Yossarian wrote:

Market forces are still market forces and supply and demand will surely set prices. The benefit cap hasn't dented the London rental market, for instance, meanwhile in towns with an oversupply of housing, who is going to risk charging the maximum benefits will allow and potentially end up with an empty property?

Because people will drop onto benefits to make sure they have a roof

I found it very difficult to come off benefits years ago for this very reason, I had to stop paying rent and squat in my council flat for two months until I got paid a couple of times so I could afford a deposit on a room in a shared house. So on benefits I had a spacious one bed flat, when working I had a room in a shared house, and about the same amount of money left in my pocket each week, probably a little less actually

I wouldn't consider someone who earns 70k to be rich. Rich to me implies being wealthy independently of what you earn, i.e. owning land and having assets.
I hear a lot of talk lately of people considering themselves 'middle class', to me being middle class means being independently well off. i.e. not rich per se but being able to go off on a sabbatical from work and not worrying about your mortgage payments for at least 6 months.
If you lost your job tomorrow and could only pay your mortgage for, say, the next 2 months you are IMO working class. Again, the way I see it, if you HAVE to work to maintain what you have right now = working class.

I and literally nearly every single person I know are working class, I know/have friendly connections with a rich dynastic family and they are far, far beyond the 70k a year 'theshold' that is being bandied around. Classing these people and those who earn 70k a year in the same 'rich' bracket is not realistic.

I realise it's all relative, i.e. there's those here on the forum that don't earn much per annum, I am one of them, and to these people 40k per year appears rich.
But 70k in London is not a lot of money, it would be elsewhere in the country but it can never be under emphasised just how expensive and hard it is to find a home here, even if you have the money. You have to experience it to really appreciate it.

I was going to segue into this but I've lost my train of thought but there's a interesting opinion piece on the Guardian site today about the good old baby boomers, they've been taking a lot of slack lately and rightly so. Not all of them of course are actively sticking the boot in but their generation still holds a lot of the reins of power and are still maybe unwittingly profiting from that power while at the same time making things considerably harder for those younger than them, especially the millennials.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/21/generation-spite-kids-scapegoat-young-people


Anyway it got me looking up my gen, Gen X on wikipedia and it really shocked me because the wiki article went into depth describing the attitudes and 'typical' thinking of your standard Gen X'er during key decades of their life, and it described me and my attitudes throughout those years to a fucking T.
It was really eye opening and drove home just how it's possible to pigeonhole people and their attitudes based on the couple of decades in which you were born (caveat #NotAll etc...). 
Attitudes that can be seen in the comments section in that Guardian article.

My mate Rich is quite poor, what do we make of that?

You're forgetting that 7% of the population went to public school and that 7% probably make up 90% of the 1%.

hahahaha, irrationally those numbers are really annoying me. I know exactly what you meant but my brain is trying to work out how 1% of the population can also be 7.7r% of the same. I hate my mind

I nkow just it was numbers so my brain started to do the sums before I'd finished reading it, was left a confused mess

Is that the median percentile gaps in earnings?

So many places don't differentiate between median and mean. It shows how much the top earners are on in that case then, being as I thought the average wage was £27k. If 50% of people are on £22k, the £27k figure must be the mean, so the difference between the two shows you how far it's weighted to either side

That makes sense, but wowsers, that's over 20% difference, that's pretty huge

Heh.

I think that's the point. People don't think about how little most people earn, especially if you earn a fair whack yourself. Your social circle tends to be made of people earning roughly the same, so you don't think of yourself as particularly rich or particularly poor, unless you're one of the people who needs food banks to survive, because you make about the same as everyone else.

Don't know. Mine is from HMRC.

Stats based on just those with taxable income of course.

WorKid wrote:

Stats based on just those with taxable income of course.

Seems fairly relevant to a debate on income tax.

Well yes, but they aren't going the be affected by changing income tax are they?

Asked whether he felt rich, he said "I earn more than most in my constituency and I am grateful for that" or something. Sure a shit didn't say he felt rich.