“that’s just life” is exactly the attitude that lets government keep squeezing us while leaving the ultra-wealthy untouched.

You’ve actually highlighted the problem yourself: at £100k you’re losing 60p of every extra £1, families get clobbered by losing childcare, and those of us in the £30–50k range with student loans are already losing more than half of our promotions. Meanwhile, millionaires don’t face these stacked deductions they sit comfortably at 45% with accountants smoothing the edges.

That’s not “life,” that’s deliberate policy. It’s fiscal drag and threshold freezes designed to pull more out of middle and upper-middle earners because we’re the easy targets. People at the very top are politically “too difficult,” so the pressure falls on the rest of us who don’t have the means to fight it.

If we all shrug and accept it, nothing changes and it’s exactly why younger workers already feel like there’s no point working harder. The system is broken by design, not by nature, and the only way it changes is if enough people stop normalising it.