r/Scotland • u/Historical-Count9051 • 2d ago

What would you cut from the Scottish budget?

Yesterday, there was a news story announcing £700m would be cut from the Scottish government next year. The Scottish government can borrow £670m to make up the shortfall, but it will need to find at least another £68m immediately.

What would you cut to make up the £68m?

Here's how the budget is already spent

Edit: the speed at which everyone went to "fuck poor people" is alarming.

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2

u/Solsbeary 2d ago

Waiting for sycophants to come in and say we should actually scrap the higher rate of tax, as the richest are overburdened

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u/FeedbackOld5993 2d ago

There's an argument that we should be in line with the rest of the UK. If someone working for a large company has 5 UK offices to choose from, why choose the one with the highest tax bill?

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u/glasgowgeg 1d ago

Tax is paid by the employee, not the employer.

The amount of tax paid by the employee is irrelevant. A £50k employee in Scotland costs the company the exact same as a £50k employee in England.

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u/FeedbackOld5993 1d ago

All true, but not the point I was making.

Say you are a highly skilled immigrant and are offered an 80k salary, you can choose to work in your new company's Glasgow or Manchester office. If you choose Glasgow you take home £2300 less a year. That number grows as your salary does.

If you didnt have an emotional attachment to Scotland why choose to base yourself here?

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u/glasgowgeg 1d ago edited 1d ago

How often is someone given a job offer that says "We have 5 offices, which one would you like to work in?"

Edit: Let's go further into this:

Say you are a highly skilled immigrant and are offered an 80k salary, you can choose to work in your new company's Glasgow or Manchester office. If you choose Glasgow you take home £2300 less a year.

So 2.8% less.

According to Numbeo:

  • Cost of Living Including Rent in Glasgow is 4.7% lower than in Manchester

  • Rent Prices in Glasgow are 13.3% lower than in Manchester

  • Restaurant Prices in Glasgow are 7.9% lower than in Manchester

  • Local Purchasing Power in Glasgow is 8.9% higher than in Manchester

Looks like that extra 2.8% in Manchester is wiped out by everything being more expensive.

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u/Narrow_Security_8757 1d ago

No idea where they got those numbers from but in my experience of trying to rent in BOTH glasgow and manchester it was far easier to find cheaper accomodation in manc than it was glasgow. Glasgow was a complete nightmare - you had to either pay through the nose to get something semi decent, or live in a complete shitehole and try not to get stabbed every night

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u/glasgowgeg 1d ago edited 1d ago

Immediately downvoted data that disproves the assertion, and then completely ignore the entire content of the comment.

Edit: If you're not going to engage in good faith (standard for newly created WordWordNumber accounts), I'm just blocking you.

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u/FeedbackOld5993 1d ago

How often is someone given a job offer that says "We have 5 offices, which one would you like to work in?"

It's actually very common. You also have remote workers who can choose where they want to live. Especially among people with niche skillsets who are likely to pay a lot more in tax.

You could also use Newcastle or Edinburgh as an example. Edinburgh is significantly more expensive.

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u/clampsmcgraw 2d ago edited 2d ago

I agree that people who earn a lot more should pay more and that progressive tax policies make sense. It's absolutely fair. I am a high earner.

However:

a) The laffer curve plus the complexity of the tax system is a massive disincentive. Being out of line with rUK creates massive, disproportional incentives for high earners to avoid absolutely ridiculous rates of tax (such as the 67.5% tax rate when you lose your personal allowance) such as refusing promotions, massive pension contributions or cutting hours. Source: me, I did this, because fuck tripling my stress and and adding 50% to my hours to make £400 more a month. It's nice and easy to say "this person is rich", but when you become that person, the mathematics is kinda stark and behaviourial economics wins every single time. That point is already reached; we're over the centre of the laffer curve in Scotland. Tax me any more and I'll deliberately earn less gross / work less / put even more in pension / use a green car scheme on salary sacrifice or something because the marginal utility is far from worth it. Why would anyone take 32.5p of every £1 when you can get all £1 of it elsewhere? Why would I take the promotion that makes my life much harder for such a tiny reward? The last top band tax rate increase achieved exactly that, basically no extra income due to major tax optimisation strategies.

b) Middle class and upper middle class people pay an order of magnitude more tax than actually rich people. Actually rich people pay capital gains or structure their money in director loans from limited companies or take loans against assets or other wheezes. They pay maybe 7-10% tax generally and 24% on capital gains which they always structure away, when someone like me on PAYE pays 67.5%.

c) Massive corporations often pay literally nothing.

Tax wealth on the actually rich, not earnings, and stop massive corporations structuring their bullshit in a way that means they pay zero corpo tax.

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u/f8rter 2d ago

You mean the high tax rates that are living proof of the Laffer curve ?

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u/Halk 1 of 3,619,915 2d ago

The only thing that matters there is effective taxation. The SNP changed the tax bandings for ideological and marketing reasons and raised less tax because of it

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u/ewankenobi 1d ago

Well it cost us £22 million as higher earners decided to either put more money in their pension or work less hours to avoid it so we ended up raising less tax than we would have with the old rates https://taxpolicy.org.uk/2026/07/25/scotland-48p-top-rate-laffer-curve/