All for this but it’ll be a challenge stopping them using various loopholes to still pay themselves crazy money.
The richest CEOs deliberetly minimise their wages anyway. They pay themselves in dividends or take out loans leveraged against their shares.
To truly redistribute wealth we need a program of taxation that accounts for these loopholes.
EDIT: Thank you everyone for explaining to me that paying onself in dividends is in fact not tax efficient. Regardless, the richest don’t pay enough tax and capping wages won’t fix that
I’d be in favour additional tax bands over capping wages.
Rather than cap it, why not a system where businesses that have lower pay spread are rewarded with beneficial tax rates?
It would need to be global. Top earners move countries.
This only works if it’s applied globally – remember the UK wants to attract productive individuals, not legislate them away. Similarly, remember because of progressive taxes, the public sector benefits significantly from pay disparity – think how many people earning 50k need to be introduced to recover the tax losses from one person earning 1M leaving.
If Premier League clubs had a maximum wage they were allowed pay in order to attract the most talented individuals, the PL would’t be the world leader. The exact same concept applies in business. To be the best in the world, we need to attract the best talent, which costs a lot of money. If it’s still profitable for the employer to fork out so much money to get the best talent, then let them.
[removed]
Politics of envy , didn’t take long
What complete non-news. “Group of people unconnected to government says this one thing!” The Thinktank is even biased towards capping high pay, ffs.
What is the treshold this sub uses for content? Because this is actual trash. Me proposing we declare Monday as National Greggs Day has the same weight.
Doesn’t necessarily need to be maximum wage, but instead should be a maximum wage difference between the lowest and highest paid worker taking into account all compensation, bonuses, stock gifting etc. So if a CEO wanted to get paid more they could, just need to raise the wage of the lowest paid to do so, keeping things “fairer” overall.
I have a better idea.
The companies highest paid employee is only allowed to earn a certain multiple of their lowest paid employee.
Close all the loopholes like paying in stock options and benefits in kind instead of cash, being a contractor rather than an employee etc.
This simply won’t work. Those who are likely to be capped will simply find ways to work around it, business owners will just take dividends for example.
The problem is the disparity between the lowest earners and the highest is vast. The greed of shareholders and ceos to continually beat the orfits of last year at any cost! Focus should be on securing a better wage structure and more robust employment contracts for all levels.
A simpler way would be to make every employee a shareholder of the company and therefore benefit in profit. John Lewis used to do this and their staff worked amazingly well for a very long time, they all did well out of it. Then the greedy leadership decided to adopt this new wave of capitalist board of profit profit profit!
Won’t work. Tax wealth, not income. It really isn’t difficult. If you tax the individual, then they can leave. If you tax their assets, then they can’t just move their assets to another country suddenly. Tax their land, their businesses, and their property. That’s how you can effectively tax the mega rich.
I’m not an economist. Can someone explain to me how this will benefit the country?
I thought this meant fatties, phew 👀
Just nobody will hire in the UK, problem solved
Thanks to tax bands being frozen and fiscal drag we already do functionally have a maximum wage – it’s a take home of about £5k/month… anything more than that is ploughed into pensions
This proposal is so stupid – we should tax wealth, not work.
I don’t care someone being paid a lot to do a job – whether they are a banker, a footballer, a Director, or an OnlyFans model.
I care that we treat taxing people on their wealth the same as if they traded hours of their life for money.
£1M “makes” £50,000 a year. Someone with £10M will be making 500k passively, more than 99% of people in the country, without any labour of their own. They have so much, they can just buy more capital so that they can make even more money.
rather than cap it why not a system that says your lowest paid worker can only be X times less than the highest paid worker
Maximum crabs in a barrel mentality.
People get paid to come up with this shit, maybe trash journalism should have a maximum wages. A lollipop and a freddo(not a caramel one though) should just about cover it.
For people not reading the article, it’s a cap on the ratio of top pay to lowest pay. They report that some businesses have 70+:1 ratio of pay.
They propose a 10-20:1 cap
People who make lots of money don’t have wages, they own businesses.
So communism then 🤷🏻♂️
Rather than a cap, just have it so every position in a company needs to be within a certain wage % from each other. Bonuses included.
This jealous needs to stop. Just because you aren’t hard working enough to earn good money, don’t penalise those who actually are.
Guarantee you that the moment investors think this will happen, they’ll pull out of the UK and the GBP will plummet just like every time the Government threatens to tax the rich and have to abandon the idea to save the economy.
I always thought it would be a good idea to hold around 10% of a companies dividend paying shares shares for the benefit of it’s employees, so whenever the owners take out money the workers benefit too.
Small owner managed businesses wouldn’t be too affected as they still count as part of the employee group and it would likely have a beneficial effect on productivity, as higher profits/shareholder dividends directly benefit the workers. Could even make it so the the shares hold voting rights too.
Obviously them implementation would be an absolute nightmare and cause untold issues, and I’m definitely not the one to plan it out, but as a concept it just seems like a much more fair idea than artificially capping wages.
This is how you get council level performance. This would be a complete disaster for the very people this is designed to be popular with. Check out the fantastic idea of rent controls and other unthought through policies.
If you are good at what you do and have a unique skillset you can almost name your price. This isn’t 1970 anymore I can just take those skills to another country
Great way to ensure high performing people bugger off to the US or elsewhere.
It’s not about capping earnings, that’s just envy. It should be about paying a fair amount of tax and bringing the employees up with you.
Communism 🤡
Public sector, sure. Private sector, dont be daft.
33 comments
All for this but it’ll be a challenge stopping them using various loopholes to still pay themselves crazy money.
The richest CEOs deliberetly minimise their wages anyway. They pay themselves in dividends or take out loans leveraged against their shares.
To truly redistribute wealth we need a program of taxation that accounts for these loopholes.
EDIT: Thank you everyone for explaining to me that paying onself in dividends is in fact not tax efficient. Regardless, the richest don’t pay enough tax and capping wages won’t fix that
I’d be in favour additional tax bands over capping wages.
Rather than cap it, why not a system where businesses that have lower pay spread are rewarded with beneficial tax rates?
It would need to be global. Top earners move countries.
This only works if it’s applied globally – remember the UK wants to attract productive individuals, not legislate them away. Similarly, remember because of progressive taxes, the public sector benefits significantly from pay disparity – think how many people earning 50k need to be introduced to recover the tax losses from one person earning 1M leaving.
If Premier League clubs had a maximum wage they were allowed pay in order to attract the most talented individuals, the PL would’t be the world leader. The exact same concept applies in business. To be the best in the world, we need to attract the best talent, which costs a lot of money. If it’s still profitable for the employer to fork out so much money to get the best talent, then let them.
[removed]
Politics of envy , didn’t take long
What complete non-news. “Group of people unconnected to government says this one thing!” The Thinktank is even biased towards capping high pay, ffs.
What is the treshold this sub uses for content? Because this is actual trash. Me proposing we declare Monday as National Greggs Day has the same weight.
Doesn’t necessarily need to be maximum wage, but instead should be a maximum wage difference between the lowest and highest paid worker taking into account all compensation, bonuses, stock gifting etc. So if a CEO wanted to get paid more they could, just need to raise the wage of the lowest paid to do so, keeping things “fairer” overall.
I have a better idea.
The companies highest paid employee is only allowed to earn a certain multiple of their lowest paid employee.
Close all the loopholes like paying in stock options and benefits in kind instead of cash, being a contractor rather than an employee etc.
This simply won’t work. Those who are likely to be capped will simply find ways to work around it, business owners will just take dividends for example.
The problem is the disparity between the lowest earners and the highest is vast. The greed of shareholders and ceos to continually beat the orfits of last year at any cost! Focus should be on securing a better wage structure and more robust employment contracts for all levels.
A simpler way would be to make every employee a shareholder of the company and therefore benefit in profit. John Lewis used to do this and their staff worked amazingly well for a very long time, they all did well out of it. Then the greedy leadership decided to adopt this new wave of capitalist board of profit profit profit!
Won’t work. Tax wealth, not income. It really isn’t difficult. If you tax the individual, then they can leave. If you tax their assets, then they can’t just move their assets to another country suddenly. Tax their land, their businesses, and their property. That’s how you can effectively tax the mega rich.
I’m not an economist. Can someone explain to me how this will benefit the country?
I thought this meant fatties, phew 👀
Just nobody will hire in the UK, problem solved
Thanks to tax bands being frozen and fiscal drag we already do functionally have a maximum wage – it’s a take home of about £5k/month… anything more than that is ploughed into pensions
This proposal is so stupid – we should tax wealth, not work.
I don’t care someone being paid a lot to do a job – whether they are a banker, a footballer, a Director, or an OnlyFans model.
I care that we treat taxing people on their wealth the same as if they traded hours of their life for money.
£1M “makes” £50,000 a year. Someone with £10M will be making 500k passively, more than 99% of people in the country, without any labour of their own. They have so much, they can just buy more capital so that they can make even more money.
rather than cap it why not a system that says your lowest paid worker can only be X times less than the highest paid worker
Maximum crabs in a barrel mentality.
People get paid to come up with this shit, maybe trash journalism should have a maximum wages. A lollipop and a freddo(not a caramel one though) should just about cover it.
For people not reading the article, it’s a cap on the ratio of top pay to lowest pay. They report that some businesses have 70+:1 ratio of pay.
They propose a 10-20:1 cap
People who make lots of money don’t have wages, they own businesses.
So communism then 🤷🏻♂️
Rather than a cap, just have it so every position in a company needs to be within a certain wage % from each other. Bonuses included.
This jealous needs to stop. Just because you aren’t hard working enough to earn good money, don’t penalise those who actually are.
Guarantee you that the moment investors think this will happen, they’ll pull out of the UK and the GBP will plummet just like every time the Government threatens to tax the rich and have to abandon the idea to save the economy.
I always thought it would be a good idea to hold around 10% of a companies dividend paying shares shares for the benefit of it’s employees, so whenever the owners take out money the workers benefit too.
Small owner managed businesses wouldn’t be too affected as they still count as part of the employee group and it would likely have a beneficial effect on productivity, as higher profits/shareholder dividends directly benefit the workers. Could even make it so the the shares hold voting rights too.
Obviously them implementation would be an absolute nightmare and cause untold issues, and I’m definitely not the one to plan it out, but as a concept it just seems like a much more fair idea than artificially capping wages.
This is how you get council level performance. This would be a complete disaster for the very people this is designed to be popular with. Check out the fantastic idea of rent controls and other unthought through policies.
If you are good at what you do and have a unique skillset you can almost name your price. This isn’t 1970 anymore I can just take those skills to another country
Great way to ensure high performing people bugger off to the US or elsewhere.
It’s not about capping earnings, that’s just envy. It should be about paying a fair amount of tax and bringing the employees up with you.
Communism 🤡
Public sector, sure. Private sector, dont be daft.
Comments are closed.