Fiddy Percent

It's like 1992 all over again. Echoing The Sun's "If Kinnock wins today, will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights" on the day of the election that year and the tabloids' concurrent mobilisation of 'celebs' pledging to leave the country in just that event, heavyweight political commentator and senescent ex-tax exile Sir Michael Caine has weighed in with his two cents' on the Government's income tax hike for those earning more than 150k a year:

"I see... that the government has taken it up to 50 per cent and if it goes to 51
I will be back in America. I will not pay the Government more than I get"

That would be 50% of the earnings made over a threshold which is about six times the median income level in the UK (using the average level is fairly meaningless since it's so heavily distorted by a handful of high earners, most of whom are still tied in with the City, despite what a cursory reading of media reportage on jobless bankers might suggest). How unfair. Particularly on hard-working artists like Caine, who has earned every penny of his millions for his contributions to world culture with his unwavering integrity intact and is therefore perfectly within his rights to assess the situation thus:

"We've got three and a half million layabouts laying about on benefits and I'm 76
getting up at six o'clock in the morning to go to work to keep them"

Obviously, all 3½ million are scroungers and parasites. I think we've been here before.
Is this shooting fish in a barrel? It would be, but the trouble is, people like Michael Caine. Me included when he sticks to robbing Italian banks, bludgeoning Geordies or cleaning up after Batman. And millions will read his comments. Those millions also have votes and a good few will find polling booths come election day, and vote for the main opposition party because that's what you do in a two-party system if you don't like the Government.
So why the hike? The Laffer curve may well hold true in this case, though it won't be because people choose not to exceed the higher-tax threshold but rather that they'll still have tax havens and loopholes to exploit with the aid of the advisers that they're able to afford. Rather, the Government is most likely, in view of its increasingly desperate predicament in the opinion polls, to be gambling on dividing the electorate along social lines, by creating the illusion that some fat cats who led us all into this mess are being punished. This strategy comes with the implicit assumption that wealthy voters are a lost cause as (a) they're all dyed-in-the-wool Conservatives and (b) there's not that many of them anyway. Under this battleplan, the Government hears angelic choirs every time a right-wing commentator refers to the tax increase as a return to Old Labour. That means at least some of their disenchanted lifelong supporters might be tempted to return to the fold.
The self-interested ramblings of a film star, or a bunch of politicians cynically putting their own survival over the national interest, are of course in themselves nothing to get excited about. But they're manifestations of a recurring phenomenon: every time the idea of higher taxation is raised anywhere, a mass of voices wail out against the injustice of penalising success. Coincidentally, these voices are usually also found decrying the state of the country's schools/hospitals/transport network. I guess it must just be all that Stalinist bureaucracy that's to blame; nothing to do with having lower taxes than those countries we damn our welfare state in comparison to.
To quote Thatcher's favourite economist:

"By pursuing his own self interest he frequently promotes that of society
more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known
much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good"

- Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

Unfortunately, this self-interested Government doesn't have long left.