Not all of them, if you are earning £60k on a PAYE contract there is a damn good chance you won't need to be.

There will be investment bankers earning alot more than that on PAYE too.

Depends how you define "wealthy". Sure the ultra-wealthy would find them irrelevant (but they are very few in number). The comfortably off do value them from what I have seen - especially state pension, NHS and bus passes.

Depends how you define a high earner I suppose.

I used £60k as that is the level family allowance is reduced to zero under the current scheme.

There is no supposing at all. HMRC define a "high earner" for the purposes of self assessment as someone earning in excess of £100k

Yes, but that isn't sacrosanct.

My point was simply that the tax system should be capable of establishing a cut off point for "universal" benefits without incurring huge cost. Its a different matter as to where, morally, that cut off point should be.

Dally is right on this and Chuka Umunna has made the same argument for Labour.

However harsh the Tories want to be, if they started really attacking the poor now there would be some disquiet from paternalistic middle England that would say 'thats not on chaps'.

But by removing entitlement to 'universal' benefits from better off sections of society now and ignoring their grumbles, they can be sure that when they do start on the poorest, middle England will just look on in grudging acceptance saying "we lost our child benefit spending money so the poor can suffer their bit too"

But I agree with the posters on here that say it is simplest to just allow universal entitlement and use the tax system to neutralise the benefit for the better off. I would however be a bit more creative with the tax system and not just focus on taxing income, but look to put lump sum taxes on things like property, which are harder to avoid and also non distortionary in terms of work incentives.

But then you get the farce we have at the moment where a couple earning £49k each keep the benefit when a single earner household on £50k loses it.

You'd need to have both single self assessment and household self assessment, or even better have a transferable tax allowance between couples, it all adds to the bureaucracy and that costs money.

No government has the balls (or the brains) for a full root and branch reform of taxation that we really need.

Whilst I have expressed support for universal benefits earlier in the thread, I have to say I've enjoyed a wry chuckle at some of the indignation that has come out of the people on £50k a year losing their child benefit. There was even an article in the London Evening Standard yesterday saying "why should those with children be punished whilst their childless counterparts get off scot free?"

Their childless counterparts have not been getting this benefit for the past few years either!

And for people that earn over £50k a year the benefit is essentially one of extra spending money. The problem is a lot of the time Middle England is keen to moralise about people 'living within their means' and say that people on council estates shouldn't be paid just to produce children if they can't afford them. But they furiously deny that the child benefit for those over £50k is just extra spending money and will tell you that just because they are on over £50k they are NOT rich, and they have 2 cars and a mortgage to run and private school fees to pay and once you take that out there is nothing left, so they need to have the child benefit or their 'children will suffer'.

Maybe they should have thought of this before they opened their legs and popped kids out? Have they not heard of contraception? The state should not pay people to have kids if they can't afford to bring them up. But also if they really need that income what is wrong with taking a second job? Being an entrepreneur on the side? You can create your own jobs. Middle England gives this advice to the poor so surely they could be able to do these things to provide for their hungry children, rather than rely on taxing wealth creators out of the country in order to subsidise them for getting pregnant.

I remember after the last election Ken Clarke causing a bit of rumpus for saying in the middle of all the Tory populist claims about "we're on the side of the workers not the shirkers" that Middle England has not understood how much it is subsidised and how much it will stand to lose with the cuts. He was right and this is the start of the complaining.