In the UK at any rate, the top 1% of earners pay 33% of all income tax. A full 50% of the workforce now receive more in state benefits than they pay in taxes.

If the top 1% paid their employees more, then there would be less reliance on the state and more people would be paying more tax.

As it stands, people who are in work are still requiring state help because they are not earning enough.

The problem with this is that the wealth of the rich wouldn't pay for much earnings.

I mean people complain about medicine as well. And then you check. If we fully nationalized all pharma, and put their profits at zero (but kept development going) ... that would mostly be a 10% drop in the cost of medicine on average at most (more like 2-3% for the really common ones), 20% for some of the more expensive ones and there would be the exceptional medication getting 25% off.

This is not the price reductions for medicine that people are looking for when they're complaining ...

I suspect this is similar. If you redirected all profits to employees, it would be those sorts of numbers. 10% more. 20% more, with 30-60% of the increase going to the state. 100% and more increases would be limited to some companies that are already paying pretty well, like Google or Facebook.

So this simply does not provide a solution.

What study supports your claim that a nationalised pharma industry could lower prices at most 25%?

Do you know the cost of insulin in the USA and its cost in the EU, although being both private companies?

INSULIN is bloody cheap. You want the old bovine insulin in common use 15 years ago, and still in use in much of the world? You can get a bucket of it for ~$200.

Re-inventing insulin the way people want it to work:

1) adaptive. Currently means combining making minute quantities work perfectly, but slowly, which is, of course, a total contradiction.

2) VERY long lasting (which is of course also a total contradiction because the dose has to vary)

3) Keep developing this further, oral application, but at some point totally adaptive without an implant would be excellent.

4) without using animals, or even animal cells (even though that doesn't really matter)

5) oh and without using cancerous cells, which is the other trick we know

6) so in essence using the newest, most expensive, most patented trick we know, "yeast expression"

7) using the most expensive protein purification tricks we know

THAT is expensive. And, uh, well of course it is. Now, I get it, the best treatment is the best treatment and the most expensive one, and everyone should get it, and of course doctors will advise the most expensive one, for good reason. But there's currently various compromises available too.

> In the UK at any rate, the top 1% of earners pay 33% of all income tax.

that statistic is disingenuous without also stating how much of the national income the top 1% earn. i.e. Its obvious that the top 1% pay the most tax because they earn the most.

If it's anything like other countries, then they make substantially less than what a proportional taxation would imply.

In the us for example the top 1% pay 6 times the taxes than the bottom 50% on a dollar for dollar basis

unless you supply the raw figures as well, it remains a sleight of hand.

Let me put this another way; anyone in the 99% would happily swap income with the 1% and then pay twice as much tax on that income than the current 1% do.

I find any conversation about the "1%" that centers around discussions of % paid in anything to be highly amusing/sad. Talk in absolute dollars and see how things turn out.

Actually, the most relevant statistic (which is, of course, much more difficult to calculate) is how much tax each pay relative to their disposable income—ie, the amount left over after necessities such as food, shelter, and clothing have been paid for.

With any vaguely reasonable calculation of this, it becomes painfully clear that the poor pay far, far too much (because they have, effectively, no disposable income) and the rich pay far, far too little (because almost all of their income is disposable).

I agree with the sentiment.

However, disposable income has a technical meaning. When the ONS publishes disposable income statistics, they mean income remaining after tax (I presume they subtract income tax and NI, but not council tax because that's local). They don't subtract e.g. energy bills or food.

I'm open to a different descriptor.

From where I sit, "income after tax" doesn't really seem to fit as the meaning of "disposable income", though I suppose I can see why it would look that way to an office like ONS.

Now, to be clear, "where I sit" is in the US, and I've never seen "disposable income" be given an official usage like that over here; its only meaning that I've known is, much more colloquially, just what I said: the amount of money you have left over each $timePeriod after paying for the basic necessities of life. (How one defines those, specifically, varies greatly from person to person.)

Is that earners by PAYE or including dividends and capital gains.

Because if it's just top PAYE owners you're missing out all the truly rich people who're tax efficient.

Okay but what share of the wealth do they control?

“ The richest 1% of Britons hold more wealth than 70 per cent of Britons “

It would make sense if the 1% paid more than the combined bottom 70%

Source: https://www.oxfam.org.uk/media/press-releases/richest-1-grab...

As a PROPORTION of their wealth/income what percentage do the Rich pay and the poorer pay?

The poor pay a higher PROPORTION of their income in taxes than the rich pay. But because the poor earn so little it amounts to such a small amount of the total taxes collected.

Your static actually highlights the vast gulf in wealth/income between rich and poor. Shame on u for not seeing that.