Andy Hall wrote:
On 2008-06-29 17:21:08 +0100, Roger said:

The message 48679e62@qaanaaq
from Andy Hall contains these words:

It seems that an average public sector dentist earns about £45k, which
is quite a comfortable salary.

By whose standards?

By most peoples.

To someone on minimum wage, I expect that the national average wage
would seem high.



It's the private sector ones at over £100k that I take issue with.

Why? There is no reason why a dentist shouldn't make a five figure
salary.

No reason why they should either.

Like all remuneration, it is based on what the remunerator is willing to
pay. If the asking level were too high, the customers wouldn't pay.

There is no restriction on people becoming dentists or doctors and hence
having access to this market. A would-be has to have the academic and
practical ability, work hard and achieve the exam results.

Perhaps not everybody is able or wants to do that. It doesn't give
them the right to criticise or complain about the income of others.



Incomes of over £100,000 are probably
still the preserve of less than 1% of the adult population and over
£45,000 probably less than 10%. My starting figures for those
assumptions are that in 2001/02 the top 10% got £640 per week or better
and of those somewhat less than 3% got over £1000 per week.

You could well be right. It would be better to encourage more people
to stretch themselves and to achieve higher earning potential provided
that they are actually creating wealth and/or benefit to their customers.



Andy seems to inhabit a strange world where low paid public servants are
overpaid wasters

It's not a strange world to realise that there are way too many public
servants. What are they all doing? What are they producing? How
are they benefiting the economy and their customers? It's difficult
to see much benefit beyond the armed forces and one or two essential
government organisations.

Those things can easily be measured in the private sector but are
obfuscated in the public sector. If the jobs are superfluous then it
really doesn't matter how little the people are paid. It would be far
better to have a tip out and to pay better salaries to attract people of
ability from the private sector to sort out the mess.

The trouble would be with paying unemployment benefits because most
would not be empoyable in the real world.




while those he can emphathise with deserve to join him
in the private sector with an income in the top 1%. He doesn't seem to
care a toss about the rest of the lower orders.

That's really missing the point. If your statement were true, I
would be proposing that there should be a massive reduction in tax for
me because I don't use services like state education and to a large
extent, state healthcare either. I could even justify it on the basis
that were I to be in the top 1% of earners, I would be paying way over
the national average as well.

However, you will notice that I have not said that, nor have I proposed
an alteration of the tax regime beyond removal of benefit in kind tax
for health insurance premiums. I have agreed that there should be
a basic level healthcare insurance funded by taxation in which
(obviously) the higher earners will pay more than the lower earners.

Therefore I do not feel that I can be reasonably criticised for not
"caring a toss about the lower orders". If people are making an
effort to support themselves to the maximum of their ability and are or
have given value to their customers, then it is quite right and
civilised for them to receive nett help, aid and assistance from those
more able to do so than themselves.

What is not reasonable is for those who are in the 90% or even 99% of
wage earners to criticise the contribution of the top 10% or 1%.
For the most part, they are creating the work environment for the
others, and/or providing high value services to them in one form or
another.

Much is said about the glass ceiling in relation to minority groups in
business. Successful people will simply say that they didn't
realise that it was there.

To say it a different way, for most of us, the largest limiter of who we
are and what we can achieve is ourselves.

It's rather sad, that there is a curiously British disease that seeks to
put down anybody who is successful (read more than the person
commenting) on the pretext that it's "not quite nice". ********.
It's the good old fashioned "J" word.



I expect the Northern Rock boss was extremely successful by your standards.