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> It'd raise nothing. You're assuming we won't just avoid it, when it should be obvious by now that we would

I think you missed the point. The USA had an income tax rate of over 50% for top-earners for over fifty years - and it was over 70% for twenty of those years.

And that period just so happened to be one of the best periods of economic and social growth for the USA. And I've not heard of any enclaves of American ex-pats, who sit around bemoaning about how they had to move out of the country because of the high taxes.

Nor have I heard of any significant numbers of rich people fleeing other countries which have a higher income tax rate than the UK.

In fact, many of the countries with higher income tax rates (e.g. Ireland, Germany, Slovenia, Israel, France, Sweden, etc) are generally considered to be highly prosperous and to have an overall better quality of life than countries with lower income tax rates.

It's almost as if paying taxes helps to maintain and build the country's infrastructure, and therefore create more opportunities for wealth generation...

> Let me give you a very simple example of why cutting taxes works. Do away with the tax free earnings withdrawal, and instead of getting 67% of nothing, you'd be getting 40% of another £25k.

So... cutting taxes by introducing a new tax? Either way, I don't know enough about taxes to know whether that would be a viable approach, or whether that'd just push people into using a different mechanism to avoid the tax. I'm generally inclined towards the latter, but that could just be because I'm cynical ;)

Sad to say, the empirical evidence to date indicates that if you cut taxes for rich people or corporations, that money just gets salted away and doesn't come back into the economy.

E.g.

The tax holiday for US companies bringing cash back into the country - https://taxfoundation.org/repatriation-tax-holiday-hangover/

"Trickle down" tax cuts - https://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/jul/21/offshore-wealth-global-economy-tax-havens

Reducing costly regulations to "enable" job growth, only to find the jobs were cut anyway, and the "saved" money ploughed into stock buybacks - https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/01/att-slashed-billions-from-network-spending-cut-tens-of-thousands-of-jobs/

And so on. I could try and dig out some British samples, but the USA does tend to provide bigger examples!

Money handed to the rich stays with the rich. Money distributed further down the chain goes back into the economy and helps to spur growth.

> my current tax rate is around the low 30's and my projected tax rate with professional advice would be around 7% with another 20% lost in fees ... the state will lose over £30k in taxes annually

That suggests that £30k is around 5% of your annual income, which in turn implies that you're earning around £600k per year and paying around £200k per year in taxes while having around £400k - or over £1000 per day - to spend on your lifestyle.

And without wanting to sound like I'm trying to be negative or score points, I genuinely do have a question: does your lifestyle actually needs that extra £30k in annual income, or is this all purely a matter of principle?