You've clearly not researched just how much Employer's NI is. It's a lot more than an employee pays.

It's clearly not a subsidy if a company is paying their fair share in taxes. Also here in the UK we have workers on income support (welfare) because their employers underpay them... That is quite literally a case of the public purse subsidising a private enterprise.

While I'm not familiar with how Employer's NI works else where in the world, given the way it works in the US I'm fine with it being cut. The way it works in the US is great for hiding the true rate of tax from the employee by having it taken out of their paycheck before the employee ever sees it. I think it works better if the employee sees the full amount their employer pays them and exactly how much the government taxes that rate.

To qualify for income support a person has to be working less than 16 hours per week.

You also have to be one of these:

> pregnant or a carer or a lone parent with a child under 5 or, in some cases, unable to work because you’re sick or disabled

(There are 3 other requirements too)

The UK benefits system is comprehensive and complex, and there are some people in full time work who get benefits. This is a good thing - we want people to work. We want people to have at least a minimum wage. We don't want to set the minimum wage too high because it reduces jobs.

Some benefits are specifically "in work" benefits - working tax credit and child tax credit.

If it works anything like the US, there is a portion[1] assessed to the employer and to the employee. If you report income as an independent contractor/self-employment, you pay both sides of it (since otherwise people would artificially class themselves as contractors to pay less). Are you saying Uber drivers in the UK aren't paying that, or that UK law allows that loophole?

>Also here in the UK we have workers on income support (welfare) because their employers underpay them... That is quite literally a case of the public purse subsidising a private enterprise.

So, it's not Uber-specific, just the general argument that all low-wage labor (below some threshold) is inherently subsidized because you qualify for public assistance at that level.

[1] economically pointlessly, I might add

That is exactly what they do do. IT, media, even public sector, it is rampant. The Inland Revenue keep trying to crack down on it but contractors are very sly about it and always find a loophole to technically meet the requirement as if they were a genuine small business.

  If you report income as an independent contractor/self-employment,
  you pay both sides of it (since otherwise people would artificially
  class themselves as contractors to pay less).

There are complicated rules to ensure this is only allowed in cases of genuine freelancing/self-employment (IR35 is one part of those rules), but Uber has previously lost court cases on parts of those rules, where drivers were ruled to be employees rather than freelancers [1].

In IT consultancy (and other high-paid jobs), it's generally more tax-efficient for the worker to be an independent contractor (but has to satisfy various rules to do so). For lower-paid jobs like driving for Uber (and the general "gig economy"), it's in the companies' interest to label the worker as "self-employed", which means the worker misses out on all sorts of worker protection regulations whilst the employer saves on costs and taxes. Many companies skirt the limit of the regulations, and end up in court as a result.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/28/uber-uk-t...

1) That your tax rate can be lower under self-employment classification (incentivizing spurious misclassifications).

2) That roads are paid for through income tax (rather than petrol or odometer tax), which is only loosely correlated with road usage and which punishes people who economize on it, while subsidizing above average users.

In any case, you can't really pin 2) on Uber, which isn't getting any more of a subsidy than any other business using the "road platform". They were abusing the law for 1) but courts have since put a stop to it.

Furthermore, the point under debate was whether Uber, as a cab[-like] service is underpaying for its road usage -- relative to the typical person -- by driving so much more; that point is still wrong because their per mile costs are unchanged with such higher usage.

If talking about the UK, that is not quite correct. Roads in the UK are mainly funded by income tax and council tax. See http://ipayroadtax.com/ for more information.