest of us indulge in pointing fingers at ourselves - higher earners, pensioners, people on benefits (delete as appropriate), we aren't focusing on them.

Frankly, the whole tax system needs an overhaul not just council tax. Unfortunately, no political party will take that on though. The Scottish Government couldn't if they wanted to as they have limited powers over taxation.

Edited December 20, 2023 by Trogdor