50% (Income Tax) + 13.8% higher rate National Insurance contrib.

i.e. for every pound you earn over £150k, 64p goes to the exchequer.
http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Nl1/Newsroom/Budget2009/DG_172915

That really sucks!

Plus of course another 15% of pretty much everything you spend as well SST!

Nicholas Ferguson, chairman of SVG Capital, said it was wrong that private equity bosses pay tax of only 10 per cent, when the basic income tax rate is 22 per cent and the higher rate is 40 per cent.

“Any commonsense person would say that a highly-paid private equity executive paying less tax than a cleaning lady or other low-paid workers can’t be right,” Mr Ferguson told the Financial Times.

“I have not heard anyone give a clear explanation of why it is justified.”

A spokesman for the British Venture Capital Association, which represents private equity firms, said Mr Ferguson’s views did not represent the industry as a whole.

Well there’s a surprise.

50% (Income Tax) + 13.8% higher rate National Insurance contrib.

That includes the employers’ contribition then? I don’t think that’s quite the same thing. For every pound a get in pay over £150k I pay 51% in tax – is that not right?

I think he’s producing a load of lazy rheteric designed to please the masses.

Of course he is – what did you expect from Jeremy Clarkson?

mudshark, no. The 13.8% is employee’s contribution, not employer’s.

Quite why you’re allowed to call it Employer NI is beyond me. It’s a tax on the individual. The employer might pay it but it’s most certainly a tax down to that employee.

Top Tip to any company owners etc on here. Pay staff a min type wage and then make it up with attendance money, sorry expenses. (you will save employer NI, employee NI, employee Tax) – sounds efficient to me. Lets face it from an HMRC position they’d hardly be in a position to say it was illegak – would they ?.

Could be worse:

The 13.8% is employee’s contribution, not employer’s.

Well I can’t find any info on that – not that it’ll ever affect me I’m sure.

New plan … our Jeremy does his sums

“They said that if they cut VAT to 15 per cent then everything would be all right. And it wasn’t.”

LOL !

‘Our Jeremy’ needs to do his sums again, quote :

“The Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) will today say that official retail sales figures for the three months following the introduction of the VAT cut – which lowered the rate from 17.5 per cent to 15 per cent at the beginning of December – provide clear evidence that the reduction is working. “

Either that, or the badly-made muppet needs to read a proper paper :

VAT cut ‘helped to boost struggling retail sales’

Still I guess being ‘well-informed’ isn’t exactly necessary when you’re simply required to write any old bollox for gullible Sun readers, who pay 30p for a newspaper to do their thinking for them.

And the daft mophead isn’t just crap with ‘his sums’, his memory is shite too.

Because whilst I don’t remember the government claiming ‘everything would be all right’ and that Britain would be unaffected by the US derived global recession, I do remember The Sun urging it’s readers to vote New Labour in 1997, and then urging them AGAIN to vote New Labour in 2005 when Gordon Brown was still chancellor.

I also remember The Sun being extremely enthusiastic supporters of “the market always knows best” economic gobbledygook which got us all in this mess in the first place.

Yep – getting Rupert Murdoch to pay you large sums of money to tell gullible and ill-informed Sun readers, complete bollox ………. nice work if you can get it.