I'm quoting off a current payslip


Even if the NIS is £4000 a year you will be hard pushed to find any country in the world where its cheaper to purchase your own healthcare and your own pension and to give you anything like the cover that the NHS gives its UK citizens, I have yet to see a private healthcare policy that has NO restrictions on claims and which offers ALL of the services of the NHS as standard cover - throw in the state pension too and the fact that your contributions won't increase for cover for non-wage earners in your household and the contributions seem incredible value for money and far from the shambles of a health system that the ex-pats like to p1ss and whine about after reading their exported Daily Mails.

His was net not gross!

Anyway, your analysis is poor. Yes, what you get for your NI IS FANTASTIC because they don't go anywhere near the cost of the NHS or State Pension. Less than £50 billion pa is raised from employees NI. The NHS costs over £100 billion pa and state pensions more than that! Even with employer contributions the NHS alone takes more and pensions as I said even more. So, yes fantastic but only because other taxes and debt is subsidising it.

So when the average person says they've paid in all their lives....etc in fact they've paid nowhere near enough. So, when you tell the Yanks we don't live in some sort of communist state you are not been entirely honest.

Where the welfare state went wrong was not putting aside contributions into a sovereign fund out of which benefits were paid. A couple of years high contributions in the early post -war years to build the fund and we could then pay out of an accumulated fund - which would by now be the worl's biggest sovereign wealth fund. Instead we have the 3rd biggest debt (to GDP) in the world and are broke.

I believe he said that he earned just over 30,000 with no tax to pay (tax free he said) and not after tax.
So is gross and his net are the same tax-wise.

Yes, but if as Jerry wanted we are trying to compare costs of UK tax v insurance we surely need to gross up the £30,000?

His is both nett AND gross as he doesn't pay any tax.

Well setting aside your normal chicken-licken outlook on life, its inarguable that the NHS and state pension is funded from taxation and is largely free of cost at the point of delivery to anyone with a NI number.

Look at your payslip every month and a portion of the deductions go to both provisions, how much of that is irrelevant really as you cannot obtain the same cover even if you used the whole of your monthly deductions to go out and purchase a healthcare and pension plan.

The correspondent from Dubai has already pointed out that the cost of living is high there and seemingly excellent salary packages are mitigated by this - and that was my point, that and an answer to the usual belly-aching from some about the NHS, the idea that governments can levy taxation and provide nothing back in turn is obviously unworkable, the delivery of first class healthcare, pensions, and education in return for taxation is to me the indicator of a very civilised society, the refusal to implement state healthcare in return for taxation is to me the sign of the ultimate uncaring selfish society where only money-grabbing counts.

I don't have a payslip.

I agree about taxation and being civilised but that's not what you were saying before.

I said a couple of pages back that for the sake of the discussion we would assume the original 1948 ethos that NIS was for health and pension provision and whilst that is not the case at all these days its still a point to start from - but even if you take the other extreme and assume that ALL of your wage slip deductions are for health and pension (they aren't) then we still have a bargain.

It's a bargain because "someone" else is paying for a good part of it - which I guess was rather the point DubaiRL was making?

Except he doesn't earn that and what he would bring to the table in the UK is 30,000 to be subjected to NI (and tax, but we were on about NI).
I think the NI is £2670.14
If he is Class 1.

But if he was in the UK system to get £30,000 in hand the NI would be higher!