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The major change to income levels has been the massive increase in minimum wage. This removes the incentive to work hard and get skills because they aren’t valued, especially outside of London.

The other major change is the continual divergence of wealth.

If you are a 20 year old living near London you can get a crap paying junior job and live rent free for 5 years with parents while you save a 100k deposit (which using things like LISAs).

By the time you’re in your early 30s you have a decent paying job, have met a partner with a similar income, and can buy a house and repeat the cycle.

If you don’t you get the same job but have to pay rent to someone else’s parents, and you never get that deposit, so you’re trapped in the rent cycle.

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taurath 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Shocking how similar the fates of the US and the UK are similar. I’m in my 30s and the divergence is starting to become extremely stark between people who had middle class financially supportive parents and those who didn’t.

Kids who’s parents who are well off but wouldn’t pay for college is an entire cohort who are functionally locked out of the housing market. For most of my generation, there is little opportunity, only gatekeeping.

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sokoloff 6 hours ago | parent [-]

> Kids [whose] parents who are well off but wouldn’t pay for college is an entire cohort who are functionally locked out of the housing market.

That can’t be a particularly large set. Parents well off is already a small minority case and only a minority of that small minority won’t give support to their kids.

For people in that tiny sliver, I’m sure it feels bad but it doesn’t seem like a solution that works for other “starting from zero” young adults would need changes to also work for this set.

	▲	arrowsmith 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		If you want to support your child at university in the UK, there's a particular band of middle-class income where you get the worst of both worlds. You make too much to get certain kinds of government support, but you don't make enough that you can comfortably make up the difference. If you want to put multiple children through uni then it can get very burdensome. One of many ways in which our system is regressive.
	▲	lotsofpulp 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I don't know about the UK, but in the US (20+ years ago), the metrics used to determine "well off" for the purposes of receiving lower prices for higher education had nothing to do with the parents' wealth, and only their income, with no accounting for assets and number of other children, not to mention jobs without access to subsidized healthcare and/or healthcare costs, etc. In my case, immigrant parents just started earning a little money around the time I go to college, which means I don't qualify for any assistance, parents don't have enough money to pay for my college, nor would I want them to as it would hurt their ability to support my grandparents and my younger sister, so I am taking out loans at full price. Using income as a proxy for wealth has screwed the middle/upper middle for such a long time, and the actually rich love it (can throw in the nonsense that is earned income taxes here).

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arrowsmith 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

We've also seen a huge compression in net income as the tax thresholds haven't kept up with inflation. So someone who paid a 20% marginal rate twenty years ago is now paying 40% on the same real-terms income. And the 0% personal allowance has been eroded too.

Not to mention the 60% effective marginal rate between £100k and £125k - 69% if you have student debt, oh and that's not even counting employee's NICs.

And don't get me started on the stealth tax that is employer's NICs. (Those were just increased even further, and the morons are all defending it by pretending it doesn't come from wages... where exactly do they think the employer gets the money from?)

Plus all the insane traps where earning extra money can actually reduce your net income. E.g. there are situations in which increasing your salary by £1 can leave you thousands of pounds poorer because certain benefits are withdrawn with a cliff.

What's the point in working harder? You'd think that with such eye-wateringly high levels of taxation, we'd at least have something to show for it in the public sector, but... okay, I need to stop writing now for the sake of my blood pressure.

	▲	chgs 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Everyone goes on about the 100k issue. For 10 years I paid 60% between 50 and 60k due to child tax. The child tax has recently shifted to between 60k and 80k and reduced so it’s now about 51% (plus student loans)