A Membership Card for Higher-rate Taxpayers

The Problem: Everyone hates paying tax and there is nothing to show from being a higher rate taxpayer.

The Solution: Create a membership card for higher rate taxpayers which offers discounts and benefits and provides a visible symbol of their contribution to society.

This idea was inspired my Dishy Rishi Sunak’s ‘eat out to help out’ scheme. While I think the scheme is largely a waste of taxpayer’s money, the one positive from it is that people finally get back some of the money they have paid in tax.

And that made me think; why doesn’t this scheme exist all the time? Why is tax always a one-way street, where you have to pay it but receive nothing in return (yes, you receive public services, but everyone receives them, whether or not you pay tax, and irrespective of the amount of tax you pay).

It’s about time we started celebrating those who contribute the most in taxation, so my proposal seeks to do just that, making higher-rate tax payers visible (when they want to be) and offering a bit of cashback and some extra benefits as a much-deserved thank you for funding this country’s public services.

I suggest creating a membership card, a bit like a National Trust or Blood Donor card, which is sent out exclusively to all higher rate taxpayers.

There would be several brackets, which would each be a different colour, starting with simply being a higher-rate taxpayer, then different brackets such as £50k, £100k, and so on, right up to a platinum card available only for the top 100 taxpayers in the country.

These cards would then become a status symbol among peer groups, as everyone looks to see who has a card and which colour it is, making how much tax you pay another part of ‘keeping up with the Jones’s’.

Furthermore, the cards would have a date printed on them of when the person started being a higher rate tax-payer, and also when they started paying tax at the rate of their card (e.g. 2012 higher rate, 2019 £50k, etc). The date would only be printed if the individual had paid tax for that whole period; if for any year they were not a higher rate taxpayer, the date would reset, incentivising people to continue paying tax (this proved very effective with Amex).

The cards would offer 10% off tickets and eating out on one ‘Taxpayer Tuesday’ each month, all funded by the taxpayer up to a maximum amount per person, and the cards would also offer exclusive deals and early access to other products and services, such as priority booking for holidays, concerts, and a special ticket lottery for Wimbledon and the Lord’s Test Match. Businesses could put their offerings on a webpage that taxpayer card-holders could look on to find deals.

The purpose of the cards is to thank higher-rate taxpayers and make their contribution visible, while also creating a taxpayers club people want to be part of. There are so many wealth-signalling mechanisms out there but none for paying tax, yet that’s not what we want. We want people to be able to show they pay lots of tax, and therefore implicitly they are wealthy, making how much tax you pay, not how wealthy you are, the key status symbol.