And another thing: government is expected to pay for pandemics and fuel crises, how will it not be expected to cover the Cost of Housing crisis this time next year?
Still no one addresses the elephant in the room. They complain about services being underfunded and how dare tax be cut.
If all services were properly funded and paid for out of tax we would have the government taking about 90% of gdp as tax.
Time to start asking what the state should be saying no we dont do that anymore. Sadly a conversation no politician seems to want to have.
The answer is not tax more when half the country is struggling to make ends meet as it is. The answer is reduce spending.
The really huge bits of state managed expenditure go on:
pensions social security NHS debt interest defence education justice/police/prisons local government services.
Debt interest will steadily rise unless we take a North Korean approach to liabilities.
In each other area above there is gigantic pressure massively to increase expenditure. Add social care to the list too. I can't thinkmof a single big area where people are generally saying 'enough' or 'too much'.
Can you (or anyone) suggest where the first, say, £200 bn reductions will be found?
For a start while those area's are high expenditure doesn't mean they should do everything they do now.
Defence for a start we could save a huge amount on procurement by just buying off the shelf stuff rather than creating custom shit just because.
NHS - last night I suggested a cap on lifetime health care expense, would set it at the average to start with and people can take out insurance to cover any over that. Also services such as tattoo removal should not be available. I would also refuse IVF on the NHS, a round of IVF costs about 10k....if you cant afford to save up 10k once a year to pay for it can you really afford the child as raising a child is likely to cost that a year in any case plus we have a lot of kids crying out for adoption.
I am sure others could come up with savings in all the other areas as well
There is some truth in your first post - so many areas of public services are so significantly underfunded right now that redressing the balance is going to be financially really quite tricky.
But your reply to @algarkirk just reinforces their point - defence procurement, tattoo removal, IVF are all tiny nibbles.
If the country was to go down your suggested route, it would need to involve, say, revoking the right to free education entirely. That's the scale we're talking about.
Which is why I suspect the only answer is to muddle on through. Only not in the way Truss and Kwarteng want us to do so.
This wouldn't save much on it's own is not a good reason to not try and save that cash in the first place.
I agree. It just doesn't match the scale @Pagan2 is suggesting we need to work at.
You are however taking my post as this is all we should do rather than just a couple of examples
I'm not taking it that way - what I'm trying to say is that my instinct is that the scale of change needed to solve the problem you identify is so large that however many examples you can identify, they won't add up to anywhere near enough.
That's not to say they aren't worth doing, just that, if we were really having a conversation about the 'elephant in the room' - finding a way to properly fund that which we think is important enough to properly fund, and not doing the rest, we would need to be looking at an entirely dfferent scale.
The way to eat an elephant is in many meals not one gigantic roast dinner
Indeed. There should be a zero-based review of spending ahead of the next Budget. It’s not been done properly in decades.
We could save £48 billion per annum by disbanding the Army, Navy and RAF. It would also free up thousands of healthy young people for more productive work.
I agree with you that there’s massive savings to be had from the military budget, especially in specification and procurement. More international co-operation with friendly nations - the British/Swedish NLAW springs to mind for some reason - can reduce costs significantly for the same capability.
The biggest savings come from complete abolition. Everything else is just tinkering.
There would be additional savings by abolishing the Ministry of defence too.
Personally, I’m rather proud of the British military at the moment! 🇺🇦
Defending the territory of any country, is the first responsibility of the State.
(I’ll agree that many hundreds of the brass hats in Whitehall are not required).
Too early to say in my opinion. Truss will get credit for having done something about the energy bills and a sense of purpose. We will have a better idea if that is enough in a month.
And in a month you’ll be saying that it’s too early to say.
Still no one addresses the elephant in the room. They complain about services being underfunded and how dare tax be cut.
If all services were properly funded and paid for out of tax we would have the government taking about 90% of gdp as tax.
Time to start asking what the state should be saying no we dont do that anymore. Sadly a conversation no politician seems to want to have.
The answer is not tax more when half the country is struggling to make ends meet as it is. The answer is reduce spending.
The really huge bits of state managed expenditure go on:
pensions social security NHS debt interest defence education justice/police/prisons local government services.
Debt interest will steadily rise unless we take a North Korean approach to liabilities.
In each other area above there is gigantic pressure massively to increase expenditure. Add social care to the list too. I can't thinkmof a single big area where people are generally saying 'enough' or 'too much'.
Can you (or anyone) suggest where the first, say, £200 bn reductions will be found?
For a start while those area's are high expenditure doesn't mean they should do everything they do now.
Defence for a start we could save a huge amount on procurement by just buying off the shelf stuff rather than creating custom shit just because.
NHS - last night I suggested a cap on lifetime health care expense, would set it at the average to start with and people can take out insurance to cover any over that. Also services such as tattoo removal should not be available. I would also refuse IVF on the NHS, a round of IVF costs about 10k....if you cant afford to save up 10k once a year to pay for it can you really afford the child as raising a child is likely to cost that a year in any case plus we have a lot of kids crying out for adoption.
I am sure others could come up with savings in all the other areas as well
There is some truth in your first post - so many areas of public services are so significantly underfunded right now that redressing the balance is going to be financially really quite tricky.
But your reply to @algarkirk just reinforces their point - defence procurement, tattoo removal, IVF are all tiny nibbles.
If the country was to go down your suggested route, it would need to involve, say, revoking the right to free education entirely. That's the scale we're talking about.
Which is why I suspect the only answer is to muddle on through. Only not in the way Truss and Kwarteng want us to do so.
They maybe tiny nibbles but I am sure there are plenty more tiny nibbles we can take and they start to add up. What we can't do is keep adding on things that need money because we are already taxing the majority of the country into the ground and there is no more to squeeze out.
The biggest change that ought to be made is public sector pensions switching from to db to dc and a cap on what the employer contributes. Currently employer contributions average about 20% in the public sector. Yes wouldn't help immediately but in the long term it would. I would also do a clawback on state pensions so for every 5£ you get from other pensions you state pension is reduced by a pound
The problem with state pension clawback is that many of us have planned retirement based on what we will need over state pension to get by. Is it really practical to say to someone who is expecting 14k a year in retirement (9k state approx plus 5k in his own schemes) that he has to take a 1k cut and live on 13k? Will rental incomes be counted as 'other pensions' for those that bought property as retirement provision? How would drawdown be handled?
Yes other income would be treated as other pensions and we all plan our lives everyday on facts that change over time and when the facts change we have to change our plans. I don't see why pensioners should be any different. If anything people facing clawback are probably in a better place to respond as chances are they have no mortgage or rent if they have significant enough pension. We could also start with a clawback free sum so only applies after first 5000 of additional income. HMRC will already have the figures for additional income so it could be handled via them.
Far far too harsh on low earners. Much higher clawback free amount required. And is this applied to future pensioners or to everyone, now? Will need to be worked out annually so all pensioners to complete tax returns? Youre basically telling a pensioner on average UK income youre taking 6 grand a year off them, the equivalent of increasing basic rate on an average earner in work to over 45%.
Most low earners will not be getting anywhere near 5K in additional pension.
HMRC already knows how much pensioners get in total as it taxes them above a certain figure so no tax returns required. Landlords also get taxed pensioner or not.
How do you get to taking 6K off them....for that level of clawback they would need additional income over the state pension of 30K or 35k if you give them the first 5K free of clawback. In my book someone with additional income of 30K doesnt need the state pension
Well if we give them the 5k allowance we are taking 5k of state pension back, or the equivalent of raising basic rate for an average wage earner to about 40%. Someone earning 60,000 a year doesn't 'need' the personal allowance. Why should a pensioner who planned his or her retirement fund some arse who earned 100k a year and pissed it all up the wall rather than saving? Why should income dependant pensioners suffer whilst asset rich ones laugh? If State pension was lavish, perhaps, but its a pittance in return for a lifetime of work and tax. I mean we might as well extend it and block access to NHS services for anybody on over average wage.
Pagan2 has effectively abolished the NHS already in their other proposals.
No I didn't typical left wing melodrama. Suggesting a cap on state care about average lifetime health care costs above which you have to insure is not abolishing the NHS in the least.
Depending on precisely what average you calculate, half the population will have lifetime health care costs above the current average, and half of all healthcare will become delivered outside the NHS and through a private insurance system. You would effectively turn the UK’s healthcare system into something like the US’s. About half of all healthcare funding in the US is paid for by the state, but their system targets state support at the old and pensioners (and federal employees), whereas your system would target state support at the lucky!
I advocated an insurance scheme to cover additional. I would suggest that the state itself runs a scheme for this to keep insurers honest and prevent abusive pricing. Many european countries have similar systems which are part insurance and part state funding. It does not have to be like america's lunacy
Still no one addresses the elephant in the room. They complain about services being underfunded and how dare tax be cut.
If all services were properly funded and paid for out of tax we would have the government taking about 90% of gdp as tax.
Time to start asking what the state should be saying no we dont do that anymore. Sadly a conversation no politician seems to want to have.
The answer is not tax more when half the country is struggling to make ends meet as it is. The answer is reduce spending.
The really huge bits of state managed expenditure go on:
pensions social security NHS debt interest defence education justice/police/prisons local government services.
Debt interest will steadily rise unless we take a North Korean approach to liabilities.
In each other area above there is gigantic pressure massively to increase expenditure. Add social care to the list too. I can't thinkmof a single big area where people are generally saying 'enough' or 'too much'.
Can you (or anyone) suggest where the first, say, £200 bn reductions will be found?
For a start while those area's are high expenditure doesn't mean they should do everything they do now.
Defence for a start we could save a huge amount on procurement by just buying off the shelf stuff rather than creating custom shit just because.
NHS - last night I suggested a cap on lifetime health care expense, would set it at the average to start with and people can take out insurance to cover any over that. Also services such as tattoo removal should not be available. I would also refuse IVF on the NHS, a round of IVF costs about 10k....if you cant afford to save up 10k once a year to pay for it can you really afford the child as raising a child is likely to cost that a year in any case plus we have a lot of kids crying out for adoption.
I am sure others could come up with savings in all the other areas as well
There is some truth in your first post - so many areas of public services are so significantly underfunded right now that redressing the balance is going to be financially really quite tricky.
But your reply to @algarkirk just reinforces their point - defence procurement, tattoo removal, IVF are all tiny nibbles.
If the country was to go down your suggested route, it would need to involve, say, revoking the right to free education entirely. That's the scale we're talking about.
Which is why I suspect the only answer is to muddle on through. Only not in the way Truss and Kwarteng want us to do so.
They maybe tiny nibbles but I am sure there are plenty more tiny nibbles we can take and they start to add up. What we can't do is keep adding on things that need money because we are already taxing the majority of the country into the ground and there is no more to squeeze out.
The biggest change that ought to be made is public sector pensions switching from to db to dc and a cap on what the employer contributes. Currently employer contributions average about 20% in the public sector. Yes wouldn't help immediately but in the long term it would. I would also do a clawback on state pensions so for every 5£ you get from other pensions you state pension is reduced by a pound
The problem with state pension clawback is that many of us have planned retirement based on what we will need over state pension to get by. Is it really practical to say to someone who is expecting 14k a year in retirement (9k state approx plus 5k in his own schemes) that he has to take a 1k cut and live on 13k? Will rental incomes be counted as 'other pensions' for those that bought property as retirement provision? How would drawdown be handled?
Yes other income would be treated as other pensions and we all plan our lives everyday on facts that change over time and when the facts change we have to change our plans. I don't see why pensioners should be any different. If anything people facing clawback are probably in a better place to respond as chances are they have no mortgage or rent if they have significant enough pension. We could also start with a clawback free sum so only applies after first 5000 of additional income. HMRC will already have the figures for additional income so it could be handled via them.
Far far too harsh on low earners. Much higher clawback free amount required. And is this applied to future pensioners or to everyone, now? Will need to be worked out annually so all pensioners to complete tax returns? Youre basically telling a pensioner on average UK income youre taking 6 grand a year off them, the equivalent of increasing basic rate on an average earner in work to over 45%.
Most low earners will not be getting anywhere near 5K in additional pension.
HMRC already knows how much pensioners get in total as it taxes them above a certain figure so no tax returns required. Landlords also get taxed pensioner or not.
How do you get to taking 6K off them....for that level of clawback they would need additional income over the state pension of 30K or 35k if you give them the first 5K free of clawback. In my book someone with additional income of 30K doesnt need the state pension
Well if we give them the 5k allowance we are taking 5k of state pension back, or the equivalent of raising basic rate for an average wage earner to about 40%. Someone earning 60,000 a year doesn't 'need' the personal allowance. Why should a pensioner who planned his or her retirement fund some arse who earned 100k a year and pissed it all up the wall rather than saving? Why should income dependant pensioners suffer whilst asset rich ones laugh? If State pension was lavish, perhaps, but its a pittance in return for a lifetime of work and tax. I mean we might as well extend it and block access to NHS services for anybody on over average wage.
sighs you misunderstood I think
You get state pension of 9k You get additional income once the additional income is over 5k then for every 5£ you get state pension is reduced by £1
so additional income is 5k you get full state pension at 10K additional you get 1K removed from state pension at 20K additional you get 4k less state pension
so total for the 3 scenarios would be 14K, 18k,and 25K
So on practice not any different to increasing taxation on pensioners, for example by charging all pensioners NI.
In practise yes it would be like a tax.
Sorry but you can't all bang on about pension time bombs, demographic pressure and underfunded services and yet any time someone suggests reducing the things we spend on or trying to save money you are all up in arms.
We either reduce spending or it all collapses. Yes that means some are going to lose out. Doing nothing is no longer an option.
May I refer you to my header on the NHS, where I did address these issues, and make some proposals to address them.
Has the fall in the pound helped UK exporters? That is what I would expect, but I haven't seen any of the commenters here mention that, or better yet, provide any numbers.
I would think it would also help, for example, software developers, who want to work for US firms, while living in the UK.
I'm not persuaded that Scottish high earners will be tempted to move south of the border because of the attraction of slightly lower taxes.
By that logic, people would always try to arrange their lives to maximise their income. Yet millions of people still choose to live in London and other parts of the south east, knowing full well that property prices mean that they would have much more disposable income if they lived elsewhere.
That only holds because the property is seen as an appreciating asset, and usually an investment high;y-leveraged with a mortgage. If that stops being the case, then expect more decisions to be made as you suggest, especially if more higher-paid jobs are available outside London.
So, following usual PB logic; abolishing the top rate of tax is bad. However, abolishing it in Scotland is good, because otherwise, high earners will emigrate. If I were the Scottish Government, I would extend LBTT to cover sales as well as purchases, with a 10% tax on sales of properties over £1 million. If the rich want to move away, fine, but we’ll get our pound of flesh first.
Of course, those riding around in Government limos don't have to worry about the cost of filling their tanks up.
The biggest problem is the Fed being too aggressive in raising rates causing the dollar to rise against every other currency.
The US has a considerably bigger deficit than the UK, but the Fed is jacking up rates by 0.75% a go while the BoE aren't.
Indeed. Many people discussing the fall in the pound and of the London stock market, as a stick with which to beat the UK government, are missing the international picture. The issue is the strong dollar, against pretty much every other currency at the moment, caused mostly by the over-eagerness of the Fed to raise rates.
The pound is down against the Euro too. QED.
Not significantly. The pound to Euro variance is within normal to be expected variance ranges. It's the aggressive Fed that are making the moves.
I'm not persuaded that Scottish high earners will be tempted to move south of the border because of the attraction of slightly lower taxes.
By that logic, people would always try to arrange their lives to maximise their income. Yet millions of people still choose to live in London and other parts of the south east, knowing full well that property prices mean that they would have much more disposable income if they lived elsewhere.
That only holds because the property is seen as an appreciating asset, and usually an investment high;y-leveraged with a mortgage. If that stops being the case, then expect more decisions to be made as you suggest, especially if more higher-paid jobs are available outside London.
I wonder how many Scottish bankers might choose to move from Edinburgh to Newcastle?
As the pub landlord has observed, Newcastle is maintained as such a dump precisely to ensure that any Scots coming south are encouraged to turn round and go back home….
Still no one addresses the elephant in the room. They complain about services being underfunded and how dare tax be cut.
If all services were properly funded and paid for out of tax we would have the government taking about 90% of gdp as tax.
Time to start asking what the state should be saying no we dont do that anymore. Sadly a conversation no politician seems to want to have.
The answer is not tax more when half the country is struggling to make ends meet as it is. The answer is reduce spending.
The really huge bits of state managed expenditure go on:
pensions social security NHS debt interest defence education justice/police/prisons local government services.
Debt interest will steadily rise unless we take a North Korean approach to liabilities.
In each other area above there is gigantic pressure massively to increase expenditure. Add social care to the list too. I can't thinkmof a single big area where people are generally saying 'enough' or 'too much'.
Can you (or anyone) suggest where the first, say, £200 bn reductions will be found?
For a start while those area's are high expenditure doesn't mean they should do everything they do now.
Defence for a start we could save a huge amount on procurement by just buying off the shelf stuff rather than creating custom shit just because.
NHS - last night I suggested a cap on lifetime health care expense, would set it at the average to start with and people can take out insurance to cover any over that. Also services such as tattoo removal should not be available. I would also refuse IVF on the NHS, a round of IVF costs about 10k....if you cant afford to save up 10k once a year to pay for it can you really afford the child as raising a child is likely to cost that a year in any case plus we have a lot of kids crying out for adoption.
I am sure others could come up with savings in all the other areas as well
There is some truth in your first post - so many areas of public services are so significantly underfunded right now that redressing the balance is going to be financially really quite tricky.
But your reply to @algarkirk just reinforces their point - defence procurement, tattoo removal, IVF are all tiny nibbles.
If the country was to go down your suggested route, it would need to involve, say, revoking the right to free education entirely. That's the scale we're talking about.
Which is why I suspect the only answer is to muddle on through. Only not in the way Truss and Kwarteng want us to do so.
They maybe tiny nibbles but I am sure there are plenty more tiny nibbles we can take and they start to add up. What we can't do is keep adding on things that need money because we are already taxing the majority of the country into the ground and there is no more to squeeze out.
The biggest change that ought to be made is public sector pensions switching from to db to dc and a cap on what the employer contributes. Currently employer contributions average about 20% in the public sector. Yes wouldn't help immediately but in the long term it would. I would also do a clawback on state pensions so for every 5£ you get from other pensions you state pension is reduced by a pound
The problem with state pension clawback is that many of us have planned retirement based on what we will need over state pension to get by. Is it really practical to say to someone who is expecting 14k a year in retirement (9k state approx plus 5k in his own schemes) that he has to take a 1k cut and live on 13k? Will rental incomes be counted as 'other pensions' for those that bought property as retirement provision? How would drawdown be handled?
Yes other income would be treated as other pensions and we all plan our lives everyday on facts that change over time and when the facts change we have to change our plans. I don't see why pensioners should be any different. If anything people facing clawback are probably in a better place to respond as chances are they have no mortgage or rent if they have significant enough pension. We could also start with a clawback free sum so only applies after first 5000 of additional income. HMRC will already have the figures for additional income so it could be handled via them.
Far far too harsh on low earners. Much higher clawback free amount required. And is this applied to future pensioners or to everyone, now? Will need to be worked out annually so all pensioners to complete tax returns? Youre basically telling a pensioner on average UK income youre taking 6 grand a year off them, the equivalent of increasing basic rate on an average earner in work to over 45%.
Most low earners will not be getting anywhere near 5K in additional pension.
HMRC already knows how much pensioners get in total as it taxes them above a certain figure so no tax returns required. Landlords also get taxed pensioner or not.
How do you get to taking 6K off them....for that level of clawback they would need additional income over the state pension of 30K or 35k if you give them the first 5K free of clawback. In my book someone with additional income of 30K doesnt need the state pension
Well if we give them the 5k allowance we are taking 5k of state pension back, or the equivalent of raising basic rate for an average wage earner to about 40%. Someone earning 60,000 a year doesn't 'need' the personal allowance. Why should a pensioner who planned his or her retirement fund some arse who earned 100k a year and pissed it all up the wall rather than saving? Why should income dependant pensioners suffer whilst asset rich ones laugh? If State pension was lavish, perhaps, but its a pittance in return for a lifetime of work and tax. I mean we might as well extend it and block access to NHS services for anybody on over average wage.
sighs you misunderstood I think
You get state pension of 9k You get additional income once the additional income is over 5k then for every 5£ you get state pension is reduced by £1
so additional income is 5k you get full state pension at 10K additional you get 1K removed from state pension at 20K additional you get 4k less state pension
so total for the 3 scenarios would be 14K, 18k,and 25K
So on practice not any different to increasing taxation on pensioners, for example by charging all pensioners NI.
In practise yes it would be like a tax.
Sorry but you can't all bang on about pension time bombs, demographic pressure and underfunded services and yet any time someone suggests reducing the things we spend on or trying to save money you are all up in arms.
We either reduce spending or it all collapses. Yes that means some are going to lose out. Doing nothing is no longer an option.
Yes but youre 'taxing' them at 20% on top of income tax on their earnings from ca 14k to ca 59k
Too early to say in my opinion. Truss will get credit for having done something about the energy bills and a sense of purpose. We will have a better idea if that is enough in a month.
She 'might' get credit.
The public don't necessarily give credit when a) They didn't much like you in the first place, and b) They expect you to provide assistance.
The budget is obviously dreadful but I'm maybe in a minority in that I think it does make sense politically. To have a chance of winning another term of tory government, with the polls showing a solid Labour lead, Truss has to project her government as fresh and vigorous and above all NEW, ie repeat the trick Johnson managed for GE19. She can't, unlike him, use personality, and she doesn't have Brexit or an electorally toxic Labour opponent going for her, therefore it has to be done on policy. Hence this "new era", "tax cutting", "going for growth", "break with the stale consensus" rhetoric and package.
They know it's reckless and requires magical thinking to believe it'll pay for itself through higher growth. But they also know that "steady as she goes" through this energy crisis, fund the help package via a sensible mix of tax and borrowing, whilst being objectively the correct approach would deliver little political upside. It would leave the game unchanged when they need to kick the table over and force a new deck. Having done so they plan to frame the narrative over the next 2 years as New Era Low Tax Tories vs Same Old Labour Tax & Spenders. Come the GE, to be whispering these dirty words into the ears of the electorate - "Do you really want to pay more tax?"
This is the play, I think. They (Truss, the Tories) have to get their "low tax" mantle back - they can't win an election without that - and this is why they're cutting taxes when the country can’t afford it. It's not because they think it'll boost aspiration, investment and long term sustainable growth. They have no clue whether it'll do that and neither do they really care. They know you can’t audit these things anyway because it’s impossible to strip out causes and effects. And in political time there is no long term, there’s only the election. The reason they are cutting taxes is very simple and it is pure politics – it's so Labour have to say they’d raise them.
The just punishment would be a tiny Conservative majority to give them till 2029 to begin to clear up the damage.
That would probably lead to a weak and chaotic (well, still weaker and more chaotic) that would end up doing much more damage.
What we need is for the Conservatives to get beat and then for Starmer to ram PR through Parliament, so that any realistic prospect of them ever ruling the country alone again is removed.
What we'll actually get is a couple of years of Labour flailing about as it's consumed by the enormity of cleaning up the mess, followed by yet more of the Tories carving up the nation's remaining assets and distributing them to the already minted.
PR would see the Tories govern again, just likely neither Labour nor the Tories would ever win a majority again.
Instead smaller parties like the LDs, Greens and RefUK and SNP would normally hold the balance of power
Of course, those riding around in Government limos don't have to worry about the cost of filling their tanks up.
The biggest problem is the Fed being too aggressive in raising rates causing the dollar to rise against every other currency.
The US has a considerably bigger deficit than the UK, but the Fed is jacking up rates by 0.75% a go while the BoE aren't.
Indeed. Many people discussing the fall in the pound and of the London stock market, as a stick with which to beat the UK government, are missing the international picture. The issue is the strong dollar, against pretty much every other currency at the moment, caused mostly by the over-eagerness of the Fed to raise rates.
The pound is down against the Euro too. QED.
Not significantly. The pound to Euro variance is within normal to be expected variance ranges. It's the aggressive Fed that are making the moves.
Still no one addresses the elephant in the room. They complain about services being underfunded and how dare tax be cut.
If all services were properly funded and paid for out of tax we would have the government taking about 90% of gdp as tax.
Time to start asking what the state should be saying no we dont do that anymore. Sadly a conversation no politician seems to want to have.
The answer is not tax more when half the country is struggling to make ends meet as it is. The answer is reduce spending.
The really huge bits of state managed expenditure go on:
pensions social security NHS debt interest defence education justice/police/prisons local government services.
Debt interest will steadily rise unless we take a North Korean approach to liabilities.
In each other area above there is gigantic pressure massively to increase expenditure. Add social care to the list too. I can't thinkmof a single big area where people are generally saying 'enough' or 'too much'.
Can you (or anyone) suggest where the first, say, £200 bn reductions will be found?
For a start while those area's are high expenditure doesn't mean they should do everything they do now.
Defence for a start we could save a huge amount on procurement by just buying off the shelf stuff rather than creating custom shit just because.
NHS - last night I suggested a cap on lifetime health care expense, would set it at the average to start with and people can take out insurance to cover any over that. Also services such as tattoo removal should not be available. I would also refuse IVF on the NHS, a round of IVF costs about 10k....if you cant afford to save up 10k once a year to pay for it can you really afford the child as raising a child is likely to cost that a year in any case plus we have a lot of kids crying out for adoption.
I am sure others could come up with savings in all the other areas as well
There is some truth in your first post - so many areas of public services are so significantly underfunded right now that redressing the balance is going to be financially really quite tricky.
But your reply to @algarkirk just reinforces their point - defence procurement, tattoo removal, IVF are all tiny nibbles.
If the country was to go down your suggested route, it would need to involve, say, revoking the right to free education entirely. That's the scale we're talking about.
Which is why I suspect the only answer is to muddle on through. Only not in the way Truss and Kwarteng want us to do so.
They maybe tiny nibbles but I am sure there are plenty more tiny nibbles we can take and they start to add up. What we can't do is keep adding on things that need money because we are already taxing the majority of the country into the ground and there is no more to squeeze out.
The biggest change that ought to be made is public sector pensions switching from to db to dc and a cap on what the employer contributes. Currently employer contributions average about 20% in the public sector. Yes wouldn't help immediately but in the long term it would. I would also do a clawback on state pensions so for every 5£ you get from other pensions you state pension is reduced by a pound
The problem with state pension clawback is that many of us have planned retirement based on what we will need over state pension to get by. Is it really practical to say to someone who is expecting 14k a year in retirement (9k state approx plus 5k in his own schemes) that he has to take a 1k cut and live on 13k? Will rental incomes be counted as 'other pensions' for those that bought property as retirement provision? How would drawdown be handled?
Yes other income would be treated as other pensions and we all plan our lives everyday on facts that change over time and when the facts change we have to change our plans. I don't see why pensioners should be any different. If anything people facing clawback are probably in a better place to respond as chances are they have no mortgage or rent if they have significant enough pension. We could also start with a clawback free sum so only applies after first 5000 of additional income. HMRC will already have the figures for additional income so it could be handled via them.
Far far too harsh on low earners. Much higher clawback free amount required. And is this applied to future pensioners or to everyone, now? Will need to be worked out annually so all pensioners to complete tax returns? Youre basically telling a pensioner on average UK income youre taking 6 grand a year off them, the equivalent of increasing basic rate on an average earner in work to over 45%.
Most low earners will not be getting anywhere near 5K in additional pension.
HMRC already knows how much pensioners get in total as it taxes them above a certain figure so no tax returns required. Landlords also get taxed pensioner or not.
How do you get to taking 6K off them....for that level of clawback they would need additional income over the state pension of 30K or 35k if you give them the first 5K free of clawback. In my book someone with additional income of 30K doesnt need the state pension
Well if we give them the 5k allowance we are taking 5k of state pension back, or the equivalent of raising basic rate for an average wage earner to about 40%. Someone earning 60,000 a year doesn't 'need' the personal allowance. Why should a pensioner who planned his or her retirement fund some arse who earned 100k a year and pissed it all up the wall rather than saving? Why should income dependant pensioners suffer whilst asset rich ones laugh? If State pension was lavish, perhaps, but its a pittance in return for a lifetime of work and tax. I mean we might as well extend it and block access to NHS services for anybody on over average wage.
sighs you misunderstood I think
You get state pension of 9k You get additional income once the additional income is over 5k then for every 5£ you get state pension is reduced by £1
so additional income is 5k you get full state pension at 10K additional you get 1K removed from state pension at 20K additional you get 4k less state pension
so total for the 3 scenarios would be 14K, 18k,and 25K
So on practice not any different to increasing taxation on pensioners, for example by charging all pensioners NI.
In practise yes it would be like a tax.
Sorry but you can't all bang on about pension time bombs, demographic pressure and underfunded services and yet any time someone suggests reducing the things we spend on or trying to save money you are all up in arms.
We either reduce spending or it all collapses. Yes that means some are going to lose out. Doing nothing is no longer an option.
May I refer you to my header on the NHS, where I did address these issues, and make some proposals to address them.
The you in my post wasn't aimed at you personally but at all of the people who are constantly bemoaning underfunded services etc. Yet reacting in horror when anyone comes up with a proposal to change things. Cf Mays dementia tax
Too early to say in my opinion. Truss will get credit for having done something about the energy bills and a sense of purpose. We will have a better idea if that is enough in a month.
She 'might' get credit.
The public don't necessarily give credit when a) They didn't much like you in the first place, and b) They expect you to provide assistance.
Exactly. Truss and the Tories come in as historically unpopular. And they are doing the opposite of what their new voters want. These are conditions for a Labour landslide IMHO.
Not predicting that yet. Still Hung Parliament for me
I'm not persuaded that Scottish high earners will be tempted to move south of the border because of the attraction of slightly lower taxes.
By that logic, people would always try to arrange their lives to maximise their income. Yet millions of people still choose to live in London and other parts of the south east, knowing full well that property prices mean that they would have much more disposable income if they lived elsewhere.
The same people that said devolution, an SNP government, 5p on a can of superlager, differentials in stamp duty, differentials in previous tax rates and differing covid rules would cause a mass exodus from Scotland are now pushing the migration of the wealth creators line; their predictions are gold standard.
Incidentally afaics those of them who were resident in Scotland are still resident in Scotland.
If Starmer wins a majority even of one he will be one of the greatest LOTOs in history
Nah.
He’s mediocre and unthreatening.
It will be the tories who can take the credit for it. Choosing to go on a right wing corbynite binge, screw the consequences.
Idiots.
It's not either or. Even of the Tories self destruct, Labout and Starmer has to be acceptable to people as an alternative. We saw this with Boris being disliked by plenty of people, but the opposition even more disliked.
Of course, those riding around in Government limos don't have to worry about the cost of filling their tanks up.
The biggest problem is the Fed being too aggressive in raising rates causing the dollar to rise against every other currency.
The US has a considerably bigger deficit than the UK, but the Fed is jacking up rates by 0.75% a go while the BoE aren't.
Indeed. Many people discussing the fall in the pound and of the London stock market, as a stick with which to beat the UK government, are missing the international picture. The issue is the strong dollar, against pretty much every other currency at the moment, caused mostly by the over-eagerness of the Fed to raise rates.
The pound is near an all time low against the Euro too. And it fell specifically after Kwateng's statement.
1.12 against an all time low of 1.02. Near-ish, I suppose.
The budget is obviously dreadful but I'm maybe in a minority in that I think it does make sense politically. To have a chance of winning another term of tory government, with the polls showing a solid Labour lead, Truss has to project her government as fresh and vigorous and above all NEW, ie repeat the trick Johnson managed for GE19. She can't, unlike him, use personality, and she doesn't have Brexit or an electorally toxic Labour opponent going for her, therefore it has to be done on policy. Hence this "new era", "tax cutting", "going for growth", "break with the stale consensus" rhetoric and package.
They know it's reckless and requires magical thinking to believe it'll pay for itself through higher growth. But they also know that "steady as she goes" through this energy crisis, fund the help package via a sensible mix of tax and borrowing, whilst being objectively the correct approach would deliver little political upside. It would leave the game unchanged when they need to kick the table over and force a new deck. Having done so they plan to frame the narrative over the next 2 years as New Era Low Tax Tories vs Same Old Labour Tax & Spenders. Come the GE, to be whispering these dirty words into the ears of the electorate - "Do you really want to pay more tax?"
This is the play, I think. They (Truss, the Tories) have to get their "low tax" mantle back - they can't win an election without that - and this is why they're cutting taxes when the country can’t afford it. It's not because they think it'll boost aspiration, investment and long term sustainable growth. They have no clue whether it'll do that and neither do they really care. They know you can’t audit these things anyway because it’s impossible to strip out causes and effects. And in political time there is no long term, there’s only the election. The reason they are cutting taxes is very simple and it is pure politics – it's so Labour have to say they’d raise them.
The just punishment would be a tiny Conservative majority to give them till 2029 to begin to clear up the damage.
That would probably lead to a weak and chaotic (well, still weaker and more chaotic) that would end up doing much more damage.
What we need is for the Conservatives to get beat and then for Starmer to ram PR through Parliament, so that any realistic prospect of them ever ruling the country alone again is removed.
What we'll actually get is a couple of years of Labour flailing about as it's consumed by the enormity of cleaning up the mess, followed by yet more of the Tories carving up the nation's remaining assets and distributing them to the already minted.
PR would see the Tories govern again, just likely neither Labour nor the Tories would ever win a majority again.
Instead smaller parties like the LDs, Greens and RefUK and SNP would normally hold the balance of power
The budget is obviously dreadful but I'm maybe in a minority in that I think it does make sense politically. To have a chance of winning another term of tory government, with the polls showing a solid Labour lead, Truss has to project her government as fresh and vigorous and above all NEW, ie repeat the trick Johnson managed for GE19. She can't, unlike him, use personality, and she doesn't have Brexit or an electorally toxic Labour opponent going for her, therefore it has to be done on policy. Hence this "new era", "tax cutting", "going for growth", "break with the stale consensus" rhetoric and package.
They know it's reckless and requires magical thinking to believe it'll pay for itself through higher growth. But they also know that "steady as she goes" through this energy crisis, fund the help package via a sensible mix of tax and borrowing, whilst being objectively the correct approach would deliver little political upside. It would leave the game unchanged when they need to kick the table over and force a new deck. Having done so they plan to frame the narrative over the next 2 years as New Era Low Tax Tories vs Same Old Labour Tax & Spenders. Come the GE, to be whispering these dirty words into the ears of the electorate - "Do you really want to pay more tax?"
This is the play, I think. They (Truss, the Tories) have to get their "low tax" mantle back - they can't win an election without that - and this is why they're cutting taxes when the country can’t afford it. It's not because they think it'll boost aspiration, investment and long term sustainable growth. They have no clue whether it'll do that and neither do they really care. They know you can’t audit these things anyway because it’s impossible to strip out causes and effects. And in political time there is no long term, there’s only the election. The reason they are cutting taxes is very simple and it is pure politics – it's so Labour have to say they’d raise them.
The just punishment would be a tiny Conservative majority to give them till 2029 to begin to clear up the damage.
That would probably lead to a weak and chaotic (well, still weaker and more chaotic) that would end up doing much more damage.
What we need is for the Conservatives to get beat and then for Starmer to ram PR through Parliament, so that any realistic prospect of them ever ruling the country alone again is removed.
What we'll actually get is a couple of years of Labour flailing about as it's consumed by the enormity of cleaning up the mess, followed by yet more of the Tories carving up the nation's remaining assets and distributing them to the already minted.
PR would see the Tories govern again, just likely neither Labour nor the Tories would ever win a majority again.
Instead smaller parties like the LDs, Greens and RefUK and SNP would normally hold the balance of power
Last poll:
SNP 46% Con 18%
And it’s the SNP that’s the smaller party.
PB was ever thus.
I think that is searching for outrage - in parliamentary terms they are a smaller party, even as they dominant Scotland and are vastly more popular. In the context it was being used about balance of power in the parliament the maximum number of seats they could achieve is relevant.
Of course, those riding around in Government limos don't have to worry about the cost of filling their tanks up.
The biggest problem is the Fed being too aggressive in raising rates causing the dollar to rise against every other currency.
The US has a considerably bigger deficit than the UK, but the Fed is jacking up rates by 0.75% a go while the BoE aren't.
Indeed. Many people discussing the fall in the pound and of the London stock market, as a stick with which to beat the UK government, are missing the international picture. The issue is the strong dollar, against pretty much every other currency at the moment, caused mostly by the over-eagerness of the Fed to raise rates.
The Americans are pursuing 'beggar thy neighbour' economical policies as they always have. We can't keep following them, so we should stay the course. If a dollar ends up worth 6 pounds, so be it.
The budget is obviously dreadful but I'm maybe in a minority in that I think it does make sense politically. To have a chance of winning another term of tory government, with the polls showing a solid Labour lead, Truss has to project her government as fresh and vigorous and above all NEW, ie repeat the trick Johnson managed for GE19. She can't, unlike him, use personality, and she doesn't have Brexit or an electorally toxic Labour opponent going for her, therefore it has to be done on policy. Hence this "new era", "tax cutting", "going for growth", "break with the stale consensus" rhetoric and package.
They know it's reckless and requires magical thinking to believe it'll pay for itself through higher growth. But they also know that "steady as she goes" through this energy crisis, fund the help package via a sensible mix of tax and borrowing, whilst being objectively the correct approach would deliver little political upside. It would leave the game unchanged when they need to kick the table over and force a new deck. Having done so they plan to frame the narrative over the next 2 years as New Era Low Tax Tories vs Same Old Labour Tax & Spenders. Come the GE, to be whispering these dirty words into the ears of the electorate - "Do you really want to pay more tax?"
This is the play, I think. They (Truss, the Tories) have to get their "low tax" mantle back - they can't win an election without that - and this is why they're cutting taxes when the country can’t afford it. It's not because they think it'll boost aspiration, investment and long term sustainable growth. They have no clue whether it'll do that and neither do they really care. They know you can’t audit these things anyway because it’s impossible to strip out causes and effects. And in political time there is no long term, there’s only the election. The reason they are cutting taxes is very simple and it is pure politics – it's so Labour have to say they’d raise them.
The just punishment would be a tiny Conservative majority to give them till 2029 to begin to clear up the damage.
That would probably lead to a weak and chaotic (well, still weaker and more chaotic) that would end up doing much more damage.
What we need is for the Conservatives to get beat and then for Starmer to ram PR through Parliament, so that any realistic prospect of them ever ruling the country alone again is removed.
What we'll actually get is a couple of years of Labour flailing about as it's consumed by the enormity of cleaning up the mess, followed by yet more of the Tories carving up the nation's remaining assets and distributing them to the already minted.
PR would see the Tories govern again, just likely neither Labour nor the Tories would ever win a majority again.
Instead smaller parties like the LDs, Greens and RefUK and SNP would normally hold the balance of power
That's the entire point. The likes of Farage, Rees-Mogg and Corbyn, who are representative of small but very rich and/or very loud segments of public opinion, could be hived off into extremist sects and properly marginalised. It's obvious to anyone with eyes to see that our current suite of "broad church" political parties has failed utterly.
PR is no guarantor against the capture of the entire political system by loonies, but it would certainly make it a lot less probable.
In theory but in practice none of them are likely to win a majority under FPTP.
Under PR though the nationalist Sweden Democrats are now kingmakers in Sweden, the nationalist Meloni is likely to become PM in Italy tomorrow and in NZ the Greens or New Zealand First are often kingmakers. In Germany too the Greens are in power and the AfD growing in strength and in Spain the hard left Podemos are kingmakers with the populist right Vox gaining support
All of the examples that you quote have something important in common: the lunatics haven't completely taken over the asylum. Our system offers completely untrammelled power to any sect that can capture one of the two major parties (the control of each of which is, in turn, in the gift of a very small selectorate of party members who are massively to the left or right of popular opinion.) We came within an ace of systemic capture by the North London branch office of Hamas in 2017; we are now actually under the power of a Reaganomics tribute act, only minus a strong economy or a strong currency to help backstop all their nonsense. This is not going to end well.
I'm not persuaded that Scottish high earners will be tempted to move south of the border because of the attraction of slightly lower taxes.
By that logic, people would always try to arrange their lives to maximise their income. Yet millions of people still choose to live in London and other parts of the south east, knowing full well that property prices mean that they would have much more disposable income if they lived elsewhere.
I'm sure that for some people it will be a factor, as they will be able to afford a better standard of living if they do so. These sorts of things will always make a difference at the margins, the questions are, how much of a difference, and how wide is the margin?
There's a big difference between 10% of high earners deciding to relocate and 0.1% doing so, but I have no doubt that at least some people will consider it. It's perhaps more likely to be part of the consideration when moving in the other direction. Why go through the hassle of moving to a new place, *and* get taxed more highly than staying put where you are? If a London high-flyer has the same job offer, but a choice of relocating to Scotland or Yorkshire, you could see why the lower tax rate would make Yorkshire a more appealing destination than if the difference wasn't there.
The counter-argument would be that the extra money raised for spending on public services made Scotland a better place to live, and that the lower tax rate for lower-paid people created a more equitable and happier society. If I was in government in Scotland that's the argument I would be working to make true. It's certainly the sort of argument that the current Scottish government makes, but they don't seem to be too focused on making it true, rather than making sure that everyone knows Westminster is to blame when it isn't.
Of course, those riding around in Government limos don't have to worry about the cost of filling their tanks up.
The biggest problem is the Fed being too aggressive in raising rates causing the dollar to rise against every other currency.
The US has a considerably bigger deficit than the UK, but the Fed is jacking up rates by 0.75% a go while the BoE aren't.
Indeed. Many people discussing the fall in the pound and of the London stock market, as a stick with which to beat the UK government, are missing the international picture. The issue is the strong dollar, against pretty much every other currency at the moment, caused mostly by the over-eagerness of the Fed to raise rates.
The Americans are pursuing 'beggar thy neighbour' economical policies as they always have. We can't keep following them, so we should stay the course. If a dollar ends up worth 6 pounds, so be it.
Has the fall in the pound helped UK exporters? That is what I would expect, but I haven't seen any of the commenters here mention that, or better yet, provide any numbers.
I would think it would also help, for example, software developers, who want to work for US firms, while living in the UK.
There are very few left bar the odd flint knapper
Our itinerant flint knapper does seem to be a net drain on the national finances as he and his commissioners earn their money here but seem to spend their earnings funding foreign hoteliers, sommeliers and restaurants.
Of course, those riding around in Government limos don't have to worry about the cost of filling their tanks up.
The biggest problem is the Fed being too aggressive in raising rates causing the dollar to rise against every other currency.
The US has a considerably bigger deficit than the UK, but the Fed is jacking up rates by 0.75% a go while the BoE aren't.
The incompetence of the BoE is really driving me mad. They completely failed to anticipate a fairly obvious rise in inflation, they have failed to protect Sterling by maintaining a sensible interest rate and they have drained liquidity from the bond market by trying to sell off their QE debt when the government is struggling for buyers for the new debt it is issuing.
Given the security situation a degree of dollar strength is inevitable but the Bank could and should have done more earlier and this week to stop us importing yet more inflation.
I gave you a like as I three quarters agree with that.
My issue is that on their own, ceteris paribus, what the Bank are doing ought to be enough. However ceteris isn't paribus, the Fed are being far too aggressive and the Bank need to take that into account. A half a point rise ought to be sufficient, except what the Fed are doing means it's not. And the Bank, acting after the Fed, should have known that!
Still no one addresses the elephant in the room. They complain about services being underfunded and how dare tax be cut.
If all services were properly funded and paid for out of tax we would have the government taking about 90% of gdp as tax.
Time to start asking what the state should be saying no we dont do that anymore. Sadly a conversation no politician seems to want to have.
The answer is not tax more when half the country is struggling to make ends meet as it is. The answer is reduce spending.
The really huge bits of state managed expenditure go on:
pensions social security NHS debt interest defence education justice/police/prisons local government services.
Debt interest will steadily rise unless we take a North Korean approach to liabilities.
In each other area above there is gigantic pressure massively to increase expenditure. Add social care to the list too. I can't thinkmof a single big area where people are generally saying 'enough' or 'too much'.
Can you (or anyone) suggest where the first, say, £200 bn reductions will be found?
For a start while those area's are high expenditure doesn't mean they should do everything they do now.
Defence for a start we could save a huge amount on procurement by just buying off the shelf stuff rather than creating custom shit just because.
NHS - last night I suggested a cap on lifetime health care expense, would set it at the average to start with and people can take out insurance to cover any over that. Also services such as tattoo removal should not be available. I would also refuse IVF on the NHS, a round of IVF costs about 10k....if you cant afford to save up 10k once a year to pay for it can you really afford the child as raising a child is likely to cost that a year in any case plus we have a lot of kids crying out for adoption.
I am sure others could come up with savings in all the other areas as well
There is some truth in your first post - so many areas of public services are so significantly underfunded right now that redressing the balance is going to be financially really quite tricky.
But your reply to @algarkirk just reinforces their point - defence procurement, tattoo removal, IVF are all tiny nibbles.
If the country was to go down your suggested route, it would need to involve, say, revoking the right to free education entirely. That's the scale we're talking about.
Which is why I suspect the only answer is to muddle on through. Only not in the way Truss and Kwarteng want us to do so.
They maybe tiny nibbles but I am sure there are plenty more tiny nibbles we can take and they start to add up. What we can't do is keep adding on things that need money because we are already taxing the majority of the country into the ground and there is no more to squeeze out.
The biggest change that ought to be made is public sector pensions switching from to db to dc and a cap on what the employer contributes. Currently employer contributions average about 20% in the public sector. Yes wouldn't help immediately but in the long term it would. I would also do a clawback on state pensions so for every 5£ you get from other pensions you state pension is reduced by a pound
The problem with state pension clawback is that many of us have planned retirement based on what we will need over state pension to get by. Is it really practical to say to someone who is expecting 14k a year in retirement (9k state approx plus 5k in his own schemes) that he has to take a 1k cut and live on 13k? Will rental incomes be counted as 'other pensions' for those that bought property as retirement provision? How would drawdown be handled?
Yes other income would be treated as other pensions and we all plan our lives everyday on facts that change over time and when the facts change we have to change our plans. I don't see why pensioners should be any different. If anything people facing clawback are probably in a better place to respond as chances are they have no mortgage or rent if they have significant enough pension. We could also start with a clawback free sum so only applies after first 5000 of additional income. HMRC will already have the figures for additional income so it could be handled via them.
Far far too harsh on low earners. Much higher clawback free amount required. And is this applied to future pensioners or to everyone, now? Will need to be worked out annually so all pensioners to complete tax returns? Youre basically telling a pensioner on average UK income youre taking 6 grand a year off them, the equivalent of increasing basic rate on an average earner in work to over 45%.
Most low earners will not be getting anywhere near 5K in additional pension.
HMRC already knows how much pensioners get in total as it taxes them above a certain figure so no tax returns required. Landlords also get taxed pensioner or not.
How do you get to taking 6K off them....for that level of clawback they would need additional income over the state pension of 30K or 35k if you give them the first 5K free of clawback. In my book someone with additional income of 30K doesnt need the state pension
Well if we give them the 5k allowance we are taking 5k of state pension back, or the equivalent of raising basic rate for an average wage earner to about 40%. Someone earning 60,000 a year doesn't 'need' the personal allowance. Why should a pensioner who planned his or her retirement fund some arse who earned 100k a year and pissed it all up the wall rather than saving? Why should income dependant pensioners suffer whilst asset rich ones laugh? If State pension was lavish, perhaps, but its a pittance in return for a lifetime of work and tax. I mean we might as well extend it and block access to NHS services for anybody on over average wage.
sighs you misunderstood I think
You get state pension of 9k You get additional income once the additional income is over 5k then for every 5£ you get state pension is reduced by £1
so additional income is 5k you get full state pension at 10K additional you get 1K removed from state pension at 20K additional you get 4k less state pension
so total for the 3 scenarios would be 14K, 18k,and 25K
So on practice not any different to increasing taxation on pensioners, for example by charging all pensioners NI.
In practise yes it would be like a tax.
Sorry but you can't all bang on about pension time bombs, demographic pressure and underfunded services and yet any time someone suggests reducing the things we spend on or trying to save money you are all up in arms.
We either reduce spending or it all collapses. Yes that means some are going to lose out. Doing nothing is no longer an option.
Yes but youre 'taxing' them at 20% on top of income tax on their earnings from ca 14k to ca 59k
Yes and your point is?
We have to reduce spending or increase revenue. That means it has to come from somewhere.The employed are already taxed to the point that many in full employment have to use food banks so increasing basic rates is out. There aren't enough higher earners to make a dent in our spending.
So you tell us where you think the reduction or increased revenue should be found. You are very quick to say "no not there".
Still no one addresses the elephant in the room. They complain about services being underfunded and how dare tax be cut.
If all services were properly funded and paid for out of tax we would have the government taking about 90% of gdp as tax.
Time to start asking what the state should be saying no we dont do that anymore. Sadly a conversation no politician seems to want to have.
The answer is not tax more when half the country is struggling to make ends meet as it is. The answer is reduce spending.
The really huge bits of state managed expenditure go on:
pensions social security NHS debt interest defence education justice/police/prisons local government services.
Debt interest will steadily rise unless we take a North Korean approach to liabilities.
In each other area above there is gigantic pressure massively to increase expenditure. Add social care to the list too. I can't thinkmof a single big area where people are generally saying 'enough' or 'too much'.
Can you (or anyone) suggest where the first, say, £200 bn reductions will be found?
For a start while those area's are high expenditure doesn't mean they should do everything they do now.
Defence for a start we could save a huge amount on procurement by just buying off the shelf stuff rather than creating custom shit just because.
NHS - last night I suggested a cap on lifetime health care expense, would set it at the average to start with and people can take out insurance to cover any over that. Also services such as tattoo removal should not be available. I would also refuse IVF on the NHS, a round of IVF costs about 10k....if you cant afford to save up 10k once a year to pay for it can you really afford the child as raising a child is likely to cost that a year in any case plus we have a lot of kids crying out for adoption.
I am sure others could come up with savings in all the other areas as well
There is some truth in your first post - so many areas of public services are so significantly underfunded right now that redressing the balance is going to be financially really quite tricky.
But your reply to @algarkirk just reinforces their point - defence procurement, tattoo removal, IVF are all tiny nibbles.
If the country was to go down your suggested route, it would need to involve, say, revoking the right to free education entirely. That's the scale we're talking about.
Which is why I suspect the only answer is to muddle on through. Only not in the way Truss and Kwarteng want us to do so.
They maybe tiny nibbles but I am sure there are plenty more tiny nibbles we can take and they start to add up. What we can't do is keep adding on things that need money because we are already taxing the majority of the country into the ground and there is no more to squeeze out.
The biggest change that ought to be made is public sector pensions switching from to db to dc and a cap on what the employer contributes. Currently employer contributions average about 20% in the public sector. Yes wouldn't help immediately but in the long term it would. I would also do a clawback on state pensions so for every 5£ you get from other pensions you state pension is reduced by a pound
The problem with state pension clawback is that many of us have planned retirement based on what we will need over state pension to get by. Is it really practical to say to someone who is expecting 14k a year in retirement (9k state approx plus 5k in his own schemes) that he has to take a 1k cut and live on 13k? Will rental incomes be counted as 'other pensions' for those that bought property as retirement provision? How would drawdown be handled?
Yes other income would be treated as other pensions and we all plan our lives everyday on facts that change over time and when the facts change we have to change our plans. I don't see why pensioners should be any different. If anything people facing clawback are probably in a better place to respond as chances are they have no mortgage or rent if they have significant enough pension. We could also start with a clawback free sum so only applies after first 5000 of additional income. HMRC will already have the figures for additional income so it could be handled via them.
Far far too harsh on low earners. Much higher clawback free amount required. And is this applied to future pensioners or to everyone, now? Will need to be worked out annually so all pensioners to complete tax returns? Youre basically telling a pensioner on average UK income youre taking 6 grand a year off them, the equivalent of increasing basic rate on an average earner in work to over 45%.
Most low earners will not be getting anywhere near 5K in additional pension.
HMRC already knows how much pensioners get in total as it taxes them above a certain figure so no tax returns required. Landlords also get taxed pensioner or not.
How do you get to taking 6K off them....for that level of clawback they would need additional income over the state pension of 30K or 35k if you give them the first 5K free of clawback. In my book someone with additional income of 30K doesnt need the state pension
Well if we give them the 5k allowance we are taking 5k of state pension back, or the equivalent of raising basic rate for an average wage earner to about 40%. Someone earning 60,000 a year doesn't 'need' the personal allowance. Why should a pensioner who planned his or her retirement fund some arse who earned 100k a year and pissed it all up the wall rather than saving? Why should income dependant pensioners suffer whilst asset rich ones laugh? If State pension was lavish, perhaps, but its a pittance in return for a lifetime of work and tax. I mean we might as well extend it and block access to NHS services for anybody on over average wage.
sighs you misunderstood I think
You get state pension of 9k You get additional income once the additional income is over 5k then for every 5£ you get state pension is reduced by £1
so additional income is 5k you get full state pension at 10K additional you get 1K removed from state pension at 20K additional you get 4k less state pension
so total for the 3 scenarios would be 14K, 18k,and 25K
So on practice not any different to increasing taxation on pensioners, for example by charging all pensioners NI.
In practise yes it would be like a tax.
Sorry but you can't all bang on about pension time bombs, demographic pressure and underfunded services and yet any time someone suggests reducing the things we spend on or trying to save money you are all up in arms.
We either reduce spending or it all collapses. Yes that means some are going to lose out. Doing nothing is no longer an option.
May I refer you to my header on the NHS, where I did address these issues, and make some proposals to address them.
The you in my post wasn't aimed at you personally but at all of the people who are constantly bemoaning underfunded services etc. Yet reacting in horror when anyone comes up with a proposal to change things. Cf Mays dementia tax
I supported her social care proposals in the 2017 GE on here.
Has the fall in the pound helped UK exporters? That is what I would expect, but I haven't seen any of the commenters here mention that, or better yet, provide any numbers.
I would think it would also help, for example, software developers, who want to work for US firms, while living in the UK.
There are very few left bar the odd flint knapper
Our itinerant flint knapper does seem to be a net drain on the national finances as he and his commissioners earn their money here but seem to spend their earnings funding foreign hoteliers, sommeliers and restaurants.
Net drain on electricity more like. Having to keep all of his accounts open
The budget is obviously dreadful but I'm maybe in a minority in that I think it does make sense politically. To have a chance of winning another term of tory government, with the polls showing a solid Labour lead, Truss has to project her government as fresh and vigorous and above all NEW, ie repeat the trick Johnson managed for GE19. She can't, unlike him, use personality, and she doesn't have Brexit or an electorally toxic Labour opponent going for her, therefore it has to be done on policy. Hence this "new era", "tax cutting", "going for growth", "break with the stale consensus" rhetoric and package.
They know it's reckless and requires magical thinking to believe it'll pay for itself through higher growth. But they also know that "steady as she goes" through this energy crisis, fund the help package via a sensible mix of tax and borrowing, whilst being objectively the correct approach would deliver little political upside. It would leave the game unchanged when they need to kick the table over and force a new deck. Having done so they plan to frame the narrative over the next 2 years as New Era Low Tax Tories vs Same Old Labour Tax & Spenders. Come the GE, to be whispering these dirty words into the ears of the electorate - "Do you really want to pay more tax?"
This is the play, I think. They (Truss, the Tories) have to get their "low tax" mantle back - they can't win an election without that - and this is why they're cutting taxes when the country can’t afford it. It's not because they think it'll boost aspiration, investment and long term sustainable growth. They have no clue whether it'll do that and neither do they really care. They know you can’t audit these things anyway because it’s impossible to strip out causes and effects. And in political time there is no long term, there’s only the election. The reason they are cutting taxes is very simple and it is pure politics – it's so Labour have to say they’d raise them.
I would like to hear Truss say that she has reduced tax to draw in the wealthy from around the world. I have no problems with them coming here so long as they pay our modest taxes. .
The latter point would seem to prevent the first from taking place. The very rich always moan about their taxes, even when they or their companies manage to avoid paying plenty of it.
Of course, those riding around in Government limos don't have to worry about the cost of filling their tanks up.
The biggest problem is the Fed being too aggressive in raising rates causing the dollar to rise against every other currency.
The US has a considerably bigger deficit than the UK, but the Fed is jacking up rates by 0.75% a go while the BoE aren't.
Indeed. Many people discussing the fall in the pound and of the London stock market, as a stick with which to beat the UK government, are missing the international picture. The issue is the strong dollar, against pretty much every other currency at the moment, caused mostly by the over-eagerness of the Fed to raise rates.
The Americans are pursuing 'beggar thy neighbour' economical policies as they always have. We can't keep following them, so we should stay the course. If a dollar ends up worth 6 pounds, so be it.
The dollar will collapse eventually, the Yanks are due a rude awakening
The budget is obviously dreadful but I'm maybe in a minority in that I think it does make sense politically. To have a chance of winning another term of tory government, with the polls showing a solid Labour lead, Truss has to project her government as fresh and vigorous and above all NEW, ie repeat the trick Johnson managed for GE19. She can't, unlike him, use personality, and she doesn't have Brexit or an electorally toxic Labour opponent going for her, therefore it has to be done on policy. Hence this "new era", "tax cutting", "going for growth", "break with the stale consensus" rhetoric and package.
They know it's reckless and requires magical thinking to believe it'll pay for itself through higher growth. But they also know that "steady as she goes" through this energy crisis, fund the help package via a sensible mix of tax and borrowing, whilst being objectively the correct approach would deliver little political upside. It would leave the game unchanged when they need to kick the table over and force a new deck. Having done so they plan to frame the narrative over the next 2 years as New Era Low Tax Tories vs Same Old Labour Tax & Spenders. Come the GE, to be whispering these dirty words into the ears of the electorate - "Do you really want to pay more tax?"
This is the play, I think. They (Truss, the Tories) have to get their "low tax" mantle back - they can't win an election without that - and this is why they're cutting taxes when the country can’t afford it. It's not because they think it'll boost aspiration, investment and long term sustainable growth. They have no clue whether it'll do that and neither do they really care. They know you can’t audit these things anyway because it’s impossible to strip out causes and effects. And in political time there is no long term, there’s only the election. The reason they are cutting taxes is very simple and it is pure politics – it's so Labour have to say they’d raise them.
The just punishment would be a tiny Conservative majority to give them till 2029 to begin to clear up the damage.
That would probably lead to a weak and chaotic (well, still weaker and more chaotic) that would end up doing much more damage.
What we need is for the Conservatives to get beat and then for Starmer to ram PR through Parliament, so that any realistic prospect of them ever ruling the country alone again is removed.
What we'll actually get is a couple of years of Labour flailing about as it's consumed by the enormity of cleaning up the mess, followed by yet more of the Tories carving up the nation's remaining assets and distributing them to the already minted.
PR would see the Tories govern again, just likely neither Labour nor the Tories would ever win a majority again.
Instead smaller parties like the LDs, Greens and RefUK and SNP would normally hold the balance of power
Of course, those riding around in Government limos don't have to worry about the cost of filling their tanks up.
The biggest problem is the Fed being too aggressive in raising rates causing the dollar to rise against every other currency.
The US has a considerably bigger deficit than the UK, but the Fed is jacking up rates by 0.75% a go while the BoE aren't.
Indeed. Many people discussing the fall in the pound and of the London stock market, as a stick with which to beat the UK government, are missing the international picture. The issue is the strong dollar, against pretty much every other currency at the moment, caused mostly by the over-eagerness of the Fed to raise rates.
The Americans are pursuing 'beggar thy neighbour' economical policies as they always have. We can't keep following them, so we should stay the course. If a dollar ends up worth 6 pounds, so be it.
That would be awesome for me, I get paid in dollars so would be earning about £400k per year!
Still no one addresses the elephant in the room. They complain about services being underfunded and how dare tax be cut.
If all services were properly funded and paid for out of tax we would have the government taking about 90% of gdp as tax.
Time to start asking what the state should be saying no we dont do that anymore. Sadly a conversation no politician seems to want to have.
The answer is not tax more when half the country is struggling to make ends meet as it is. The answer is reduce spending.
The really huge bits of state managed expenditure go on:
pensions social security NHS debt interest defence education justice/police/prisons local government services.
Debt interest will steadily rise unless we take a North Korean approach to liabilities.
In each other area above there is gigantic pressure massively to increase expenditure. Add social care to the list too. I can't thinkmof a single big area where people are generally saying 'enough' or 'too much'.
Can you (or anyone) suggest where the first, say, £200 bn reductions will be found?
For a start while those area's are high expenditure doesn't mean they should do everything they do now.
Defence for a start we could save a huge amount on procurement by just buying off the shelf stuff rather than creating custom shit just because.
NHS - last night I suggested a cap on lifetime health care expense, would set it at the average to start with and people can take out insurance to cover any over that. Also services such as tattoo removal should not be available. I would also refuse IVF on the NHS, a round of IVF costs about 10k....if you cant afford to save up 10k once a year to pay for it can you really afford the child as raising a child is likely to cost that a year in any case plus we have a lot of kids crying out for adoption.
I am sure others could come up with savings in all the other areas as well
There is some truth in your first post - so many areas of public services are so significantly underfunded right now that redressing the balance is going to be financially really quite tricky.
But your reply to @algarkirk just reinforces their point - defence procurement, tattoo removal, IVF are all tiny nibbles.
If the country was to go down your suggested route, it would need to involve, say, revoking the right to free education entirely. That's the scale we're talking about.
Which is why I suspect the only answer is to muddle on through. Only not in the way Truss and Kwarteng want us to do so.
They maybe tiny nibbles but I am sure there are plenty more tiny nibbles we can take and they start to add up. What we can't do is keep adding on things that need money because we are already taxing the majority of the country into the ground and there is no more to squeeze out.
The biggest change that ought to be made is public sector pensions switching from to db to dc and a cap on what the employer contributes. Currently employer contributions average about 20% in the public sector. Yes wouldn't help immediately but in the long term it would. I would also do a clawback on state pensions so for every 5£ you get from other pensions you state pension is reduced by a pound
The problem with state pension clawback is that many of us have planned retirement based on what we will need over state pension to get by. Is it really practical to say to someone who is expecting 14k a year in retirement (9k state approx plus 5k in his own schemes) that he has to take a 1k cut and live on 13k? Will rental incomes be counted as 'other pensions' for those that bought property as retirement provision? How would drawdown be handled?
Yes other income would be treated as other pensions and we all plan our lives everyday on facts that change over time and when the facts change we have to change our plans. I don't see why pensioners should be any different. If anything people facing clawback are probably in a better place to respond as chances are they have no mortgage or rent if they have significant enough pension. We could also start with a clawback free sum so only applies after first 5000 of additional income. HMRC will already have the figures for additional income so it could be handled via them.
Far far too harsh on low earners. Much higher clawback free amount required. And is this applied to future pensioners or to everyone, now? Will need to be worked out annually so all pensioners to complete tax returns? Youre basically telling a pensioner on average UK income youre taking 6 grand a year off them, the equivalent of increasing basic rate on an average earner in work to over 45%.
Most low earners will not be getting anywhere near 5K in additional pension.
HMRC already knows how much pensioners get in total as it taxes them above a certain figure so no tax returns required. Landlords also get taxed pensioner or not.
How do you get to taking 6K off them....for that level of clawback they would need additional income over the state pension of 30K or 35k if you give them the first 5K free of clawback. In my book someone with additional income of 30K doesnt need the state pension
Well if we give them the 5k allowance we are taking 5k of state pension back, or the equivalent of raising basic rate for an average wage earner to about 40%. Someone earning 60,000 a year doesn't 'need' the personal allowance. Why should a pensioner who planned his or her retirement fund some arse who earned 100k a year and pissed it all up the wall rather than saving? Why should income dependant pensioners suffer whilst asset rich ones laugh? If State pension was lavish, perhaps, but its a pittance in return for a lifetime of work and tax. I mean we might as well extend it and block access to NHS services for anybody on over average wage.
Pagan2 has effectively abolished the NHS already in their other proposals.
No I didn't typical left wing melodrama. Suggesting a cap on state care about average lifetime health care costs above which you have to insure is not abolishing the NHS in the least.
Depending on precisely what average you calculate, half the population will have lifetime health care costs above the current average, and half of all healthcare will become delivered outside the NHS and through a private insurance system. You would effectively turn the UK’s healthcare system into something like the US’s. About half of all healthcare funding in the US is paid for by the state, but their system targets state support at the old and pensioners (and federal employees), whereas your system would target state support at the lucky!
I advocated an insurance scheme to cover additional. I would suggest that the state itself runs a scheme for this to keep insurers honest and prevent abusive pricing. Many european countries have similar systems which are part insurance and part state funding. It does not have to be like america's lunacy
The thing is, a state-run insurance system that people have to pay into… well, basically, that just takes you back to where we started. You’ve re-labelled a tax into an insurance model… I guess you could call it a national insurance? The big difference is you go from funding healthcare via a progressive tax to funding it via effectively a flat tax.
But, sure, let’s look at some European models. In the UK, the state currently pays about 79% of all healthcare costs. Our nearest neighbour is France. The French state pays about 75% of all healthcare costs. It’s a similar figure in Germany, 77%. Switching to one of these European models doesn’t match what you proposed or deliver the savings you want.
Of course, those riding around in Government limos don't have to worry about the cost of filling their tanks up.
The biggest problem is the Fed being too aggressive in raising rates causing the dollar to rise against every other currency.
The US has a considerably bigger deficit than the UK, but the Fed is jacking up rates by 0.75% a go while the BoE aren't.
Indeed. Many people discussing the fall in the pound and of the London stock market, as a stick with which to beat the UK government, are missing the international picture. The issue is the strong dollar, against pretty much every other currency at the moment, caused mostly by the over-eagerness of the Fed to raise rates.
The Americans are pursuing 'beggar thy neighbour' economical policies as they always have. We can't keep following them, so we should stay the course. If a dollar ends up worth 6 pounds, so be it.
That would be awesome for me, I get paid in dollars so would be earning about £400k per year!
You might even be able to buy a few pints in central London with that kind of money.
Still no one addresses the elephant in the room. They complain about services being underfunded and how dare tax be cut.
If all services were properly funded and paid for out of tax we would have the government taking about 90% of gdp as tax.
Time to start asking what the state should be saying no we dont do that anymore. Sadly a conversation no politician seems to want to have.
The answer is not tax more when half the country is struggling to make ends meet as it is. The answer is reduce spending.
The really huge bits of state managed expenditure go on:
pensions social security NHS debt interest defence education justice/police/prisons local government services.
Debt interest will steadily rise unless we take a North Korean approach to liabilities.
In each other area above there is gigantic pressure massively to increase expenditure. Add social care to the list too. I can't thinkmof a single big area where people are generally saying 'enough' or 'too much'.
Can you (or anyone) suggest where the first, say, £200 bn reductions will be found?
For a start while those area's are high expenditure doesn't mean they should do everything they do now.
Defence for a start we could save a huge amount on procurement by just buying off the shelf stuff rather than creating custom shit just because.
NHS - last night I suggested a cap on lifetime health care expense, would set it at the average to start with and people can take out insurance to cover any over that. Also services such as tattoo removal should not be available. I would also refuse IVF on the NHS, a round of IVF costs about 10k....if you cant afford to save up 10k once a year to pay for it can you really afford the child as raising a child is likely to cost that a year in any case plus we have a lot of kids crying out for adoption.
I am sure others could come up with savings in all the other areas as well
There is some truth in your first post - so many areas of public services are so significantly underfunded right now that redressing the balance is going to be financially really quite tricky.
But your reply to @algarkirk just reinforces their point - defence procurement, tattoo removal, IVF are all tiny nibbles.
If the country was to go down your suggested route, it would need to involve, say, revoking the right to free education entirely. That's the scale we're talking about.
Which is why I suspect the only answer is to muddle on through. Only not in the way Truss and Kwarteng want us to do so.
They maybe tiny nibbles but I am sure there are plenty more tiny nibbles we can take and they start to add up. What we can't do is keep adding on things that need money because we are already taxing the majority of the country into the ground and there is no more to squeeze out.
The biggest change that ought to be made is public sector pensions switching from to db to dc and a cap on what the employer contributes. Currently employer contributions average about 20% in the public sector. Yes wouldn't help immediately but in the long term it would. I would also do a clawback on state pensions so for every 5£ you get from other pensions you state pension is reduced by a pound
The problem with state pension clawback is that many of us have planned retirement based on what we will need over state pension to get by. Is it really practical to say to someone who is expecting 14k a year in retirement (9k state approx plus 5k in his own schemes) that he has to take a 1k cut and live on 13k? Will rental incomes be counted as 'other pensions' for those that bought property as retirement provision? How would drawdown be handled?
Yes other income would be treated as other pensions and we all plan our lives everyday on facts that change over time and when the facts change we have to change our plans. I don't see why pensioners should be any different. If anything people facing clawback are probably in a better place to respond as chances are they have no mortgage or rent if they have significant enough pension. We could also start with a clawback free sum so only applies after first 5000 of additional income. HMRC will already have the figures for additional income so it could be handled via them.
Far far too harsh on low earners. Much higher clawback free amount required. And is this applied to future pensioners or to everyone, now? Will need to be worked out annually so all pensioners to complete tax returns? Youre basically telling a pensioner on average UK income youre taking 6 grand a year off them, the equivalent of increasing basic rate on an average earner in work to over 45%.
Most low earners will not be getting anywhere near 5K in additional pension.
HMRC already knows how much pensioners get in total as it taxes them above a certain figure so no tax returns required. Landlords also get taxed pensioner or not.
How do you get to taking 6K off them....for that level of clawback they would need additional income over the state pension of 30K or 35k if you give them the first 5K free of clawback. In my book someone with additional income of 30K doesnt need the state pension
Well if we give them the 5k allowance we are taking 5k of state pension back, or the equivalent of raising basic rate for an average wage earner to about 40%. Someone earning 60,000 a year doesn't 'need' the personal allowance. Why should a pensioner who planned his or her retirement fund some arse who earned 100k a year and pissed it all up the wall rather than saving? Why should income dependant pensioners suffer whilst asset rich ones laugh? If State pension was lavish, perhaps, but its a pittance in return for a lifetime of work and tax. I mean we might as well extend it and block access to NHS services for anybody on over average wage.
sighs you misunderstood I think
You get state pension of 9k You get additional income once the additional income is over 5k then for every 5£ you get state pension is reduced by £1
so additional income is 5k you get full state pension at 10K additional you get 1K removed from state pension at 20K additional you get 4k less state pension
so total for the 3 scenarios would be 14K, 18k,and 25K
So on practice not any different to increasing taxation on pensioners, for example by charging all pensioners NI.
In practise yes it would be like a tax.
Sorry but you can't all bang on about pension time bombs, demographic pressure and underfunded services and yet any time someone suggests reducing the things we spend on or trying to save money you are all up in arms.
We either reduce spending or it all collapses. Yes that means some are going to lose out. Doing nothing is no longer an option.
May I refer you to my header on the NHS, where I did address these issues, and make some proposals to address them.
The you in my post wasn't aimed at you personally but at all of the people who are constantly bemoaning underfunded services etc. Yet reacting in horror when anyone comes up with a proposal to change things. Cf Mays dementia tax
Agreed about the dementia tax. And keep coming with the proposals - they're much more constructive than much of what is posted on here, even if they're robustly challenged.
Thing is, right now, the most obvious proposal to change things is simply cancel what the government has announced. Wind back 48 hours, we had cheaper debt and less of it, and therefore very significantly better funded public services, for a given level of deficit.
If you're insisting on gentle nibbles rather than voracious gulps, let's at least not feed the elephant up so its even bigger. (This isn't directed at you specifically - you haven't as far as I can see argued for the governmeent's economic idiocy).
The budget is obviously dreadful but I'm maybe in a minority in that I think it does make sense politically. To have a chance of winning another term of tory government, with the polls showing a solid Labour lead, Truss has to project her government as fresh and vigorous and above all NEW, ie repeat the trick Johnson managed for GE19. She can't, unlike him, use personality, and she doesn't have Brexit or an electorally toxic Labour opponent going for her, therefore it has to be done on policy. Hence this "new era", "tax cutting", "going for growth", "break with the stale consensus" rhetoric and package.
They know it's reckless and requires magical thinking to believe it'll pay for itself through higher growth. But they also know that "steady as she goes" through this energy crisis, fund the help package via a sensible mix of tax and borrowing, whilst being objectively the correct approach would deliver little political upside. It would leave the game unchanged when they need to kick the table over and force a new deck. Having done so they plan to frame the narrative over the next 2 years as New Era Low Tax Tories vs Same Old Labour Tax & Spenders. Come the GE, to be whispering these dirty words into the ears of the electorate - "Do you really want to pay more tax?"
This is Yethe play, I think. They (Truss, the Tories) have to get their "low tax" mantle back - they can't win an election without that - and this is why they're cutting taxes when the country can’t afford it. It's not because they think it'll boost aspiration, investment and long term sustainable growth. They have no clue whether it'll do that and neither do they really care. They know you can’t audit these things anyway because it’s impossible to strip out causes and effects. And in political time there is no long term, there’s only the election. The reason they are cutting taxes is very simple and it is pure politics – it's so Labour have to say they’d raise them.
The just punishment would be a tiny Conservative majority to give them till 2029 to begin to clear up the damage.
That would probably lead to a weak and chaotic (well, still weaker and more chaotic) that would end up doing much more damage.
What we need is for the Conservatives to get beat and then for Starmer to ram PR through Parliament, so that any realistic prospect of them ever ruling the country alone again is removed.
What we'll actually get is a couple of years of Labour flailing about as it's consumed by the enormity of cleaning up the mess, followed by yet more of the Tories carving up the nation's remaining assets and distributing them to the already minted.
PR would see the Tories govern again, just likely neither Labour nor the Tories would ever win a majority again.
Instead smaller parties like the LDs, Greens and RefUK and SNP would normally hold the balance of power
That's the entire point. The likes of Farage, Rees-Mogg and Corbyn, who are representative of small but very rich and/or very loud segments of public opinion, could be hived off into extremist sects and properly marginalised. It's obvious to anyone with eyes to see that our current suite of "broad church" political parties has failed utterly.
PR is no guarantor against the capture of the entire political system by loonies, but it would certainly make it a lot less probable.
In theory but in practice none of them are likely to win a majority under FPTP.
Under PR though the nationalist Sweden Democrats are now kingmakers in Sweden, the nationalist Meloni is likely to become PM in Italy tomorrow and in NZ the Greens or New Zealand First are often kingmakers. In Germany too the Greens are in power and the AfD growing in strength and in Spain the hard left Podemos are kingmakers with the populist right Vox gaining support
All of the examples that you quote have something important in common: the lunatics haven't completely taken over the asylum. Our system offers completely untrammelled power to any sect that can capture one of the two major parties (the control of each of which is, in turn, in the gift of a very small selectorate of party members who are massively to the left or right of popular opinion.) We came within an ace of systemic capture by the North London branch office of Hamas in 2017; we are now actually under the power of a Reaganomics tribute act, only minus a strong economy or a strong currency to help backstop all their nonsense. This is not going to end well.
Yes but Corbyn still failed to win under FPTP in 2017 and on current polls Truss would be unlikely to win in 2024 either.
PR however would give both a better chance of forming a government in a coalition, even without the small chance of a majority under FPTP
Still no one addresses the elephant in the room. They complain about services being underfunded and how dare tax be cut.
If all services were properly funded and paid for out of tax we would have the government taking about 90% of gdp as tax.
Time to start asking what the state should be saying no we dont do that anymore. Sadly a conversation no politician seems to want to have.
The answer is not tax more when half the country is struggling to make ends meet as it is. The answer is reduce spending.
The really huge bits of state managed expenditure go on:
pensions social security NHS debt interest defence education justice/police/prisons local government services.
Debt interest will steadily rise unless we take a North Korean approach to liabilities.
In each other area above there is gigantic pressure massively to increase expenditure. Add social care to the list too. I can't thinkmof a single big area where people are generally saying 'enough' or 'too much'.
Can you (or anyone) suggest where the first, say, £200 bn reductions will be found?
For a start while those area's are high expenditure doesn't mean they should do everything they do now.
Defence for a start we could save a huge amount on procurement by just buying off the shelf stuff rather than creating custom shit just because.
NHS - last night I suggested a cap on lifetime health care expense, would set it at the average to start with and people can take out insurance to cover any over that. Also services such as tattoo removal should not be available. I would also refuse IVF on the NHS, a round of IVF costs about 10k....if you cant afford to save up 10k once a year to pay for it can you really afford the child as raising a child is likely to cost that a year in any case plus we have a lot of kids crying out for adoption.
I am sure others could come up with savings in all the other areas as well
A round of IVF doesn't cost £10k. Those babies are the tax payers of the future who will look after you in your dotage.
We paid around 11k for two rounds of IVF. Happily the second was sucessful and I’m now terrified about next year! (And very excited).
Still no one addresses the elephant in the room. They complain about services being underfunded and how dare tax be cut.
If all services were properly funded and paid for out of tax we would have the government taking about 90% of gdp as tax.
Time to start asking what the state should be saying no we dont do that anymore. Sadly a conversation no politician seems to want to have.
The answer is not tax more when half the country is struggling to make ends meet as it is. The answer is reduce spending.
The really huge bits of state managed expenditure go on:
pensions social security NHS debt interest defence education justice/police/prisons local government services.
Debt interest will steadily rise unless we take a North Korean approach to liabilities.
In each other area above there is gigantic pressure massively to increase expenditure. Add social care to the list too. I can't thinkmof a single big area where people are generally saying 'enough' or 'too much'.
Can you (or anyone) suggest where the first, say, £200 bn reductions will be found?
For a start while those area's are high expenditure doesn't mean they should do everything they do now.
Defence for a start we could save a huge amount on procurement by just buying off the shelf stuff rather than creating custom shit just because.
NHS - last night I suggested a cap on lifetime health care expense, would set it at the average to start with and people can take out insurance to cover any over that. Also services such as tattoo removal should not be available. I would also refuse IVF on the NHS, a round of IVF costs about 10k....if you cant afford to save up 10k once a year to pay for it can you really afford the child as raising a child is likely to cost that a year in any case plus we have a lot of kids crying out for adoption.
I am sure others could come up with savings in all the other areas as well
There is some truth in your first post - so many areas of public services are so significantly underfunded right now that redressing the balance is going to be financially really quite tricky.
But your reply to @algarkirk just reinforces their point - defence procurement, tattoo removal, IVF are all tiny nibbles.
If the country was to go down your suggested route, it would need to involve, say, revoking the right to free education entirely. That's the scale we're talking about.
Which is why I suspect the only answer is to muddle on through. Only not in the way Truss and Kwarteng want us to do so.
They maybe tiny nibbles but I am sure there are plenty more tiny nibbles we can take and they start to add up. What we can't do is keep adding on things that need money because we are already taxing the majority of the country into the ground and there is no more to squeeze out.
The biggest change that ought to be made is public sector pensions switching from to db to dc and a cap on what the employer contributes. Currently employer contributions average about 20% in the public sector. Yes wouldn't help immediately but in the long term it would. I would also do a clawback on state pensions so for every 5£ you get from other pensions you state pension is reduced by a pound
The problem with state pension clawback is that many of us have planned retirement based on what we will need over state pension to get by. Is it really practical to say to someone who is expecting 14k a year in retirement (9k state approx plus 5k in his own schemes) that he has to take a 1k cut and live on 13k? Will rental incomes be counted as 'other pensions' for those that bought property as retirement provision? How would drawdown be handled?
Yes other income would be treated as other pensions and we all plan our lives everyday on facts that change over time and when the facts change we have to change our plans. I don't see why pensioners should be any different. If anything people facing clawback are probably in a better place to respond as chances are they have no mortgage or rent if they have significant enough pension. We could also start with a clawback free sum so only applies after first 5000 of additional income. HMRC will already have the figures for additional income so it could be handled via them.
Far far too harsh on low earners. Much higher clawback free amount required. And is this applied to future pensioners or to everyone, now? Will need to be worked out annually so all pensioners to complete tax returns? Youre basically telling a pensioner on average UK income youre taking 6 grand a year off them, the equivalent of increasing basic rate on an average earner in work to over 45%.
Most low earners will not be getting anywhere near 5K in additional pension.
HMRC already knows how much pensioners get in total as it taxes them above a certain figure so no tax returns required. Landlords also get taxed pensioner or not.
How do you get to taking 6K off them....for that level of clawback they would need additional income over the state pension of 30K or 35k if you give them the first 5K free of clawback. In my book someone with additional income of 30K doesnt need the state pension
Well if we give them the 5k allowance we are taking 5k of state pension back, or the equivalent of raising basic rate for an average wage earner to about 40%. Someone earning 60,000 a year doesn't 'need' the personal allowance. Why should a pensioner who planned his or her retirement fund some arse who earned 100k a year and pissed it all up the wall rather than saving? Why should income dependant pensioners suffer whilst asset rich ones laugh? If State pension was lavish, perhaps, but its a pittance in return for a lifetime of work and tax. I mean we might as well extend it and block access to NHS services for anybody on over average wage.
sighs you misunderstood I think
You get state pension of 9k You get additional income once the additional income is over 5k then for every 5£ you get state pension is reduced by £1
so additional income is 5k you get full state pension at 10K additional you get 1K removed from state pension at 20K additional you get 4k less state pension
so total for the 3 scenarios would be 14K, 18k,and 25K
So on practice not any different to increasing taxation on pensioners, for example by charging all pensioners NI.
In practise yes it would be like a tax.
Sorry but you can't all bang on about pension time bombs, demographic pressure and underfunded services and yet any time someone suggests reducing the things we spend on or trying to save money you are all up in arms.
We either reduce spending or it all collapses. Yes that means some are going to lose out. Doing nothing is no longer an option.
May I refer you to my header on the NHS, where I did address these issues, and make some proposals to address them.
The you in my post wasn't aimed at you personally but at all of the people who are constantly bemoaning underfunded services etc. Yet reacting in horror when anyone comes up with a proposal to change things. Cf Mays dementia tax
Agreed about the dementia tax. And keep coming with the proposals - they're much more constructive than much of what is posted on here, even if they're robustly challenged.
Thing is, right now, the most obvious proposal to change things is simply cancel what the government has announced. Wind back 48 hours, we had cheaper debt and less of it, and therefore very significantly better funded public services, for a given level of deficit.
If you're insisting on gentle nibbles rather than voracious gulps, let's at least not feed the elephant up so its even bigger. (This isn't directed at you specifically - you haven't as far as I can see argued for the governmeent's economic idiocy).
Agreed entirely with your first point. The level of debate generally (not here, but in the country at large) is so pitifully low now. I think the response to May's proposal summed that up quite nicely.
Still no one addresses the elephant in the room. They complain about services being underfunded and how dare tax be cut.
If all services were properly funded and paid for out of tax we would have the government taking about 90% of gdp as tax.
Time to start asking what the state should be saying no we dont do that anymore. Sadly a conversation no politician seems to want to have.
The answer is not tax more when half the country is struggling to make ends meet as it is. The answer is reduce spending.
The really huge bits of state managed expenditure go on:
pensions social security NHS debt interest defence education justice/police/prisons local government services.
Debt interest will steadily rise unless we take a North Korean approach to liabilities.
In each other area above there is gigantic pressure massively to increase expenditure. Add social care to the list too. I can't thinkmof a single big area where people are generally saying 'enough' or 'too much'.
Can you (or anyone) suggest where the first, say, £200 bn reductions will be found?
For a start while those area's are high expenditure doesn't mean they should do everything they do now.
Defence for a start we could save a huge amount on procurement by just buying off the shelf stuff rather than creating custom shit just because.
NHS - last night I suggested a cap on lifetime health care expense, would set it at the average to start with and people can take out insurance to cover any over that. Also services such as tattoo removal should not be available. I would also refuse IVF on the NHS, a round of IVF costs about 10k....if you cant afford to save up 10k once a year to pay for it can you really afford the child as raising a child is likely to cost that a year in any case plus we have a lot of kids crying out for adoption.
I am sure others could come up with savings in all the other areas as well
A round of IVF doesn't cost £10k. Those babies are the tax payers of the future who will look after you in your dotage.
We paid around 11k for two rounds of IVF. Happily the second was sucessful and I’m now terrified about next year! (And very excited).
Has the fall in the pound helped UK exporters? That is what I would expect, but I haven't seen any of the commenters here mention that, or better yet, provide any numbers.
I would think it would also help, for example, software developers, who want to work for US firms, while living in the UK.
There are very few left bar the odd flint knapper
Our itinerant flint knapper does seem to be a net drain on the national finances as he and his commissioners earn their money here but seem to spend their earnings funding foreign hoteliers, sommeliers and restaurants.
He did spend money in Newport, Kirkwall and Wick to be quite fair. Don't know if he ever got to Northumberland and Tweeddale.
Still no one addresses the elephant in the room. They complain about services being underfunded and how dare tax be cut.
If all services were properly funded and paid for out of tax we would have the government taking about 90% of gdp as tax.
Time to start asking what the state should be saying no we dont do that anymore. Sadly a conversation no politician seems to want to have.
The answer is not tax more when half the country is struggling to make ends meet as it is. The answer is reduce spending.
The really huge bits of state managed expenditure go on:
pensions social security NHS debt interest defence education justice/police/prisons local government services.
Debt interest will steadily rise unless we take a North Korean approach to liabilities.
In each other area above there is gigantic pressure massively to increase expenditure. Add social care to the list too. I can't thinkmof a single big area where people are generally saying 'enough' or 'too much'.
Can you (or anyone) suggest where the first, say, £200 bn reductions will be found?
For a start while those area's are high expenditure doesn't mean they should do everything they do now.
Defence for a start we could save a huge amount on procurement by just buying off the shelf stuff rather than creating custom shit just because.
NHS - last night I suggested a cap on lifetime health care expense, would set it at the average to start with and people can take out insurance to cover any over that. Also services such as tattoo removal should not be available. I would also refuse IVF on the NHS, a round of IVF costs about 10k....if you cant afford to save up 10k once a year to pay for it can you really afford the child as raising a child is likely to cost that a year in any case plus we have a lot of kids crying out for adoption.
I am sure others could come up with savings in all the other areas as well
There is some truth in your first post - so many areas of public services are so significantly underfunded right now that redressing the balance is going to be financially really quite tricky.
But your reply to @algarkirk just reinforces their point - defence procurement, tattoo removal, IVF are all tiny nibbles.
If the country was to go down your suggested route, it would need to involve, say, revoking the right to free education entirely. That's the scale we're talking about.
Which is why I suspect the only answer is to muddle on through. Only not in the way Truss and Kwarteng want us to do so.
They maybe tiny nibbles but I am sure there are plenty more tiny nibbles we can take and they start to add up. What we can't do is keep adding on things that need money because we are already taxing the majority of the country into the ground and there is no more to squeeze out.
The biggest change that ought to be made is public sector pensions switching from to db to dc and a cap on what the employer contributes. Currently employer contributions average about 20% in the public sector. Yes wouldn't help immediately but in the long term it would. I would also do a clawback on state pensions so for every 5£ you get from other pensions you state pension is reduced by a pound
The problem with state pension clawback is that many of us have planned retirement based on what we will need over state pension to get by. Is it really practical to say to someone who is expecting 14k a year in retirement (9k state approx plus 5k in his own schemes) that he has to take a 1k cut and live on 13k? Will rental incomes be counted as 'other pensions' for those that bought property as retirement provision? How would drawdown be handled?
Yes other income would be treated as other pensions and we all plan our lives everyday on facts that change over time and when the facts change we have to change our plans. I don't see why pensioners should be any different. If anything people facing clawback are probably in a better place to respond as chances are they have no mortgage or rent if they have significant enough pension. We could also start with a clawback free sum so only applies after first 5000 of additional income. HMRC will already have the figures for additional income so it could be handled via them.
Far far too harsh on low earners. Much higher clawback free amount required. And is this applied to future pensioners or to everyone, now? Will need to be worked out annually so all pensioners to complete tax returns? Youre basically telling a pensioner on average UK income youre taking 6 grand a year off them, the equivalent of increasing basic rate on an average earner in work to over 45%.
Most low earners will not be getting anywhere near 5K in additional pension.
HMRC already knows how much pensioners get in total as it taxes them above a certain figure so no tax returns required. Landlords also get taxed pensioner or not.
How do you get to taking 6K off them....for that level of clawback they would need additional income over the state pension of 30K or 35k if you give them the first 5K free of clawback. In my book someone with additional income of 30K doesnt need the state pension
Well if we give them the 5k allowance we are taking 5k of state pension back, or the equivalent of raising basic rate for an average wage earner to about 40%. Someone earning 60,000 a year doesn't 'need' the personal allowance. Why should a pensioner who planned his or her retirement fund some arse who earned 100k a year and pissed it all up the wall rather than saving? Why should income dependant pensioners suffer whilst asset rich ones laugh? If State pension was lavish, perhaps, but its a pittance in return for a lifetime of work and tax. I mean we might as well extend it and block access to NHS services for anybody on over average wage.
Pagan2 has effectively abolished the NHS already in their other proposals.
No I didn't typical left wing melodrama. Suggesting a cap on state care about average lifetime health care costs above which you have to insure is not abolishing the NHS in the least.
Depending on precisely what average you calculate, half the population will have lifetime health care costs above the current average, and half of all healthcare will become delivered outside the NHS and through a private insurance system. You would effectively turn the UK’s healthcare system into something like the US’s. About half of all healthcare funding in the US is paid for by the state, but their system targets state support at the old and pensioners (and federal employees), whereas your system would target state support at the lucky!
I advocated an insurance scheme to cover additional. I would suggest that the state itself runs a scheme for this to keep insurers honest and prevent abusive pricing. Many european countries have similar systems which are part insurance and part state funding. It does not have to be like america's lunacy
The thing is, a state-run insurance system that people have to pay into… well, basically, that just takes you back to where we started. You’ve re-labelled a tax into an insurance model… I guess you could call it a national insurance? The big difference is you go from funding healthcare via a progressive tax to funding it via effectively a flat tax.
But, sure, let’s look at some European models. In the UK, the state currently pays about 79% of all healthcare costs. Our nearest neighbour is France. The French state pays about 75% of all healthcare costs. It’s a similar figure in Germany, 77%. Switching to one of these European models doesn’t match what you proposed or deliver the savings you want.
I didn't say the state run scheme was mandatory. I suggested a state run scheme be run so that insurance companies offering similar schemes couldn't run riot.
Also those stats on europe while they look comparable may not be. Does for example the french system or the german system do all the procedures the nhs does for free or do they go you want procedure x sorry need to go private for that. I don't know that answer so am speculating
Of course, those riding around in Government limos don't have to worry about the cost of filling their tanks up.
The biggest problem is the Fed being too aggressive in raising rates causing the dollar to rise against every other currency.
The US has a considerably bigger deficit than the UK, but the Fed is jacking up rates by 0.75% a go while the BoE aren't.
Indeed. Many people discussing the fall in the pound and of the London stock market, as a stick with which to beat the UK government, are missing the international picture. The issue is the strong dollar, against pretty much every other currency at the moment, caused mostly by the over-eagerness of the Fed to raise rates.
The pound is down against the Euro too. QED.
Not significantly. The pound to Euro variance is within normal to be expected variance ranges. It's the aggressive Fed that are making the moves.
The pound was never remotely this low before Brexit. There has been something of a rollercoaster since Brexit, but the Euro has sunk very significantly this month, way lower than it’s been for the last year.
Of course, those riding around in Government limos don't have to worry about the cost of filling their tanks up.
The biggest problem is the Fed being too aggressive in raising rates causing the dollar to rise against every other currency.
The US has a considerably bigger deficit than the UK, but the Fed is jacking up rates by 0.75% a go while the BoE aren't.
Indeed. Many people discussing the fall in the pound and of the London stock market, as a stick with which to beat the UK government, are missing the international picture. The issue is the strong dollar, against pretty much every other currency at the moment, caused mostly by the over-eagerness of the Fed to raise rates.
The Americans are pursuing 'beggar thy neighbour' economical policies as they always have. We can't keep following them, so we should stay the course. If a dollar ends up worth 6 pounds, so be it.
That would be awesome for me, I get paid in dollars so would be earning about £400k per year!
You might even be able to buy a few pints in central London with that kind of money.
I paid £12.50 for a pint in my local last night.
The sandpit is going to be a very expensive place for Europeans on holidays this winter.
Still no one addresses the elephant in the room. They complain about services being underfunded and how dare tax be cut.
If all services were properly funded and paid for out of tax we would have the government taking about 90% of gdp as tax.
Time to start asking what the state should be saying no we dont do that anymore. Sadly a conversation no politician seems to want to have.
The answer is not tax more when half the country is struggling to make ends meet as it is. The answer is reduce spending.
The really huge bits of state managed expenditure go on:
pensions social security NHS debt interest defence education justice/police/prisons local government services.
Debt interest will steadily rise unless we take a North Korean approach to liabilities.
In each other area above there is gigantic pressure massively to increase expenditure. Add social care to the list too. I can't thinkmof a single big area where people are generally saying 'enough' or 'too much'.
Can you (or anyone) suggest where the first, say, £200 bn reductions will be found?
For a start while those area's are high expenditure doesn't mean they should do everything they do now.
Defence for a start we could save a huge amount on procurement by just buying off the shelf stuff rather than creating custom shit just because.
NHS - last night I suggested a cap on lifetime health care expense, would set it at the average to start with and people can take out insurance to cover any over that. Also services such as tattoo removal should not be available. I would also refuse IVF on the NHS, a round of IVF costs about 10k....if you cant afford to save up 10k once a year to pay for it can you really afford the child as raising a child is likely to cost that a year in any case plus we have a lot of kids crying out for adoption.
I am sure others could come up with savings in all the other areas as well
A round of IVF doesn't cost £10k. Those babies are the tax payers of the future who will look after you in your dotage.
We paid around 11k for two rounds of IVF. Happily the second was sucessful and I’m now terrified about next year! (And very excited).
Congratulations a child is a hugely rewarding investment of time and money
Of course, those riding around in Government limos don't have to worry about the cost of filling their tanks up.
The biggest problem is the Fed being too aggressive in raising rates causing the dollar to rise against every other currency.
The US has a considerably bigger deficit than the UK, but the Fed is jacking up rates by 0.75% a go while the BoE aren't.
Indeed. Many people discussing the fall in the pound and of the London stock market, as a stick with which to beat the UK government, are missing the international picture. The issue is the strong dollar, against pretty much every other currency at the moment, caused mostly by the over-eagerness of the Fed to raise rates.
The Americans are pursuing 'beggar thy neighbour' economical policies as they always have. We can't keep following them, so we should stay the course. If a dollar ends up worth 6 pounds, so be it.
That would be awesome for me, I get paid in dollars so would be earning about £400k per year!
You might even be able to buy a few pints in central London with that kind of money.
I paid £12.50 for a pint in my local last night.
The sandpit is going to be a very expensive place for Europeans on holidays this winter.
With inflation it's already £12.60 tonight. Get them in quick.
Of course, those riding around in Government limos don't have to worry about the cost of filling their tanks up.
The biggest problem is the Fed being too aggressive in raising rates causing the dollar to rise against every other currency.
The US has a considerably bigger deficit than the UK, but the Fed is jacking up rates by 0.75% a go while the BoE aren't.
Indeed. Many people discussing the fall in the pound and of the London stock market, as a stick with which to beat the UK government, are missing the international picture. The issue is the strong dollar, against pretty much every other currency at the moment, caused mostly by the over-eagerness of the Fed to raise rates.
The pound is down against the Euro too. QED.
Not significantly. The pound to Euro variance is within normal to be expected variance ranges. It's the aggressive Fed that are making the moves.
Na, it dropped 2% in a few hours.
Yes it "dropped" to one cent higher than it was this time last year.
The pound and euro are bouncing around in normal variance ranges seen in recent years. It's the dollar that has moved significantly.
Still no one addresses the elephant in the room. They complain about services being underfunded and how dare tax be cut.
If all services were properly funded and paid for out of tax we would have the government taking about 90% of gdp as tax.
Time to start asking what the state should be saying no we dont do that anymore. Sadly a conversation no politician seems to want to have.
The answer is not tax more when half the country is struggling to make ends meet as it is. The answer is reduce spending.
The really huge bits of state managed expenditure go on:
pensions social security NHS debt interest defence education justice/police/prisons local government services.
Debt interest will steadily rise unless we take a North Korean approach to liabilities.
In each other area above there is gigantic pressure massively to increase expenditure. Add social care to the list too. I can't thinkmof a single big area where people are generally saying 'enough' or 'too much'.
Can you (or anyone) suggest where the first, say, £200 bn reductions will be found?
For a start while those area's are high expenditure doesn't mean they should do everything they do now.
Defence for a start we could save a huge amount on procurement by just buying off the shelf stuff rather than creating custom shit just because.
NHS - last night I suggested a cap on lifetime health care expense, would set it at the average to start with and people can take out insurance to cover any over that. Also services such as tattoo removal should not be available. I would also refuse IVF on the NHS, a round of IVF costs about 10k....if you cant afford to save up 10k once a year to pay for it can you really afford the child as raising a child is likely to cost that a year in any case plus we have a lot of kids crying out for adoption.
I am sure others could come up with savings in all the other areas as well
There is some truth in your first post - so many areas of public services are so significantly underfunded right now that redressing the balance is going to be financially really quite tricky.
But your reply to @algarkirk just reinforces their point - defence procurement, tattoo removal, IVF are all tiny nibbles.
If the country was to go down your suggested route, it would need to involve, say, revoking the right to free education entirely. That's the scale we're talking about.
Which is why I suspect the only answer is to muddle on through. Only not in the way Truss and Kwarteng want us to do so.
They maybe tiny nibbles but I am sure there are plenty more tiny nibbles we can take and they start to add up. What we can't do is keep adding on things that need money because we are already taxing the majority of the country into the ground and there is no more to squeeze out.
The biggest change that ought to be made is public sector pensions switching from to db to dc and a cap on what the employer contributes. Currently employer contributions average about 20% in the public sector. Yes wouldn't help immediately but in the long term it would. I would also do a clawback on state pensions so for every 5£ you get from other pensions you state pension is reduced by a pound
The problem with state pension clawback is that many of us have planned retirement based on what we will need over state pension to get by. Is it really practical to say to someone who is expecting 14k a year in retirement (9k state approx plus 5k in his own schemes) that he has to take a 1k cut and live on 13k? Will rental incomes be counted as 'other pensions' for those that bought property as retirement provision? How would drawdown be handled?
Yes other income would be treated as other pensions and we all plan our lives everyday on facts that change over time and when the facts change we have to change our plans. I don't see why pensioners should be any different. If anything people facing clawback are probably in a better place to respond as chances are they have no mortgage or rent if they have significant enough pension. We could also start with a clawback free sum so only applies after first 5000 of additional income. HMRC will already have the figures for additional income so it could be handled via them.
Far far too harsh on low earners. Much higher clawback free amount required. And is this applied to future pensioners or to everyone, now? Will need to be worked out annually so all pensioners to complete tax returns? Youre basically telling a pensioner on average UK income youre taking 6 grand a year off them, the equivalent of increasing basic rate on an average earner in work to over 45%.
Most low earners will not be getting anywhere near 5K in additional pension.
HMRC already knows how much pensioners get in total as it taxes them above a certain figure so no tax returns required. Landlords also get taxed pensioner or not.
How do you get to taking 6K off them....for that level of clawback they would need additional income over the state pension of 30K or 35k if you give them the first 5K free of clawback. In my book someone with additional income of 30K doesnt need the state pension
Well if we give them the 5k allowance we are taking 5k of state pension back, or the equivalent of raising basic rate for an average wage earner to about 40%. Someone earning 60,000 a year doesn't 'need' the personal allowance. Why should a pensioner who planned his or her retirement fund some arse who earned 100k a year and pissed it all up the wall rather than saving? Why should income dependant pensioners suffer whilst asset rich ones laugh? If State pension was lavish, perhaps, but its a pittance in return for a lifetime of work and tax. I mean we might as well extend it and block access to NHS services for anybody on over average wage.
sighs you misunderstood I think
You get state pension of 9k You get additional income once the additional income is over 5k then for every 5£ you get state pension is reduced by £1
so additional income is 5k you get full state pension at 10K additional you get 1K removed from state pension at 20K additional you get 4k less state pension
so total for the 3 scenarios would be 14K, 18k,and 25K
So on practice not any different to increasing taxation on pensioners, for example by charging all pensioners NI.
In practise yes it would be like a tax.
Sorry but you can't all bang on about pension time bombs, demographic pressure and underfunded services and yet any time someone suggests reducing the things we spend on or trying to save money you are all up in arms.
We either reduce spending or it all collapses. Yes that means some are going to lose out. Doing nothing is no longer an option.
May I refer you to my header on the NHS, where I did address these issues, and make some proposals to address them.
The you in my post wasn't aimed at you personally but at all of the people who are constantly bemoaning underfunded services etc. Yet reacting in horror when anyone comes up with a proposal to change things. Cf Mays dementia tax
Agreed about the dementia tax. And keep coming with the proposals - they're much more constructive than much of what is posted on here, even if they're robustly challenged.
Thing is, right now, the most obvious proposal to change things is simply cancel what the government has announced. Wind back 48 hours, we had cheaper debt and less of it, and therefore very significantly better funded public services, for a given level of deficit.
If you're insisting on gentle nibbles rather than voracious gulps, let's at least not feed the elephant up so its even bigger. (This isn't directed at you specifically - you haven't as far as I can see argued for the governmeent's economic idiocy).
Agreed entirely with your first point. The level of debate generally (not here, but in the country at large) is so pitifully low now. I think the response to May's proposal summed that up quite nicely.
I don't think it's about the level of debate. I think the average person believes they can force the average taxpayer to pay for everything - once medicine and education, now energy, next probably food - and any deviation from this will lead to screams of rage.
Still no one addresses the elephant in the room. They complain about services being underfunded and how dare tax be cut.
If all services were properly funded and paid for out of tax we would have the government taking about 90% of gdp as tax.
Time to start asking what the state should be saying no we dont do that anymore. Sadly a conversation no politician seems to want to have.
The answer is not tax more when half the country is struggling to make ends meet as it is. The answer is reduce spending.
The really huge bits of state managed expenditure go on:
pensions social security NHS debt interest defence education justice/police/prisons local government services.
Debt interest will steadily rise unless we take a North Korean approach to liabilities.
In each other area above there is gigantic pressure massively to increase expenditure. Add social care to the list too. I can't thinkmof a single big area where people are generally saying 'enough' or 'too much'.
Can you (or anyone) suggest where the first, say, £200 bn reductions will be found?
For a start while those area's are high expenditure doesn't mean they should do everything they do now.
Defence for a start we could save a huge amount on procurement by just buying off the shelf stuff rather than creating custom shit just because.
NHS - last night I suggested a cap on lifetime health care expense, would set it at the average to start with and people can take out insurance to cover any over that. Also services such as tattoo removal should not be available. I would also refuse IVF on the NHS, a round of IVF costs about 10k....if you cant afford to save up 10k once a year to pay for it can you really afford the child as raising a child is likely to cost that a year in any case plus we have a lot of kids crying out for adoption.
I am sure others could come up with savings in all the other areas as well
There is some truth in your first post - so many areas of public services are so significantly underfunded right now that redressing the balance is going to be financially really quite tricky.
But your reply to @algarkirk just reinforces their point - defence procurement, tattoo removal, IVF are all tiny nibbles.
If the country was to go down your suggested route, it would need to involve, say, revoking the right to free education entirely. That's the scale we're talking about.
Which is why I suspect the only answer is to muddle on through. Only not in the way Truss and Kwarteng want us to do so.
They maybe tiny nibbles but I am sure there are plenty more tiny nibbles we can take and they start to add up. What we can't do is keep adding on things that need money because we are already taxing the majority of the country into the ground and there is no more to squeeze out.
The biggest change that ought to be made is public sector pensions switching from to db to dc and a cap on what the employer contributes. Currently employer contributions average about 20% in the public sector. Yes wouldn't help immediately but in the long term it would. I would also do a clawback on state pensions so for every 5£ you get from other pensions you state pension is reduced by a pound
The problem with state pension clawback is that many of us have planned retirement based on what we will need over state pension to get by. Is it really practical to say to someone who is expecting 14k a year in retirement (9k state approx plus 5k in his own schemes) that he has to take a 1k cut and live on 13k? Will rental incomes be counted as 'other pensions' for those that bought property as retirement provision? How would drawdown be handled?
Yes other income would be treated as other pensions and we all plan our lives everyday on facts that change over time and when the facts change we have to change our plans. I don't see why pensioners should be any different. If anything people facing clawback are probably in a better place to respond as chances are they have no mortgage or rent if they have significant enough pension. We could also start with a clawback free sum so only applies after first 5000 of additional income. HMRC will already have the figures for additional income so it could be handled via them.
Far far too harsh on low earners. Much higher clawback free amount required. And is this applied to future pensioners or to everyone, now? Will need to be worked out annually so all pensioners to complete tax returns? Youre basically telling a pensioner on average UK income youre taking 6 grand a year off them, the equivalent of increasing basic rate on an average earner in work to over 45%.
Most low earners will not be getting anywhere near 5K in additional pension.
HMRC already knows how much pensioners get in total as it taxes them above a certain figure so no tax returns required. Landlords also get taxed pensioner or not.
How do you get to taking 6K off them....for that level of clawback they would need additional income over the state pension of 30K or 35k if you give them the first 5K free of clawback. In my book someone with additional income of 30K doesnt need the state pension
Well if we give them the 5k allowance we are taking 5k of state pension back, or the equivalent of raising basic rate for an average wage earner to about 40%. Someone earning 60,000 a year doesn't 'need' the personal allowance. Why should a pensioner who planned his or her retirement fund some arse who earned 100k a year and pissed it all up the wall rather than saving? Why should income dependant pensioners suffer whilst asset rich ones laugh? If State pension was lavish, perhaps, but its a pittance in return for a lifetime of work and tax. I mean we might as well extend it and block access to NHS services for anybody on over average wage.
sighs you misunderstood I think
You get state pension of 9k You get additional income once the additional income is over 5k then for every 5£ you get state pension is reduced by £1
so additional income is 5k you get full state pension at 10K additional you get 1K removed from state pension at 20K additional you get 4k less state pension
so total for the 3 scenarios would be 14K, 18k,and 25K
So on practice not any different to increasing taxation on pensioners, for example by charging all pensioners NI.
In practise yes it would be like a tax.
Sorry but you can't all bang on about pension time bombs, demographic pressure and underfunded services and yet any time someone suggests reducing the things we spend on or trying to save money you are all up in arms.
We either reduce spending or it all collapses. Yes that means some are going to lose out. Doing nothing is no longer an option.
Yes but youre 'taxing' them at 20% on top of income tax on their earnings from ca 14k to ca 59k
Yes and your point is?
We have to reduce or increase revenue. That means it has to come from somewhere.The employed are already taxed to the point that many in full employment have to use food banks so increasing basic rates is out. There aren't enough higher earners to make a dent in our spending.
So you tell us where you think the reduction or increased revenue should be found. You are very quick to say "no not there".
The employed are already taxed mortgaged and billed to the point that many in full employment have to use food banks...
Fixed it for ya. The current cost of living crisis is in no way generated by marginal rates of taxation. Taxation levels aren't the fundamental problem here, the way our economy has been skewed by the weird brand of capitalism we currently subscribe to, so that house prices and rental costs are unaffordable is.
Of course, those riding around in Government limos don't have to worry about the cost of filling their tanks up.
The biggest problem is the Fed being too aggressive in raising rates causing the dollar to rise against every other currency.
The US has a considerably bigger deficit than the UK, but the Fed is jacking up rates by 0.75% a go while the BoE aren't.
Indeed. Many people discussing the fall in the pound and of the London stock market, as a stick with which to beat the UK government, are missing the international picture. The issue is the strong dollar, against pretty much every other currency at the moment, caused mostly by the over-eagerness of the Fed to raise rates.
The pound is near an all time low against the Euro too. And it fell specifically after Kwateng's statement.
1.12 against an all time low of 1.02. Near-ish, I suppose.
GBP briefly dipped below €1.00 on the night of 30/31 Dec 2008.
I know, because I was the duty IT manager for a major UK bank, one of whose systems went tits up at the idea of £ < € and started offering free money to other companies' automatic trading systems. We had to shut it down sharpish in the early hours but not before we'd lost several £m.
By the time we fixed the system the £ was back up above the € again of course.
Still no one addresses the elephant in the room. They complain about services being underfunded and how dare tax be cut.
If all services were properly funded and paid for out of tax we would have the government taking about 90% of gdp as tax.
Time to start asking what the state should be saying no we dont do that anymore. Sadly a conversation no politician seems to want to have.
The answer is not tax more when half the country is struggling to make ends meet as it is. The answer is reduce spending.
The really huge bits of state managed expenditure go on:
pensions social security NHS debt interest defence education justice/police/prisons local government services.
Debt interest will steadily rise unless we take a North Korean approach to liabilities.
In each other area above there is gigantic pressure massively to increase expenditure. Add social care to the list too. I can't thinkmof a single big area where people are generally saying 'enough' or 'too much'.
Can you (or anyone) suggest where the first, say, £200 bn reductions will be found?
For a start while those area's are high expenditure doesn't mean they should do everything they do now.
Defence for a start we could save a huge amount on procurement by just buying off the shelf stuff rather than creating custom shit just because.
NHS - last night I suggested a cap on lifetime health care expense, would set it at the average to start with and people can take out insurance to cover any over that. Also services such as tattoo removal should not be available. I would also refuse IVF on the NHS, a round of IVF costs about 10k....if you cant afford to save up 10k once a year to pay for it can you really afford the child as raising a child is likely to cost that a year in any case plus we have a lot of kids crying out for adoption.
I am sure others could come up with savings in all the other areas as well
There is some truth in your first post - so many areas of public services are so significantly underfunded right now that redressing the balance is going to be financially really quite tricky.
But your reply to @algarkirk just reinforces their point - defence procurement, tattoo removal, IVF are all tiny nibbles.
If the country was to go down your suggested route, it would need to involve, say, revoking the right to free education entirely. That's the scale we're talking about.
Which is why I suspect the only answer is to muddle on through. Only not in the way Truss and Kwarteng want us to do so.
They maybe tiny nibbles but I am sure there are plenty more tiny nibbles we can take and they start to add up. What we can't do is keep adding on things that need money because we are already taxing the majority of the country into the ground and there is no more to squeeze out.
The biggest change that ought to be made is public sector pensions switching from to db to dc and a cap on what the employer contributes. Currently employer contributions average about 20% in the public sector. Yes wouldn't help immediately but in the long term it would. I would also do a clawback on state pensions so for every 5£ you get from other pensions you state pension is reduced by a pound
The problem with state pension clawback is that many of us have planned retirement based on what we will need over state pension to get by. Is it really practical to say to someone who is expecting 14k a year in retirement (9k state approx plus 5k in his own schemes) that he has to take a 1k cut and live on 13k? Will rental incomes be counted as 'other pensions' for those that bought property as retirement provision? How would drawdown be handled?
Yes other income would be treated as other pensions and we all plan our lives everyday on facts that change over time and when the facts change we have to change our plans. I don't see why pensioners should be any different. If anything people facing clawback are probably in a better place to respond as chances are they have no mortgage or rent if they have significant enough pension. We could also start with a clawback free sum so only applies after first 5000 of additional income. HMRC will already have the figures for additional income so it could be handled via them.
Far far too harsh on low earners. Much higher clawback free amount required. And is this applied to future pensioners or to everyone, now? Will need to be worked out annually so all pensioners to complete tax returns? Youre basically telling a pensioner on average UK income youre taking 6 grand a year off them, the equivalent of increasing basic rate on an average earner in work to over 45%.
Most low earners will not be getting anywhere near 5K in additional pension.
HMRC already knows how much pensioners get in total as it taxes them above a certain figure so no tax returns required. Landlords also get taxed pensioner or not.
How do you get to taking 6K off them....for that level of clawback they would need additional income over the state pension of 30K or 35k if you give them the first 5K free of clawback. In my book someone with additional income of 30K doesnt need the state pension
Well if we give them the 5k allowance we are taking 5k of state pension back, or the equivalent of raising basic rate for an average wage earner to about 40%. Someone earning 60,000 a year doesn't 'need' the personal allowance. Why should a pensioner who planned his or her retirement fund some arse who earned 100k a year and pissed it all up the wall rather than saving? Why should income dependant pensioners suffer whilst asset rich ones laugh? If State pension was lavish, perhaps, but its a pittance in return for a lifetime of work and tax. I mean we might as well extend it and block access to NHS services for anybody on over average wage.
sighs you misunderstood I think
You get state pension of 9k You get additional income once the additional income is over 5k then for every 5£ you get state pension is reduced by £1
so additional income is 5k you get full state pension at 10K additional you get 1K removed from state pension at 20K additional you get 4k less state pension
so total for the 3 scenarios would be 14K, 18k,and 25K
So on practice not any different to increasing taxation on pensioners, for example by charging all pensioners NI.
In practise yes it would be like a tax.
Sorry but you can't all bang on about pension time bombs, demographic pressure and underfunded services and yet any time someone suggests reducing the things we spend on or trying to save money you are all up in arms.
We either reduce spending or it all collapses. Yes that means some are going to lose out. Doing nothing is no longer an option.
Yes but youre 'taxing' them at 20% on top of income tax on their earnings from ca 14k to ca 59k
Yes and your point is?
We have to reduce spending or increase revenue. That means it has to come from somewhere.The employed are already taxed to the point that many in full employment have to use food banks so increasing basic rates is out. There aren't enough higher earners to make a dent in our spending.
So you tell us where you think the reduction or increased revenue should be found. You are very quick to say "no not there".
If those in employment are using food banks, is that because they are taxed too much or paid too little?
Tax rates in the UK are lower than in most of our European neighbours. We could comfortably be taxed more. Sure, one should target those taxes appropriately. Maybe people who are in no danger of needing a food bank, say those earning over £150,000, could pay a bit more in tax.
Still no one addresses the elephant in the room. They complain about services being underfunded and how dare tax be cut.
If all services were properly funded and paid for out of tax we would have the government taking about 90% of gdp as tax.
Time to start asking what the state should be saying no we dont do that anymore. Sadly a conversation no politician seems to want to have.
The answer is not tax more when half the country is struggling to make ends meet as it is. The answer is reduce spending.
The really huge bits of state managed expenditure go on:
pensions social security NHS debt interest defence education justice/police/prisons local government services.
Debt interest will steadily rise unless we take a North Korean approach to liabilities.
In each other area above there is gigantic pressure massively to increase expenditure. Add social care to the list too. I can't thinkmof a single big area where people are generally saying 'enough' or 'too much'.
Can you (or anyone) suggest where the first, say, £200 bn reductions will be found?
For a start while those area's are high expenditure doesn't mean they should do everything they do now.
Defence for a start we could save a huge amount on procurement by just buying off the shelf stuff rather than creating custom shit just because.
NHS - last night I suggested a cap on lifetime health care expense, would set it at the average to start with and people can take out insurance to cover any over that. Also services such as tattoo removal should not be available. I would also refuse IVF on the NHS, a round of IVF costs about 10k....if you cant afford to save up 10k once a year to pay for it can you really afford the child as raising a child is likely to cost that a year in any case plus we have a lot of kids crying out for adoption.
I am sure others could come up with savings in all the other areas as well
There is some truth in your first post - so many areas of public services are so significantly underfunded right now that redressing the balance is going to be financially really quite tricky.
But your reply to @algarkirk just reinforces their point - defence procurement, tattoo removal, IVF are all tiny nibbles.
If the country was to go down your suggested route, it would need to involve, say, revoking the right to free education entirely. That's the scale we're talking about.
Which is why I suspect the only answer is to muddle on through. Only not in the way Truss and Kwarteng want us to do so.
They maybe tiny nibbles but I am sure there are plenty more tiny nibbles we can take and they start to add up. What we can't do is keep adding on things that need money because we are already taxing the majority of the country into the ground and there is no more to squeeze out.
The biggest change that ought to be made is public sector pensions switching from to db to dc and a cap on what the employer contributes. Currently employer contributions average about 20% in the public sector. Yes wouldn't help immediately but in the long term it would. I would also do a clawback on state pensions so for every 5£ you get from other pensions you state pension is reduced by a pound
The problem with state pension clawback is that many of us have planned retirement based on what we will need over state pension to get by. Is it really practical to say to someone who is expecting 14k a year in retirement (9k state approx plus 5k in his own schemes) that he has to take a 1k cut and live on 13k? Will rental incomes be counted as 'other pensions' for those that bought property as retirement provision? How would drawdown be handled?
Yes other income would be treated as other pensions and we all plan our lives everyday on facts that change over time and when the facts change we have to change our plans. I don't see why pensioners should be any different. If anything people facing clawback are probably in a better place to respond as chances are they have no mortgage or rent if they have significant enough pension. We could also start with a clawback free sum so only applies after first 5000 of additional income. HMRC will already have the figures for additional income so it could be handled via them.
Far far too harsh on low earners. Much higher clawback free amount required. And is this applied to future pensioners or to everyone, now? Will need to be worked out annually so all pensioners to complete tax returns? Youre basically telling a pensioner on average UK income youre taking 6 grand a year off them, the equivalent of increasing basic rate on an average earner in work to over 45%.
Most low earners will not be getting anywhere near 5K in additional pension.
HMRC already knows how much pensioners get in total as it taxes them above a certain figure so no tax returns required. Landlords also get taxed pensioner or not.
How do you get to taking 6K off them....for that level of clawback they would need additional income over the state pension of 30K or 35k if you give them the first 5K free of clawback. In my book someone with additional income of 30K doesnt need the state pension
Well if we give them the 5k allowance we are taking 5k of state pension back, or the equivalent of raising basic rate for an average wage earner to about 40%. Someone earning 60,000 a year doesn't 'need' the personal allowance. Why should a pensioner who planned his or her retirement fund some arse who earned 100k a year and pissed it all up the wall rather than saving? Why should income dependant pensioners suffer whilst asset rich ones laugh? If State pension was lavish, perhaps, but its a pittance in return for a lifetime of work and tax. I mean we might as well extend it and block access to NHS services for anybody on over average wage.
sighs you misunderstood I think
You get state pension of 9k You get additional income once the additional income is over 5k then for every 5£ you get state pension is reduced by £1
so additional income is 5k you get full state pension at 10K additional you get 1K removed from state pension at 20K additional you get 4k less state pension
so total for the 3 scenarios would be 14K, 18k,and 25K
So on practice not any different to increasing taxation on pensioners, for example by charging all pensioners NI.
In practise yes it would be like a tax.
Sorry but you can't all bang on about pension time bombs, demographic pressure and underfunded services and yet any time someone suggests reducing the things we spend on or trying to save money you are all up in arms.
We either reduce spending or it all collapses. Yes that means some are going to lose out. Doing nothing is no longer an option.
May I refer you to my header on the NHS, where I did address these issues, and make some proposals to address them.
The you in my post wasn't aimed at you personally but at all of the people who are constantly bemoaning underfunded services etc. Yet reacting in horror when anyone comes up with a proposal to change things. Cf Mays dementia tax
Agreed about the dementia tax. And keep coming with the proposals - they're much more constructive than much of what is posted on here, even if they're robustly challenged.
Thing is, right now, the most obvious proposal to change things is simply cancel what the government has announced. Wind back 48 hours, we had cheaper debt and less of it, and therefore very significantly better funded public services, for a given level of deficit.
If you're insisting on gentle nibbles rather than voracious gulps, let's at least not feed the elephant up so its even bigger. (This isn't directed at you specifically - you haven't as far as I can see argued for the governmeent's economic idiocy).
I am staying clear about the debate on the last budget and trying to take a broader view. I start at the point of what I want
a) Well funded services that we do continue b) People not having so much money taken from them to fund the services the state offers that they struggle c) not kicking debt down the road to our children and grandchildren
Still no one addresses the elephant in the room. They complain about services being underfunded and how dare tax be cut.
If all services were properly funded and paid for out of tax we would have the government taking about 90% of gdp as tax.
Time to start asking what the state should be saying no we dont do that anymore. Sadly a conversation no politician seems to want to have.
The answer is not tax more when half the country is struggling to make ends meet as it is. The answer is reduce spending.
The really huge bits of state managed expenditure go on:
pensions social security NHS debt interest defence education justice/police/prisons local government services.
Debt interest will steadily rise unless we take a North Korean approach to liabilities.
In each other area above there is gigantic pressure massively to increase expenditure. Add social care to the list too. I can't thinkmof a single big area where people are generally saying 'enough' or 'too much'.
Can you (or anyone) suggest where the first, say, £200 bn reductions will be found?
For a start while those area's are high expenditure doesn't mean they should do everything they do now.
Defence for a start we could save a huge amount on procurement by just buying off the shelf stuff rather than creating custom shit just because.
NHS - last night I suggested a cap on lifetime health care expense, would set it at the average to start with and people can take out insurance to cover any over that. Also services such as tattoo removal should not be available. I would also refuse IVF on the NHS, a round of IVF costs about 10k....if you cant afford to save up 10k once a year to pay for it can you really afford the child as raising a child is likely to cost that a year in any case plus we have a lot of kids crying out for adoption.
I am sure others could come up with savings in all the other areas as well
A round of IVF doesn't cost £10k. Those babies are the tax payers of the future who will look after you in your dotage.
We paid around 11k for two rounds of IVF. Happily the second was sucessful and I’m now terrified about next year! (And very excited).
Congratulations!
Fox jr2 was via self funded IVF. £1200 per cycle at that time, but nothing like the psychological cost. It is a very gruelling process emotionally.
I don't regret it at all, but the costs since birth have been substantially more!
Of course, those riding around in Government limos don't have to worry about the cost of filling their tanks up.
The biggest problem is the Fed being too aggressive in raising rates causing the dollar to rise against every other currency.
The US has a considerably bigger deficit than the UK, but the Fed is jacking up rates by 0.75% a go while the BoE aren't.
Indeed. Many people discussing the fall in the pound and of the London stock market, as a stick with which to beat the UK government, are missing the international picture. The issue is the strong dollar, against pretty much every other currency at the moment, caused mostly by the over-eagerness of the Fed to raise rates.
The Americans are pursuing 'beggar thy neighbour' economical policies as they always have. We can't keep following them, so we should stay the course. If a dollar ends up worth 6 pounds, so be it.
How much do the Kremlin pay you?
Nah, not @Luckyguy1983. He may be an idiot but he's not a 'useful idiot' ;-)
I'm not persuaded that Scottish high earners will be tempted to move south of the border because of the attraction of slightly lower taxes.
By that logic, people would always try to arrange their lives to maximise their income. Yet millions of people still choose to live in London and other parts of the south east, knowing full well that property prices mean that they would have much more disposable income if they lived elsewhere.
The same people that said devolution, an SNP government, 5p on a can of superlager, differentials in stamp duty, differentials in previous tax rates and differing covid rules would cause a mass exodus from Scotland are now pushing the migration of the wealth creators line; their predictions are gold standard.
Incidentally afaics those of them who were resident in Scotland are still resident in Scotland.
I remember when the SNP were proposing a flat rate income tax (3% or 4% - can't remember) to replace the council tax. Scottish Labour complained that high earners would leave Scotland. They used Fred Goodwin as an example. If only ...
Of course, those riding around in Government limos don't have to worry about the cost of filling their tanks up.
The biggest problem is the Fed being too aggressive in raising rates causing the dollar to rise against every other currency.
The US has a considerably bigger deficit than the UK, but the Fed is jacking up rates by 0.75% a go while the BoE aren't.
Indeed. Many people discussing the fall in the pound and of the London stock market, as a stick with which to beat the UK government, are missing the international picture. The issue is the strong dollar, against pretty much every other currency at the moment, caused mostly by the over-eagerness of the Fed to raise rates.
The pound is near an all time low against the Euro too. And it fell specifically after Kwateng's statement.
1.12 against an all time low of 1.02. Near-ish, I suppose.
GBP briefly dipped below €1.00 on the night of 30/31 Dec 2008.
I know, because I was the duty IT manager for a major UK bank, one of whose systems went tits up at the idea of £ < € and started offering free money to other companies' automatic trading systems. We had to shut it down sharpish in the early hours but not before we'd lost several £m.
By the time we fixed the system the £ was back up above the € again of course.
Ouch!
I was duty IT manager for a hospitality retailer in Europe, on the night the Euro went live on 1st Jan 2002.
I wonder how many systems got caught out on that mad day in 2020, when the US oil price went negative?
Still no one addresses the elephant in the room. They complain about services being underfunded and how dare tax be cut.
If all services were properly funded and paid for out of tax we would have the government taking about 90% of gdp as tax.
Time to start asking what the state should be saying no we dont do that anymore. Sadly a conversation no politician seems to want to have.
The answer is not tax more when half the country is struggling to make ends meet as it is. The answer is reduce spending.
The really huge bits of state managed expenditure go on:
pensions social security NHS debt interest defence education justice/police/prisons local government services.
Debt interest will steadily rise unless we take a North Korean approach to liabilities.
In each other area above there is gigantic pressure massively to increase expenditure. Add social care to the list too. I can't thinkmof a single big area where people are generally saying 'enough' or 'too much'.
Can you (or anyone) suggest where the first, say, £200 bn reductions will be found?
For a start while those area's are high expenditure doesn't mean they should do everything they do now.
Defence for a start we could save a huge amount on procurement by just buying off the shelf stuff rather than creating custom shit just because.
NHS - last night I suggested a cap on lifetime health care expense, would set it at the average to start with and people can take out insurance to cover any over that. Also services such as tattoo removal should not be available. I would also refuse IVF on the NHS, a round of IVF costs about 10k....if you cant afford to save up 10k once a year to pay for it can you really afford the child as raising a child is likely to cost that a year in any case plus we have a lot of kids crying out for adoption.
I am sure others could come up with savings in all the other areas as well
There is some truth in your first post - so many areas of public services are so significantly underfunded right now that redressing the balance is going to be financially really quite tricky.
But your reply to @algarkirk just reinforces their point - defence procurement, tattoo removal, IVF are all tiny nibbles.
If the country was to go down your suggested route, it would need to involve, say, revoking the right to free education entirely. That's the scale we're talking about.
Which is why I suspect the only answer is to muddle on through. Only not in the way Truss and Kwarteng want us to do so.
They maybe tiny nibbles but I am sure there are plenty more tiny nibbles we can take and they start to add up. What we can't do is keep adding on things that need money because we are already taxing the majority of the country into the ground and there is no more to squeeze out.
The biggest change that ought to be made is public sector pensions switching from to db to dc and a cap on what the employer contributes. Currently employer contributions average about 20% in the public sector. Yes wouldn't help immediately but in the long term it would. I would also do a clawback on state pensions so for every 5£ you get from other pensions you state pension is reduced by a pound
The problem with state pension clawback is that many of us have planned retirement based on what we will need over state pension to get by. Is it really practical to say to someone who is expecting 14k a year in retirement (9k state approx plus 5k in his own schemes) that he has to take a 1k cut and live on 13k? Will rental incomes be counted as 'other pensions' for those that bought property as retirement provision? How would drawdown be handled?
Yes other income would be treated as other pensions and we all plan our lives everyday on facts that change over time and when the facts change we have to change our plans. I don't see why pensioners should be any different. If anything people facing clawback are probably in a better place to respond as chances are they have no mortgage or rent if they have significant enough pension. We could also start with a clawback free sum so only applies after first 5000 of additional income. HMRC will already have the figures for additional income so it could be handled via them.
Far far too harsh on low earners. Much higher clawback free amount required. And is this applied to future pensioners or to everyone, now? Will need to be worked out annually so all pensioners to complete tax returns? Youre basically telling a pensioner on average UK income youre taking 6 grand a year off them, the equivalent of increasing basic rate on an average earner in work to over 45%.
Most low earners will not be getting anywhere near 5K in additional pension.
HMRC already knows how much pensioners get in total as it taxes them above a certain figure so no tax returns required. Landlords also get taxed pensioner or not.
How do you get to taking 6K off them....for that level of clawback they would need additional income over the state pension of 30K or 35k if you give them the first 5K free of clawback. In my book someone with additional income of 30K doesnt need the state pension
Well if we give them the 5k allowance we are taking 5k of state pension back, or the equivalent of raising basic rate for an average wage earner to about 40%. Someone earning 60,000 a year doesn't 'need' the personal allowance. Why should a pensioner who planned his or her retirement fund some arse who earned 100k a year and pissed it all up the wall rather than saving? Why should income dependant pensioners suffer whilst asset rich ones laugh? If State pension was lavish, perhaps, but its a pittance in return for a lifetime of work and tax. I mean we might as well extend it and block access to NHS services for anybody on over average wage.
sighs you misunderstood I think
You get state pension of 9k You get additional income once the additional income is over 5k then for every 5£ you get state pension is reduced by £1
so additional income is 5k you get full state pension at 10K additional you get 1K removed from state pension at 20K additional you get 4k less state pension
so total for the 3 scenarios would be 14K, 18k,and 25K
So on practice not any different to increasing taxation on pensioners, for example by charging all pensioners NI.
In practise yes it would be like a tax.
Sorry but you can't all bang on about pension time bombs, demographic pressure and underfunded services and yet any time someone suggests reducing the things we spend on or trying to save money you are all up in arms.
We either reduce spending or it all collapses. Yes that means some are going to lose out. Doing nothing is no longer an option.
Yes but youre 'taxing' them at 20% on top of income tax on their earnings from ca 14k to ca 59k
Yes and your point is?
We have to reduce spending or increase revenue. That means it has to come from somewhere.The employed are already taxed to the point that many in full employment have to use food banks so increasing basic rates is out. There aren't enough higher earners to make a dent in our spending.
So you tell us where you think the reduction or increased revenue should be found. You are very quick to say "no not there".
If those in employment are using food banks, is that because they are taxed too much or paid too little?
Tax rates in the UK are lower than in most of our European neighbours. We could comfortably be taxed more. Sure, one should target those taxes appropriately. Maybe people who are in no danger of needing a food bank, say those earning over £150,000, could pay a bit more in tax.
Taxed too much.
Real tax rates are not that low in this country. In fact until yesterday they'd never been higher in 74 years.
Of course, those riding around in Government limos don't have to worry about the cost of filling their tanks up.
The biggest problem is the Fed being too aggressive in raising rates causing the dollar to rise against every other currency.
The US has a considerably bigger deficit than the UK, but the Fed is jacking up rates by 0.75% a go while the BoE aren't.
Indeed. Many people discussing the fall in the pound and of the London stock market, as a stick with which to beat the UK government, are missing the international picture. The issue is the strong dollar, against pretty much every other currency at the moment, caused mostly by the over-eagerness of the Fed to raise rates.
The Americans are pursuing 'beggar thy neighbour' economical policies as they always have. We can't keep following them, so we should stay the course. If a dollar ends up worth 6 pounds, so be it.
How much do the Kremlin pay you?
Nah, not @Luckyguy1983. He may be an idiot but he's not a 'useful idiot' ;-)
Still no one addresses the elephant in the room. They complain about services being underfunded and how dare tax be cut.
If all services were properly funded and paid for out of tax we would have the government taking about 90% of gdp as tax.
Time to start asking what the state should be saying no we dont do that anymore. Sadly a conversation no politician seems to want to have.
The answer is not tax more when half the country is struggling to make ends meet as it is. The answer is reduce spending.
The really huge bits of state managed expenditure go on:
pensions social security NHS debt interest defence education justice/police/prisons local government services.
Debt interest will steadily rise unless we take a North Korean approach to liabilities.
In each other area above there is gigantic pressure massively to increase expenditure. Add social care to the list too. I can't thinkmof a single big area where people are generally saying 'enough' or 'too much'.
Can you (or anyone) suggest where the first, say, £200 bn reductions will be found?
For a start while those area's are high expenditure doesn't mean they should do everything they do now.
Defence for a start we could save a huge amount on procurement by just buying off the shelf stuff rather than creating custom shit just because.
NHS - last night I suggested a cap on lifetime health care expense, would set it at the average to start with and people can take out insurance to cover any over that. Also services such as tattoo removal should not be available. I would also refuse IVF on the NHS, a round of IVF costs about 10k....if you cant afford to save up 10k once a year to pay for it can you really afford the child as raising a child is likely to cost that a year in any case plus we have a lot of kids crying out for adoption.
I am sure others could come up with savings in all the other areas as well
There is some truth in your first post - so many areas of public services are so significantly underfunded right now that redressing the balance is going to be financially really quite tricky.
But your reply to @algarkirk just reinforces their point - defence procurement, tattoo removal, IVF are all tiny nibbles.
If the country was to go down your suggested route, it would need to involve, say, revoking the right to free education entirely. That's the scale we're talking about.
Which is why I suspect the only answer is to muddle on through. Only not in the way Truss and Kwarteng want us to do so.
They maybe tiny nibbles but I am sure there are plenty more tiny nibbles we can take and they start to add up. What we can't do is keep adding on things that need money because we are already taxing the majority of the country into the ground and there is no more to squeeze out.
The biggest change that ought to be made is public sector pensions switching from to db to dc and a cap on what the employer contributes. Currently employer contributions average about 20% in the public sector. Yes wouldn't help immediately but in the long term it would. I would also do a clawback on state pensions so for every 5£ you get from other pensions you state pension is reduced by a pound
The problem with state pension clawback is that many of us have planned retirement based on what we will need over state pension to get by. Is it really practical to say to someone who is expecting 14k a year in retirement (9k state approx plus 5k in his own schemes) that he has to take a 1k cut and live on 13k? Will rental incomes be counted as 'other pensions' for those that bought property as retirement provision? How would drawdown be handled?
Yes other income would be treated as other pensions and we all plan our lives everyday on facts that change over time and when the facts change we have to change our plans. I don't see why pensioners should be any different. If anything people facing clawback are probably in a better place to respond as chances are they have no mortgage or rent if they have significant enough pension. We could also start with a clawback free sum so only applies after first 5000 of additional income. HMRC will already have the figures for additional income so it could be handled via them.
Far far too harsh on low earners. Much higher clawback free amount required. And is this applied to future pensioners or to everyone, now? Will need to be worked out annually so all pensioners to complete tax returns? Youre basically telling a pensioner on average UK income youre taking 6 grand a year off them, the equivalent of increasing basic rate on an average earner in work to over 45%.
Most low earners will not be getting anywhere near 5K in additional pension.
HMRC already knows how much pensioners get in total as it taxes them above a certain figure so no tax returns required. Landlords also get taxed pensioner or not.
How do you get to taking 6K off them....for that level of clawback they would need additional income over the state pension of 30K or 35k if you give them the first 5K free of clawback. In my book someone with additional income of 30K doesnt need the state pension
Well if we give them the 5k allowance we are taking 5k of state pension back, or the equivalent of raising basic rate for an average wage earner to about 40%. Someone earning 60,000 a year doesn't 'need' the personal allowance. Why should a pensioner who planned his or her retirement fund some arse who earned 100k a year and pissed it all up the wall rather than saving? Why should income dependant pensioners suffer whilst asset rich ones laugh? If State pension was lavish, perhaps, but its a pittance in return for a lifetime of work and tax. I mean we might as well extend it and block access to NHS services for anybody on over average wage.
sighs you misunderstood I think
You get state pension of 9k You get additional income once the additional income is over 5k then for every 5£ you get state pension is reduced by £1
so additional income is 5k you get full state pension at 10K additional you get 1K removed from state pension at 20K additional you get 4k less state pension
so total for the 3 scenarios would be 14K, 18k,and 25K
So on practice not any different to increasing taxation on pensioners, for example by charging all pensioners NI.
In practise yes it would be like a tax.
Sorry but you can't all bang on about pension time bombs, demographic pressure and underfunded services and yet any time someone suggests reducing the things we spend on or trying to save money you are all up in arms.
We either reduce spending or it all collapses. Yes that means some are going to lose out. Doing nothing is no longer an option.
Yes but youre 'taxing' them at 20% on top of income tax on their earnings from ca 14k to ca 59k
Yes and your point is?
We have to reduce spending or increase revenue. That means it has to come from somewhere.The employed are already taxed to the point that many in full employment have to use food banks so increasing basic rates is out. There aren't enough higher earners to make a dent in our spending.
So you tell us where you think the reduction or increased revenue should be found. You are very quick to say "no not there".
Im happy to look at things like NI/Income tax consolidation so pensioners pay, maybe giving them a 15 k or so PA. Rather than smashing pensioners on modest incomes over the head with a cudgel. And vastly cut back what is covered on the NHS. Drastically reduce degree course uptake and put students on a lifetime income tax addition for each year or part year completed in return for free tuition and a maintenance grant. Start there.
Of course, those riding around in Government limos don't have to worry about the cost of filling their tanks up.
The biggest problem is the Fed being too aggressive in raising rates causing the dollar to rise against every other currency.
The US has a considerably bigger deficit than the UK, but the Fed is jacking up rates by 0.75% a go while the BoE aren't.
Indeed. Many people discussing the fall in the pound and of the London stock market, as a stick with which to beat the UK government, are missing the international picture. The issue is the strong dollar, against pretty much every other currency at the moment, caused mostly by the over-eagerness of the Fed to raise rates.
The pound is down against the Euro too. QED.
Not significantly. The pound to Euro variance is within normal to be expected variance ranges. It's the aggressive Fed that are making the moves.
Na, it dropped 2% in a few hours.
Yes it "dropped" to one cent higher than it was this time last year.
The pound and euro are bouncing around in normal variance ranges seen in recent years. It's the dollar that has moved significantly.
I think that's right, rumours of GBP's terminal decline have been greatly exaggerated.
But let's see how it fares over the next few months.
Still no one addresses the elephant in the room. They complain about services being underfunded and how dare tax be cut.
If all services were properly funded and paid for out of tax we would have the government taking about 90% of gdp as tax.
Time to start asking what the state should be saying no we dont do that anymore. Sadly a conversation no politician seems to want to have.
The answer is not tax more when half the country is struggling to make ends meet as it is. The answer is reduce spending.
The really huge bits of state managed expenditure go on:
pensions social security NHS debt interest defence education justice/police/prisons local government services.
Debt interest will steadily rise unless we take a North Korean approach to liabilities.
In each other area above there is gigantic pressure massively to increase expenditure. Add social care to the list too. I can't thinkmof a single big area where people are generally saying 'enough' or 'too much'.
Can you (or anyone) suggest where the first, say, £200 bn reductions will be found?
For a start while those area's are high expenditure doesn't mean they should do everything they do now.
Defence for a start we could save a huge amount on procurement by just buying off the shelf stuff rather than creating custom shit just because.
NHS - last night I suggested a cap on lifetime health care expense, would set it at the average to start with and people can take out insurance to cover any over that. Also services such as tattoo removal should not be available. I would also refuse IVF on the NHS, a round of IVF costs about 10k....if you cant afford to save up 10k once a year to pay for it can you really afford the child as raising a child is likely to cost that a year in any case plus we have a lot of kids crying out for adoption.
I am sure others could come up with savings in all the other areas as well
There is some truth in your first post - so many areas of public services are so significantly underfunded right now that redressing the balance is going to be financially really quite tricky.
But your reply to @algarkirk just reinforces their point - defence procurement, tattoo removal, IVF are all tiny nibbles.
If the country was to go down your suggested route, it would need to involve, say, revoking the right to free education entirely. That's the scale we're talking about.
Which is why I suspect the only answer is to muddle on through. Only not in the way Truss and Kwarteng want us to do so.
They maybe tiny nibbles but I am sure there are plenty more tiny nibbles we can take and they start to add up. What we can't do is keep adding on things that need money because we are already taxing the majority of the country into the ground and there is no more to squeeze out.
The biggest change that ought to be made is public sector pensions switching from to db to dc and a cap on what the employer contributes. Currently employer contributions average about 20% in the public sector. Yes wouldn't help immediately but in the long term it would. I would also do a clawback on state pensions so for every 5£ you get from other pensions you state pension is reduced by a pound
The problem with state pension clawback is that many of us have planned retirement based on what we will need over state pension to get by. Is it really practical to say to someone who is expecting 14k a year in retirement (9k state approx plus 5k in his own schemes) that he has to take a 1k cut and live on 13k? Will rental incomes be counted as 'other pensions' for those that bought property as retirement provision? How would drawdown be handled?
Yes other income would be treated as other pensions and we all plan our lives everyday on facts that change over time and when the facts change we have to change our plans. I don't see why pensioners should be any different. If anything people facing clawback are probably in a better place to respond as chances are they have no mortgage or rent if they have significant enough pension. We could also start with a clawback free sum so only applies after first 5000 of additional income. HMRC will already have the figures for additional income so it could be handled via them.
Far far too harsh on low earners. Much higher clawback free amount required. And is this applied to future pensioners or to everyone, now? Will need to be worked out annually so all pensioners to complete tax returns? Youre basically telling a pensioner on average UK income youre taking 6 grand a year off them, the equivalent of increasing basic rate on an average earner in work to over 45%.
Most low earners will not be getting anywhere near 5K in additional pension.
HMRC already knows how much pensioners get in total as it taxes them above a certain figure so no tax returns required. Landlords also get taxed pensioner or not.
How do you get to taking 6K off them....for that level of clawback they would need additional income over the state pension of 30K or 35k if you give them the first 5K free of clawback. In my book someone with additional income of 30K doesnt need the state pension
Well if we give them the 5k allowance we are taking 5k of state pension back, or the equivalent of raising basic rate for an average wage earner to about 40%. Someone earning 60,000 a year doesn't 'need' the personal allowance. Why should a pensioner who planned his or her retirement fund some arse who earned 100k a year and pissed it all up the wall rather than saving? Why should income dependant pensioners suffer whilst asset rich ones laugh? If State pension was lavish, perhaps, but its a pittance in return for a lifetime of work and tax. I mean we might as well extend it and block access to NHS services for anybody on over average wage.
sighs you misunderstood I think
You get state pension of 9k You get additional income once the additional income is over 5k then for every 5£ you get state pension is reduced by £1
so additional income is 5k you get full state pension at 10K additional you get 1K removed from state pension at 20K additional you get 4k less state pension
so total for the 3 scenarios would be 14K, 18k,and 25K
So on practice not any different to increasing taxation on pensioners, for example by charging all pensioners NI.
In practise yes it would be like a tax.
Sorry but you can't all bang on about pension time bombs, demographic pressure and underfunded services and yet any time someone suggests reducing the things we spend on or trying to save money you are all up in arms.
We either reduce spending or it all collapses. Yes that means some are going to lose out. Doing nothing is no longer an option.
May I refer you to my header on the NHS, where I did address these issues, and make some proposals to address them.
The you in my post wasn't aimed at you personally but at all of the people who are constantly bemoaning underfunded services etc. Yet reacting in horror when anyone comes up with a proposal to change things. Cf Mays dementia tax
Agreed about the dementia tax. And keep coming with the proposals - they're much more constructive than much of what is posted on here, even if they're robustly challenged.
Thing is, right now, the most obvious proposal to change things is simply cancel what the government has announced. Wind back 48 hours, we had cheaper debt and less of it, and therefore very significantly better funded public services, for a given level of deficit.
If you're insisting on gentle nibbles rather than voracious gulps, let's at least not feed the elephant up so its even bigger. (This isn't directed at you specifically - you haven't as far as I can see argued for the governmeent's economic idiocy).
I am staying clear about the debate on the last budget and trying to take a broader view. I start at the point of what I want
a) Well funded services that we do continue b) People not having so much money taken from them to fund the services the state offers that they struggle c) not kicking debt down the road to our children and grandchildren
I am with you on the third.
Paying £87 billion in interest on the national debt is only going to be increasing in the next few years as interest rates spiral ever upwards.
Still no one addresses the elephant in the room. They complain about services being underfunded and how dare tax be cut.
If all services were properly funded and paid for out of tax we would have the government taking about 90% of gdp as tax.
Time to start asking what the state should be saying no we dont do that anymore. Sadly a conversation no politician seems to want to have.
The answer is not tax more when half the country is struggling to make ends meet as it is. The answer is reduce spending.
The really huge bits of state managed expenditure go on:
pensions social security NHS debt interest defence education justice/police/prisons local government services.
Debt interest will steadily rise unless we take a North Korean approach to liabilities.
In each other area above there is gigantic pressure massively to increase expenditure. Add social care to the list too. I can't thinkmof a single big area where people are generally saying 'enough' or 'too much'.
Can you (or anyone) suggest where the first, say, £200 bn reductions will be found?
For a start while those area's are high expenditure doesn't mean they should do everything they do now.
Defence for a start we could save a huge amount on procurement by just buying off the shelf stuff rather than creating custom shit just because.
NHS - last night I suggested a cap on lifetime health care expense, would set it at the average to start with and people can take out insurance to cover any over that. Also services such as tattoo removal should not be available. I would also refuse IVF on the NHS, a round of IVF costs about 10k....if you cant afford to save up 10k once a year to pay for it can you really afford the child as raising a child is likely to cost that a year in any case plus we have a lot of kids crying out for adoption.
I am sure others could come up with savings in all the other areas as well
There is some truth in your first post - so many areas of public services are so significantly underfunded right now that redressing the balance is going to be financially really quite tricky.
But your reply to @algarkirk just reinforces their point - defence procurement, tattoo removal, IVF are all tiny nibbles.
If the country was to go down your suggested route, it would need to involve, say, revoking the right to free education entirely. That's the scale we're talking about.
Which is why I suspect the only answer is to muddle on through. Only not in the way Truss and Kwarteng want us to do so.
They maybe tiny nibbles but I am sure there are plenty more tiny nibbles we can take and they start to add up. What we can't do is keep adding on things that need money because we are already taxing the majority of the country into the ground and there is no more to squeeze out.
The biggest change that ought to be made is public sector pensions switching from to db to dc and a cap on what the employer contributes. Currently employer contributions average about 20% in the public sector. Yes wouldn't help immediately but in the long term it would. I would also do a clawback on state pensions so for every 5£ you get from other pensions you state pension is reduced by a pound
The problem with state pension clawback is that many of us have planned retirement based on what we will need over state pension to get by. Is it really practical to say to someone who is expecting 14k a year in retirement (9k state approx plus 5k in his own schemes) that he has to take a 1k cut and live on 13k? Will rental incomes be counted as 'other pensions' for those that bought property as retirement provision? How would drawdown be handled?
Yes other income would be treated as other pensions and we all plan our lives everyday on facts that change over time and when the facts change we have to change our plans. I don't see why pensioners should be any different. If anything people facing clawback are probably in a better place to respond as chances are they have no mortgage or rent if they have significant enough pension. We could also start with a clawback free sum so only applies after first 5000 of additional income. HMRC will already have the figures for additional income so it could be handled via them.
Far far too harsh on low earners. Much higher clawback free amount required. And is this applied to future pensioners or to everyone, now? Will need to be worked out annually so all pensioners to complete tax returns? Youre basically telling a pensioner on average UK income youre taking 6 grand a year off them, the equivalent of increasing basic rate on an average earner in work to over 45%.
Most low earners will not be getting anywhere near 5K in additional pension.
HMRC already knows how much pensioners get in total as it taxes them above a certain figure so no tax returns required. Landlords also get taxed pensioner or not.
How do you get to taking 6K off them....for that level of clawback they would need additional income over the state pension of 30K or 35k if you give them the first 5K free of clawback. In my book someone with additional income of 30K doesnt need the state pension
Well if we give them the 5k allowance we are taking 5k of state pension back, or the equivalent of raising basic rate for an average wage earner to about 40%. Someone earning 60,000 a year doesn't 'need' the personal allowance. Why should a pensioner who planned his or her retirement fund some arse who earned 100k a year and pissed it all up the wall rather than saving? Why should income dependant pensioners suffer whilst asset rich ones laugh? If State pension was lavish, perhaps, but its a pittance in return for a lifetime of work and tax. I mean we might as well extend it and block access to NHS services for anybody on over average wage.
sighs you misunderstood I think
You get state pension of 9k You get additional income once the additional income is over 5k then for every 5£ you get state pension is reduced by £1
so additional income is 5k you get full state pension at 10K additional you get 1K removed from state pension at 20K additional you get 4k less state pension
so total for the 3 scenarios would be 14K, 18k,and 25K
So on practice not any different to increasing taxation on pensioners, for example by charging all pensioners NI.
In practise yes it would be like a tax.
Sorry but you can't all bang on about pension time bombs, demographic pressure and underfunded services and yet any time someone suggests reducing the things we spend on or trying to save money you are all up in arms.
We either reduce spending or it all collapses. Yes that means some are going to lose out. Doing nothing is no longer an option.
May I refer you to my header on the NHS, where I did address these issues, and make some proposals to address them.
The you in my post wasn't aimed at you personally but at all of the people who are constantly bemoaning underfunded services etc. Yet reacting in horror when anyone comes up with a proposal to change things. Cf Mays dementia tax
Agreed about the dementia tax. And keep coming with the proposals - they're much more constructive than much of what is posted on here, even if they're robustly challenged.
Thing is, right now, the most obvious proposal to change things is simply cancel what the government has announced. Wind back 48 hours, we had cheaper debt and less of it, and therefore very significantly better funded public services, for a given level of deficit.
If you're insisting on gentle nibbles rather than voracious gulps, let's at least not feed the elephant up so its even bigger. (This isn't directed at you specifically - you haven't as far as I can see argued for the governmeent's economic idiocy).
I am staying clear about the debate on the last budget and trying to take a broader view. I start at the point of what I want
a) Well funded services that we do continue b) People not having so much money taken from them to fund the services the state offers that they struggle c) not kicking debt down the road to our children and grandchildren
Entirely agree with the overall sentiment, and its worth pursuing 'out there' solutions, at least in theory.
I disagree with (b) though. I don't think that people are struggling because of the levels of taxation. It's possible the economy as a whole is hampered, but individual struggles are affected much more by other things than taxation (above all else, costs of renting/buying a house).
Liz Truss has another problem. Because she’s a bit odd and not very warm, along with her Chancellor she finds it hard to sell this budget as being anything other than a rich person giveaway.
Their rebuttals have been utterly pathetic. Like Seumus Milne levels of bad. Labour has played them like a fiddle
Has the fall in the pound helped UK exporters? That is what I would expect, but I haven't seen any of the commenters here mention that, or better yet, provide any numbers.
I would think it would also help, for example, software developers, who want to work for US firms, while living in the UK.
There are very few left bar the odd flint knapper
Our itinerant flint knapper does seem to be a net drain on the national finances as he and his commissioners earn their money here but seem to spend their earnings funding foreign hoteliers, sommeliers and restaurants.
He did spend money in Newport, Kirkwall and Wick to be quite fair. Don't know if he ever got to Northumberland and Tweeddale.
Don't forget his sterling (!) efforts to prop up the Penarth economy during Covid wave 1!
Of course, those riding around in Government limos don't have to worry about the cost of filling their tanks up.
The biggest problem is the Fed being too aggressive in raising rates causing the dollar to rise against every other currency.
The US has a considerably bigger deficit than the UK, but the Fed is jacking up rates by 0.75% a go while the BoE aren't.
Indeed. Many people discussing the fall in the pound and of the London stock market, as a stick with which to beat the UK government, are missing the international picture. The issue is the strong dollar, against pretty much every other currency at the moment, caused mostly by the over-eagerness of the Fed to raise rates.
The pound is down against the Euro too. QED.
Not significantly. The pound to Euro variance is within normal to be expected variance ranges. It's the aggressive Fed that are making the moves.
Na, it dropped 2% in a few hours.
Yes it "dropped" to one cent higher than it was this time last year.
The pound and euro are bouncing around in normal variance ranges seen in recent years. It's the dollar that has moved significantly.
Fair enough, but it was one of the biggest gains/losses (depending on your perspective) in many years on a single day, rather than a gradual drift. Exactly as happened with the USD, only that was on top of the slow strengthening of the dollar in recent years.
Still no one addresses the elephant in the room. They complain about services being underfunded and how dare tax be cut.
If all services were properly funded and paid for out of tax we would have the government taking about 90% of gdp as tax.
Time to start asking what the state should be saying no we dont do that anymore. Sadly a conversation no politician seems to want to have.
The answer is not tax more when half the country is struggling to make ends meet as it is. The answer is reduce spending.
The really huge bits of state managed expenditure go on:
pensions social security NHS debt interest defence education justice/police/prisons local government services.
Debt interest will steadily rise unless we take a North Korean approach to liabilities.
In each other area above there is gigantic pressure massively to increase expenditure. Add social care to the list too. I can't thinkmof a single big area where people are generally saying 'enough' or 'too much'.
Can you (or anyone) suggest where the first, say, £200 bn reductions will be found?
For a start while those area's are high expenditure doesn't mean they should do everything they do now.
Defence for a start we could save a huge amount on procurement by just buying off the shelf stuff rather than creating custom shit just because.
NHS - last night I suggested a cap on lifetime health care expense, would set it at the average to start with and people can take out insurance to cover any over that. Also services such as tattoo removal should not be available. I would also refuse IVF on the NHS, a round of IVF costs about 10k....if you cant afford to save up 10k once a year to pay for it can you really afford the child as raising a child is likely to cost that a year in any case plus we have a lot of kids crying out for adoption.
I am sure others could come up with savings in all the other areas as well
There is some truth in your first post - so many areas of public services are so significantly underfunded right now that redressing the balance is going to be financially really quite tricky.
But your reply to @algarkirk just reinforces their point - defence procurement, tattoo removal, IVF are all tiny nibbles.
If the country was to go down your suggested route, it would need to involve, say, revoking the right to free education entirely. That's the scale we're talking about.
Which is why I suspect the only answer is to muddle on through. Only not in the way Truss and Kwarteng want us to do so.
They maybe tiny nibbles but I am sure there are plenty more tiny nibbles we can take and they start to add up. What we can't do is keep adding on things that need money because we are already taxing the majority of the country into the ground and there is no more to squeeze out.
The biggest change that ought to be made is public sector pensions switching from to db to dc and a cap on what the employer contributes. Currently employer contributions average about 20% in the public sector. Yes wouldn't help immediately but in the long term it would. I would also do a clawback on state pensions so for every 5£ you get from other pensions you state pension is reduced by a pound
The problem with state pension clawback is that many of us have planned retirement based on what we will need over state pension to get by. Is it really practical to say to someone who is expecting 14k a year in retirement (9k state approx plus 5k in his own schemes) that he has to take a 1k cut and live on 13k? Will rental incomes be counted as 'other pensions' for those that bought property as retirement provision? How would drawdown be handled?
Yes other income would be treated as other pensions and we all plan our lives everyday on facts that change over time and when the facts change we have to change our plans. I don't see why pensioners should be any different. If anything people facing clawback are probably in a better place to respond as chances are they have no mortgage or rent if they have significant enough pension. We could also start with a clawback free sum so only applies after first 5000 of additional income. HMRC will already have the figures for additional income so it could be handled via them.
Far far too harsh on low earners. Much higher clawback free amount required. And is this applied to future pensioners or to everyone, now? Will need to be worked out annually so all pensioners to complete tax returns? Youre basically telling a pensioner on average UK income youre taking 6 grand a year off them, the equivalent of increasing basic rate on an average earner in work to over 45%.
Most low earners will not be getting anywhere near 5K in additional pension.
HMRC already knows how much pensioners get in total as it taxes them above a certain figure so no tax returns required. Landlords also get taxed pensioner or not.
How do you get to taking 6K off them....for that level of clawback they would need additional income over the state pension of 30K or 35k if you give them the first 5K free of clawback. In my book someone with additional income of 30K doesnt need the state pension
Well if we give them the 5k allowance we are taking 5k of state pension back, or the equivalent of raising basic rate for an average wage earner to about 40%. Someone earning 60,000 a year doesn't 'need' the personal allowance. Why should a pensioner who planned his or her retirement fund some arse who earned 100k a year and pissed it all up the wall rather than saving? Why should income dependant pensioners suffer whilst asset rich ones laugh? If State pension was lavish, perhaps, but its a pittance in return for a lifetime of work and tax. I mean we might as well extend it and block access to NHS services for anybody on over average wage.
Pagan2 has effectively abolished the NHS already in their other proposals.
No I didn't typical left wing melodrama. Suggesting a cap on state care about average lifetime health care costs above which you have to insure is not abolishing the NHS in the least.
Depending on precisely what average you calculate, half the population will have lifetime health care costs above the current average, and half of all healthcare will become delivered outside the NHS and through a private insurance system. You would effectively turn the UK’s healthcare system into something like the US’s. About half of all healthcare funding in the US is paid for by the state, but their system targets state support at the old and pensioners (and federal employees), whereas your system would target state support at the lucky!
I advocated an insurance scheme to cover additional. I would suggest that the state itself runs a scheme for this to keep insurers honest and prevent abusive pricing. Many european countries have similar systems which are part insurance and part state funding. It does not have to be like america's lunacy
The thing is, a state-run insurance system that people have to pay into… well, basically, that just takes you back to where we started. You’ve re-labelled a tax into an insurance model… I guess you could call it a national insurance? The big difference is you go from funding healthcare via a progressive tax to funding it via effectively a flat tax.
But, sure, let’s look at some European models. In the UK, the state currently pays about 79% of all healthcare costs. Our nearest neighbour is France. The French state pays about 75% of all healthcare costs. It’s a similar figure in Germany, 77%. Switching to one of these European models doesn’t match what you proposed or deliver the savings you want.
I didn't say the state run scheme was mandatory. I suggested a state run scheme be run so that insurance companies offering similar schemes couldn't run riot.
Also those stats on europe while they look comparable may not be. Does for example the french system or the german system do all the procedures the nhs does for free or do they go you want procedure x sorry need to go private for that. I don't know that answer so am speculating
I’m sure there are particular idiosyncrasies to each of those systems so they fund certain procedures in different ways, but the total spend is the total spend. While organised somewhat differently, our European neighbours have state-funded healthcare systems that cost them, more or less, what the NHS costs us. You’re right about “nibbles”, as discussed earlier, and if there are savings to be found and we can find them through making international comparisons, we should do that.
But you were suggesting something far more drastic, which is why I feel it’s fair enough to describe it abolishing the NHS.
Still no one addresses the elephant in the room. They complain about services being underfunded and how dare tax be cut.
If all services were properly funded and paid for out of tax we would have the government taking about 90% of gdp as tax.
Time to start asking what the state should be saying no we dont do that anymore. Sadly a conversation no politician seems to want to have.
The answer is not tax more when half the country is struggling to make ends meet as it is. The answer is reduce spending.
The really huge bits of state managed expenditure go on:
pensions social security NHS debt interest defence education justice/police/prisons local government services.
Debt interest will steadily rise unless we take a North Korean approach to liabilities.
In each other area above there is gigantic pressure massively to increase expenditure. Add social care to the list too. I can't thinkmof a single big area where people are generally saying 'enough' or 'too much'.
Can you (or anyone) suggest where the first, say, £200 bn reductions will be found?
For a start while those area's are high expenditure doesn't mean they should do everything they do now.
Defence for a start we could save a huge amount on procurement by just buying off the shelf stuff rather than creating custom shit just because.
NHS - last night I suggested a cap on lifetime health care expense, would set it at the average to start with and people can take out insurance to cover any over that. Also services such as tattoo removal should not be available. I would also refuse IVF on the NHS, a round of IVF costs about 10k....if you cant afford to save up 10k once a year to pay for it can you really afford the child as raising a child is likely to cost that a year in any case plus we have a lot of kids crying out for adoption.
I am sure others could come up with savings in all the other areas as well
There is some truth in your first post - so many areas of public services are so significantly underfunded right now that redressing the balance is going to be financially really quite tricky.
But your reply to @algarkirk just reinforces their point - defence procurement, tattoo removal, IVF are all tiny nibbles.
If the country was to go down your suggested route, it would need to involve, say, revoking the right to free education entirely. That's the scale we're talking about.
Which is why I suspect the only answer is to muddle on through. Only not in the way Truss and Kwarteng want us to do so.
This wouldn't save much on it's own is not a good reason to not try and save that cash in the first place.
I agree. It just doesn't match the scale @Pagan2 is suggesting we need to work at.
You are however taking my post as this is all we should do rather than just a couple of examples
I'm not taking it that way - what I'm trying to say is that my instinct is that the scale of change needed to solve the problem you identify is so large that however many examples you can identify, they won't add up to anywhere near enough.
That's not to say they aren't worth doing, just that, if we were really having a conversation about the 'elephant in the room' - finding a way to properly fund that which we think is important enough to properly fund, and not doing the rest, we would need to be looking at an entirely dfferent scale.
The way to eat an elephant is in many meals not one gigantic roast dinner
Indeed. There should be a zero-based review of spending ahead of the next Budget. It’s not been done properly in decades.
We could save £48 billion per annum by disbanding the Army, Navy and RAF. It would also free up thousands of healthy young people for more productive work.
We could save about the same by abandoning the state education system.
The way things are going, they'll only be antedating its disorganised collapse by a few months anyway.
Good idea, it frees up all those teachers to work in financial services, and all those children to go down the mines, up chimneys and pick cabbages
So having disbanded the armed forces and schools, we should have enough to fund the £87 billion due in interest on the national debt this year.
We will need further savings as next year the amount payable will be higher.
Abolish NHS, close it down entirely. And stop paying all state pensions. That should do the trick.
Liz Truss has another problem. Because she’s a bit odd and not very warm, along with her Chancellor she finds it hard to sell this budget as being anything other than a rich person giveaway.
Their rebuttals have been utterly pathetic. Like Seumus Milne levels of bad. Labour has played them like a fiddle
They aren't trying to sell this as anything other than a rich person's giveaway. It isn't something that they seem embarrassed by.
Still no one addresses the elephant in the room. They complain about services being underfunded and how dare tax be cut.
If all services were properly funded and paid for out of tax we would have the government taking about 90% of gdp as tax.
Time to start asking what the state should be saying no we dont do that anymore. Sadly a conversation no politician seems to want to have.
The answer is not tax more when half the country is struggling to make ends meet as it is. The answer is reduce spending.
The really huge bits of state managed expenditure go on:
pensions social security NHS debt interest defence education justice/police/prisons local government services.
Debt interest will steadily rise unless we take a North Korean approach to liabilities.
In each other area above there is gigantic pressure massively to increase expenditure. Add social care to the list too. I can't thinkmof a single big area where people are generally saying 'enough' or 'too much'.
Can you (or anyone) suggest where the first, say, £200 bn reductions will be found?
For a start while those area's are high expenditure doesn't mean they should do everything they do now.
Defence for a start we could save a huge amount on procurement by just buying off the shelf stuff rather than creating custom shit just because.
NHS - last night I suggested a cap on lifetime health care expense, would set it at the average to start with and people can take out insurance to cover any over that. Also services such as tattoo removal should not be available. I would also refuse IVF on the NHS, a round of IVF costs about 10k....if you cant afford to save up 10k once a year to pay for it can you really afford the child as raising a child is likely to cost that a year in any case plus we have a lot of kids crying out for adoption.
I am sure others could come up with savings in all the other areas as well
There is some truth in your first post - so many areas of public services are so significantly underfunded right now that redressing the balance is going to be financially really quite tricky.
But your reply to @algarkirk just reinforces their point - defence procurement, tattoo removal, IVF are all tiny nibbles.
If the country was to go down your suggested route, it would need to involve, say, revoking the right to free education entirely. That's the scale we're talking about.
Which is why I suspect the only answer is to muddle on through. Only not in the way Truss and Kwarteng want us to do so.
They maybe tiny nibbles but I am sure there are plenty more tiny nibbles we can take and they start to add up. What we can't do is keep adding on things that need money because we are already taxing the majority of the country into the ground and there is no more to squeeze out.
The biggest change that ought to be made is public sector pensions switching from to db to dc and a cap on what the employer contributes. Currently employer contributions average about 20% in the public sector. Yes wouldn't help immediately but in the long term it would. I would also do a clawback on state pensions so for every 5£ you get from other pensions you state pension is reduced by a pound
The problem with state pension clawback is that many of us have planned retirement based on what we will need over state pension to get by. Is it really practical to say to someone who is expecting 14k a year in retirement (9k state approx plus 5k in his own schemes) that he has to take a 1k cut and live on 13k? Will rental incomes be counted as 'other pensions' for those that bought property as retirement provision? How would drawdown be handled?
Yes other income would be treated as other pensions and we all plan our lives everyday on facts that change over time and when the facts change we have to change our plans. I don't see why pensioners should be any different. If anything people facing clawback are probably in a better place to respond as chances are they have no mortgage or rent if they have significant enough pension. We could also start with a clawback free sum so only applies after first 5000 of additional income. HMRC will already have the figures for additional income so it could be handled via them.
Far far too harsh on low earners. Much higher clawback free amount required. And is this applied to future pensioners or to everyone, now? Will need to be worked out annually so all pensioners to complete tax returns? Youre basically telling a pensioner on average UK income youre taking 6 grand a year off them, the equivalent of increasing basic rate on an average earner in work to over 45%.
Most low earners will not be getting anywhere near 5K in additional pension.
HMRC already knows how much pensioners get in total as it taxes them above a certain figure so no tax returns required. Landlords also get taxed pensioner or not.
How do you get to taking 6K off them....for that level of clawback they would need additional income over the state pension of 30K or 35k if you give them the first 5K free of clawback. In my book someone with additional income of 30K doesnt need the state pension
Well if we give them the 5k allowance we are taking 5k of state pension back, or the equivalent of raising basic rate for an average wage earner to about 40%. Someone earning 60,000 a year doesn't 'need' the personal allowance. Why should a pensioner who planned his or her retirement fund some arse who earned 100k a year and pissed it all up the wall rather than saving? Why should income dependant pensioners suffer whilst asset rich ones laugh? If State pension was lavish, perhaps, but its a pittance in return for a lifetime of work and tax. I mean we might as well extend it and block access to NHS services for anybody on over average wage.
sighs you misunderstood I think
You get state pension of 9k You get additional income once the additional income is over 5k then for every 5£ you get state pension is reduced by £1
so additional income is 5k you get full state pension at 10K additional you get 1K removed from state pension at 20K additional you get 4k less state pension
so total for the 3 scenarios would be 14K, 18k,and 25K
So on practice not any different to increasing taxation on pensioners, for example by charging all pensioners NI.
In practise yes it would be like a tax.
Sorry but you can't all bang on about pension time bombs, demographic pressure and underfunded services and yet any time someone suggests reducing the things we spend on or trying to save money you are all up in arms.
We either reduce spending or it all collapses. Yes that means some are going to lose out. Doing nothing is no longer an option.
Yes but youre 'taxing' them at 20% on top of income tax on their earnings from ca 14k to ca 59k
Yes and your point is?
We have to reduce spending or increase revenue. That means it has to come from somewhere.The employed are already taxed to the point that many in full employment have to use food banks so increasing basic rates is out. There aren't enough higher earners to make a dent in our spending.
So you tell us where you think the reduction or increased revenue should be found. You are very quick to say "no not there".
If those in employment are using food banks, is that because they are taxed too much or paid too little?
Tax rates in the UK are lower than in most of our European neighbours. We could comfortably be taxed more. Sure, one should target those taxes appropriately. Maybe people who are in no danger of needing a food bank, say those earning over £150,000, could pay a bit more in tax.
Even if you whacked 10% extra tax on them the amount it would make is negligble you have to be in the top 1% to earn that much and thats about 350,000 people even if they paid an average of 50k extra tax you are talking a mere 17.5 billion which is a drop in the ocean
Liz Truss has another problem. Because she’s a bit odd and not very warm, along with her Chancellor she finds it hard to sell this budget as being anything other than a rich person giveaway.
Their rebuttals have been utterly pathetic. Like Seumus Milne levels of bad. Labour has played them like a fiddle
Doesn’t help that the Chief Sec to the Treasury appears to be an idiot.
The budget is obviously dreadful but I'm maybe in a minority in that I think it does make sense politically. To have a chance of winning another term of tory government, with the polls showing a solid Labour lead, Truss has to project her government as fresh and vigorous and above all NEW, ie repeat the trick Johnson managed for GE19. She can't, unlike him, use personality, and she doesn't have Brexit or an electorally toxic Labour opponent going for her, therefore it has to be done on policy. Hence this "new era", "tax cutting", "going for growth", "break with the stale consensus" rhetoric and package.
They know it's reckless and requires magical thinking to believe it'll pay for itself through higher growth. But they also know that "steady as she goes" through this energy crisis, fund the help package via a sensible mix of tax and borrowing, whilst being objectively the correct approach would deliver little political upside. It would leave the game unchanged when they need to kick the table over and force a new deck. Having done so they plan to frame the narrative over the next 2 years as New Era Low Tax Tories vs Same Old Labour Tax & Spenders. Come the GE, to be whispering these dirty words into the ears of the electorate - "Do you really want to pay more tax?"
This is Yethe play, I think. They (Truss, the Tories) have to get their "low tax" mantle back - they can't win an election without that - and this is why they're cutting taxes when the country can’t afford it. It's not because they think it'll boost aspiration, investment and long term sustainable growth. They have no clue whether it'll do that and neither do they really care. They know you can’t audit these things anyway because it’s impossible to strip out causes and effects. And in political time there is no long term, there’s only the election. The reason they are cutting taxes is very simple and it is pure politics – it's so Labour have to say they’d raise them.
The just punishment would be a tiny Conservative majority to give them till 2029 to begin to clear up the damage.
That would probably lead to a weak and chaotic (well, still weaker and more chaotic) that would end up doing much more damage.
What we need is for the Conservatives to get beat and then for Starmer to ram PR through Parliament, so that any realistic prospect of them ever ruling the country alone again is removed.
What we'll actually get is a couple of years of Labour flailing about as it's consumed by the enormity of cleaning up the mess, followed by yet more of the Tories carving up the nation's remaining assets and distributing them to the already minted.
PR would see the Tories govern again, just likely neither Labour nor the Tories would ever win a majority again.
Instead smaller parties like the LDs, Greens and RefUK and SNP would normally hold the balance of power
That's the entire point. The likes of Farage, Rees-Mogg and Corbyn, who are representative of small but very rich and/or very loud segments of public opinion, could be hived off into extremist sects and properly marginalised. It's obvious to anyone with eyes to see that our current suite of "broad church" political parties has failed utterly.
PR is no guarantor against the capture of the entire political system by loonies, but it would certainly make it a lot less probable.
In theory but in practice none of them are likely to win a majority under FPTP.
Under PR though the nationalist Sweden Democrats are now kingmakers in Sweden, the nationalist Meloni is likely to become PM in Italy tomorrow and in NZ the Greens or New Zealand First are often kingmakers. In Germany too the Greens are in power and the AfD growing in strength and in Spain the hard left Podemos are kingmakers with the populist right Vox gaining support
All of the examples that you quote have something important in common: the lunatics haven't completely taken over the asylum. Our system offers completely untrammelled power to any sect that can capture one of the two major parties (the control of each of which is, in turn, in the gift of a very small selectorate of party members who are massively to the left or right of popular opinion.) We came within an ace of systemic capture by the North London branch office of Hamas in 2017; we are now actually under the power of a Reaganomics tribute act, only minus a strong economy or a strong currency to help backstop all their nonsense. This is not going to end well.
Yes but Corbyn still failed to win under FPTP in 2017 and on current polls Truss would be unlikely to win in 2024 either.
PR however would give both a better chance of forming a government in a coalition, even without the small chance of a majority under FPTP
Corbyn or Truss would never have been elected party leader in a system where parties have to hold some appeal to other groups in order to form a government. If they were somehow elected then people would vote for a similar or breakaway party because there wouldn’t be wasted votes.
Liz Truss has another problem. Because she’s a bit odd and not very warm, along with her Chancellor she finds it hard to sell this budget as being anything other than a rich person giveaway.
Their rebuttals have been utterly pathetic. Like Seumus Milne levels of bad. Labour has played them like a fiddle
They aren't trying to sell this as anything other than a rich person's giveaway. It isn't something that they seem embarrassed by.
It'll be fine, once every single person is above average in wealth.
Liz Truss has another problem. Because she’s a bit odd and not very warm, along with her Chancellor she finds it hard to sell this budget as being anything other than a rich person giveaway.
Their rebuttals have been utterly pathetic. Like Seumus Milne levels of bad. Labour has played them like a fiddle
Doesn’t help that the Chief Sec to the Treasury appears to be an idiot.
That’s the team Truss has put together. They are either rubbish or being advised very poorly.
The budget is obviously dreadful but I'm maybe in a minority in that I think it does make sense politically. To have a chance of winning another term of tory government, with the polls showing a solid Labour lead, Truss has to project her government as fresh and vigorous and above all NEW, ie repeat the trick Johnson managed for GE19. She can't, unlike him, use personality, and she doesn't have Brexit or an electorally toxic Labour opponent going for her, therefore it has to be done on policy. Hence this "new era", "tax cutting", "going for growth", "break with the stale consensus" rhetoric and package.
They know it's reckless and requires magical thinking to believe it'll pay for itself through higher growth. But they also know that "steady as she goes" through this energy crisis, fund the help package via a sensible mix of tax and borrowing, whilst being objectively the correct approach would deliver little political upside. It would leave the game unchanged when they need to kick the table over and force a new deck. Having done so they plan to frame the narrative over the next 2 years as New Era Low Tax Tories vs Same Old Labour Tax & Spenders. Come the GE, to be whispering these dirty words into the ears of the electorate - "Do you really want to pay more tax?"
This is Yethe play, I think. They (Truss, the Tories) have to get their "low tax" mantle back - they can't win an election without that - and this is why they're cutting taxes when the country can’t afford it. It's not because they think it'll boost aspiration, investment and long term sustainable growth. They have no clue whether it'll do that and neither do they really care. They know you can’t audit these things anyway because it’s impossible to strip out causes and effects. And in political time there is no long term, there’s only the election. The reason they are cutting taxes is very simple and it is pure politics – it's so Labour have to say they’d raise them.
The just punishment would be a tiny Conservative majority to give them till 2029 to begin to clear up the damage.
That would probably lead to a weak and chaotic (well, still weaker and more chaotic) that would end up doing much more damage.
What we need is for the Conservatives to get beat and then for Starmer to ram PR through Parliament, so that any realistic prospect of them ever ruling the country alone again is removed.
What we'll actually get is a couple of years of Labour flailing about as it's consumed by the enormity of cleaning up the mess, followed by yet more of the Tories carving up the nation's remaining assets and distributing them to the already minted.
PR would see the Tories govern again, just likely neither Labour nor the Tories would ever win a majority again.
Instead smaller parties like the LDs, Greens and RefUK and SNP would normally hold the balance of power
That's the entire point. The likes of Farage, Rees-Mogg and Corbyn, who are representative of small but very rich and/or very loud segments of public opinion, could be hived off into extremist sects and properly marginalised. It's obvious to anyone with eyes to see that our current suite of "broad church" political parties has failed utterly.
PR is no guarantor against the capture of the entire political system by loonies, but it would certainly make it a lot less probable.
In theory but in practice none of them are likely to win a majority under FPTP.
Under PR though the nationalist Sweden Democrats are now kingmakers in Sweden, the nationalist Meloni is likely to become PM in Italy tomorrow and in NZ the Greens or New Zealand First are often kingmakers. In Germany too the Greens are in power and the AfD growing in strength and in Spain the hard left Podemos are kingmakers with the populist right Vox gaining support
All of the examples that you quote have something important in common: the lunatics haven't completely taken over the asylum. Our system offers completely untrammelled power to any sect that can capture one of the two major parties (the control of each of which is, in turn, in the gift of a very small selectorate of party members who are massively to the left or right of popular opinion.) We came within an ace of systemic capture by the North London branch office of Hamas in 2017; we are now actually under the power of a Reaganomics tribute act, only minus a strong economy or a strong currency to help backstop all their nonsense. This is not going to end well.
Yes but Corbyn still failed to win under FPTP in 2017 and on current polls Truss would be unlikely to win in 2024 either.
PR however would give both a better chance of forming a government in a coalition, even without the small chance of a majority under FPTP
Corbyn or Truss would never have been elected party leader in a system where parties have to hold some appeal to other groups in order to form a government. If they were somehow elected then people would vote for a similar or breakaway party because there wouldn’t be wasted votes.
If I were Labour leader I’d abolish the membership vote altogether.
Went to the Brian Cox 'Horizons' show last night. Very good. Seems like it's an interesting time for astrophysics as our understanding of black holes raises more and more questions about the nature of the universe.
Interestingly for all you alien hunters, Cox sounds decidedly more hesitant about the certainty of other intelligent life than he did when I went to a talk of his about 10 years ago.
'The human brain might be the only only thing in existence capable of giving meaning to the universe'. (I paraphrase)
Recommended if you happen to get chance to go to the show.
Everyone on the ground in Kherson, knows that the enemy can’t possibly hold on to the city for any length of time, as the defenders have the advantage of range and can effectively target the very limited number of supply routes across the Deniper river.
The only questions remaining, are how many troops get killed or captured, and whether the Ukranians can get their kit intact or destroyed.
The commanders want to be allowed to destroy equipment and retreat in an ordered manner - Putin wants them to fight to the inevitable end.
Liz Truss has another problem. Because she’s a bit odd and not very warm, along with her Chancellor she finds it hard to sell this budget as being anything other than a rich person giveaway.
Their rebuttals have been utterly pathetic. Like Seumus Milne levels of bad. Labour has played them like a fiddle
They aren't trying to sell this as anything other than a rich person's giveaway. It isn't something that they seem embarrassed by.
They believe this stuff has a very good chance of working. The grimly fascinating bit will be if these prophecies of plenty don't come true.
Still no one addresses the elephant in the room. They complain about services being underfunded and how dare tax be cut.
If all services were properly funded and paid for out of tax we would have the government taking about 90% of gdp as tax.
Time to start asking what the state should be saying no we dont do that anymore. Sadly a conversation no politician seems to want to have.
The answer is not tax more when half the country is struggling to make ends meet as it is. The answer is reduce spending.
The really huge bits of state managed expenditure go on:
pensions social security NHS debt interest defence education justice/police/prisons local government services.
Debt interest will steadily rise unless we take a North Korean approach to liabilities.
In each other area above there is gigantic pressure massively to increase expenditure. Add social care to the list too. I can't thinkmof a single big area where people are generally saying 'enough' or 'too much'.
Can you (or anyone) suggest where the first, say, £200 bn reductions will be found?
For a start while those area's are high expenditure doesn't mean they should do everything they do now.
Defence for a start we could save a huge amount on procurement by just buying off the shelf stuff rather than creating custom shit just because.
NHS - last night I suggested a cap on lifetime health care expense, would set it at the average to start with and people can take out insurance to cover any over that. Also services such as tattoo removal should not be available. I would also refuse IVF on the NHS, a round of IVF costs about 10k....if you cant afford to save up 10k once a year to pay for it can you really afford the child as raising a child is likely to cost that a year in any case plus we have a lot of kids crying out for adoption.
I am sure others could come up with savings in all the other areas as well
There is some truth in your first post - so many areas of public services are so significantly underfunded right now that redressing the balance is going to be financially really quite tricky.
But your reply to @algarkirk just reinforces their point - defence procurement, tattoo removal, IVF are all tiny nibbles.
If the country was to go down your suggested route, it would need to involve, say, revoking the right to free education entirely. That's the scale we're talking about.
Which is why I suspect the only answer is to muddle on through. Only not in the way Truss and Kwarteng want us to do so.
They maybe tiny nibbles but I am sure there are plenty more tiny nibbles we can take and they start to add up. What we can't do is keep adding on things that need money because we are already taxing the majority of the country into the ground and there is no more to squeeze out.
The biggest change that ought to be made is public sector pensions switching from to db to dc and a cap on what the employer contributes. Currently employer contributions average about 20% in the public sector. Yes wouldn't help immediately but in the long term it would. I would also do a clawback on state pensions so for every 5£ you get from other pensions you state pension is reduced by a pound
The problem with state pension clawback is that many of us have planned retirement based on what we will need over state pension to get by. Is it really practical to say to someone who is expecting 14k a year in retirement (9k state approx plus 5k in his own schemes) that he has to take a 1k cut and live on 13k? Will rental incomes be counted as 'other pensions' for those that bought property as retirement provision? How would drawdown be handled?
Yes other income would be treated as other pensions and we all plan our lives everyday on facts that change over time and when the facts change we have to change our plans. I don't see why pensioners should be any different. If anything people facing clawback are probably in a better place to respond as chances are they have no mortgage or rent if they have significant enough pension. We could also start with a clawback free sum so only applies after first 5000 of additional income. HMRC will already have the figures for additional income so it could be handled via them.
Far far too harsh on low earners. Much higher clawback free amount required. And is this applied to future pensioners or to everyone, now? Will need to be worked out annually so all pensioners to complete tax returns? Youre basically telling a pensioner on average UK income youre taking 6 grand a year off them, the equivalent of increasing basic rate on an average earner in work to over 45%.
Most low earners will not be getting anywhere near 5K in additional pension.
HMRC already knows how much pensioners get in total as it taxes them above a certain figure so no tax returns required. Landlords also get taxed pensioner or not.
How do you get to taking 6K off them....for that level of clawback they would need additional income over the state pension of 30K or 35k if you give them the first 5K free of clawback. In my book someone with additional income of 30K doesnt need the state pension
Well if we give them the 5k allowance we are taking 5k of state pension back, or the equivalent of raising basic rate for an average wage earner to about 40%. Someone earning 60,000 a year doesn't 'need' the personal allowance. Why should a pensioner who planned his or her retirement fund some arse who earned 100k a year and pissed it all up the wall rather than saving? Why should income dependant pensioners suffer whilst asset rich ones laugh? If State pension was lavish, perhaps, but its a pittance in return for a lifetime of work and tax. I mean we might as well extend it and block access to NHS services for anybody on over average wage.
sighs you misunderstood I think
You get state pension of 9k You get additional income once the additional income is over 5k then for every 5£ you get state pension is reduced by £1
so additional income is 5k you get full state pension at 10K additional you get 1K removed from state pension at 20K additional you get 4k less state pension
so total for the 3 scenarios would be 14K, 18k,and 25K
So on practice not any different to increasing taxation on pensioners, for example by charging all pensioners NI.
In practise yes it would be like a tax.
Sorry but you can't all bang on about pension time bombs, demographic pressure and underfunded services and yet any time someone suggests reducing the things we spend on or trying to save money you are all up in arms.
We either reduce spending or it all collapses. Yes that means some are going to lose out. Doing nothing is no longer an option.
May I refer you to my header on the NHS, where I did address these issues, and make some proposals to address them.
The you in my post wasn't aimed at you personally but at all of the people who are constantly bemoaning underfunded services etc. Yet reacting in horror when anyone comes up with a proposal to change things. Cf Mays dementia tax
Agreed about the dementia tax. And keep coming with the proposals - they're much more constructive than much of what is posted on here, even if they're robustly challenged.
Thing is, right now, the most obvious proposal to change things is simply cancel what the government has announced. Wind back 48 hours, we had cheaper debt and less of it, and therefore very significantly better funded public services, for a given level of deficit.
If you're insisting on gentle nibbles rather than voracious gulps, let's at least not feed the elephant up so its even bigger. (This isn't directed at you specifically - you haven't as far as I can see argued for the governmeent's economic idiocy).
I am staying clear about the debate on the last budget and trying to take a broader view. I start at the point of what I want
a) Well funded services that we do continue b) People not having so much money taken from them to fund the services the state offers that they struggle c) not kicking debt down the road to our children and grandchildren
It remains true that you can pick a maximum of any two out of these three: Decent public services, manageable taxes, sound public finances.
Still no one addresses the elephant in the room. They complain about services being underfunded and how dare tax be cut.
If all services were properly funded and paid for out of tax we would have the government taking about 90% of gdp as tax.
Time to start asking what the state should be saying no we dont do that anymore. Sadly a conversation no politician seems to want to have.
The answer is not tax more when half the country is struggling to make ends meet as it is. The answer is reduce spending.
The really huge bits of state managed expenditure go on:
pensions social security NHS debt interest defence education justice/police/prisons local government services.
Debt interest will steadily rise unless we take a North Korean approach to liabilities.
In each other area above there is gigantic pressure massively to increase expenditure. Add social care to the list too. I can't thinkmof a single big area where people are generally saying 'enough' or 'too much'.
Can you (or anyone) suggest where the first, say, £200 bn reductions will be found?
For a start while those area's are high expenditure doesn't mean they should do everything they do now.
Defence for a start we could save a huge amount on procurement by just buying off the shelf stuff rather than creating custom shit just because.
NHS - last night I suggested a cap on lifetime health care expense, would set it at the average to start with and people can take out insurance to cover any over that. Also services such as tattoo removal should not be available. I would also refuse IVF on the NHS, a round of IVF costs about 10k....if you cant afford to save up 10k once a year to pay for it can you really afford the child as raising a child is likely to cost that a year in any case plus we have a lot of kids crying out for adoption.
I am sure others could come up with savings in all the other areas as well
There is some truth in your first post - so many areas of public services are so significantly underfunded right now that redressing the balance is going to be financially really quite tricky.
But your reply to @algarkirk just reinforces their point - defence procurement, tattoo removal, IVF are all tiny nibbles.
If the country was to go down your suggested route, it would need to involve, say, revoking the right to free education entirely. That's the scale we're talking about.
Which is why I suspect the only answer is to muddle on through. Only not in the way Truss and Kwarteng want us to do so.
They maybe tiny nibbles but I am sure there are plenty more tiny nibbles we can take and they start to add up. What we can't do is keep adding on things that need money because we are already taxing the majority of the country into the ground and there is no more to squeeze out.
The biggest change that ought to be made is public sector pensions switching from to db to dc and a cap on what the employer contributes. Currently employer contributions average about 20% in the public sector. Yes wouldn't help immediately but in the long term it would. I would also do a clawback on state pensions so for every 5£ you get from other pensions you state pension is reduced by a pound
The problem with state pension clawback is that many of us have planned retirement based on what we will need over state pension to get by. Is it really practical to say to someone who is expecting 14k a year in retirement (9k state approx plus 5k in his own schemes) that he has to take a 1k cut and live on 13k? Will rental incomes be counted as 'other pensions' for those that bought property as retirement provision? How would drawdown be handled?
Yes other income would be treated as other pensions and we all plan our lives everyday on facts that change over time and when the facts change we have to change our plans. I don't see why pensioners should be any different. If anything people facing clawback are probably in a better place to respond as chances are they have no mortgage or rent if they have significant enough pension. We could also start with a clawback free sum so only applies after first 5000 of additional income. HMRC will already have the figures for additional income so it could be handled via them.
Far far too harsh on low earners. Much higher clawback free amount required. And is this applied to future pensioners or to everyone, now? Will need to be worked out annually so all pensioners to complete tax returns? Youre basically telling a pensioner on average UK income youre taking 6 grand a year off them, the equivalent of increasing basic rate on an average earner in work to over 45%.
Most low earners will not be getting anywhere near 5K in additional pension.
HMRC already knows how much pensioners get in total as it taxes them above a certain figure so no tax returns required. Landlords also get taxed pensioner or not.
How do you get to taking 6K off them....for that level of clawback they would need additional income over the state pension of 30K or 35k if you give them the first 5K free of clawback. In my book someone with additional income of 30K doesnt need the state pension
Well if we give them the 5k allowance we are taking 5k of state pension back, or the equivalent of raising basic rate for an average wage earner to about 40%. Someone earning 60,000 a year doesn't 'need' the personal allowance. Why should a pensioner who planned his or her retirement fund some arse who earned 100k a year and pissed it all up the wall rather than saving? Why should income dependant pensioners suffer whilst asset rich ones laugh? If State pension was lavish, perhaps, but its a pittance in return for a lifetime of work and tax. I mean we might as well extend it and block access to NHS services for anybody on over average wage.
Pagan2 has effectively abolished the NHS already in their other proposals.
No I didn't typical left wing melodrama. Suggesting a cap on state care about average lifetime health care costs above which you have to insure is not abolishing the NHS in the least.
Depending on precisely what average you calculate, half the population will have lifetime health care costs above the current average, and half of all healthcare will become delivered outside the NHS and through a private insurance system. You would effectively turn the UK’s healthcare system into something like the US’s. About half of all healthcare funding in the US is paid for by the state, but their system targets state support at the old and pensioners (and federal employees), whereas your system would target state support at the lucky!
I advocated an insurance scheme to cover additional. I would suggest that the state itself runs a scheme for this to keep insurers honest and prevent abusive pricing. Many european countries have similar systems which are part insurance and part state funding. It does not have to be like america's lunacy
The thing is, a state-run insurance system that people have to pay into… well, basically, that just takes you back to where we started. You’ve re-labelled a tax into an insurance model… I guess you could call it a national insurance? The big difference is you go from funding healthcare via a progressive tax to funding it via effectively a flat tax.
But, sure, let’s look at some European models. In the UK, the state currently pays about 79% of all healthcare costs. Our nearest neighbour is France. The French state pays about 75% of all healthcare costs. It’s a similar figure in Germany, 77%. Switching to one of these European models doesn’t match what you proposed or deliver the savings you want.
I didn't say the state run scheme was mandatory. I suggested a state run scheme be run so that insurance companies offering similar schemes couldn't run riot.
Also those stats on europe while they look comparable may not be. Does for example the french system or the german system do all the procedures the nhs does for free or do they go you want procedure x sorry need to go private for that. I don't know that answer so am speculating
I’m sure there are particular idiosyncrasies to each of those systems so they fund certain procedures in different ways, but the total spend is the total spend. While organised somewhat differently, our European neighbours have state-funded healthcare systems that cost them, more or less, what the NHS costs us. You’re right about “nibbles”, as discussed earlier, and if there are savings to be found and we can find them through making international comparisons, we should do that.
But you were suggesting something far more drastic, which is why I feel it’s fair enough to describe it abolishing the NHS.
Health care, whether funded by state, insurance or self funded is essentially redistributive as the people paying most will be healthy and working and those needing it sick and not working. It is long term illnesses that are most expensive, so there isn't a lot of churn between earners and recipients, though there always a few.
If taxes are cut but we wind up having to pay out for health insurance, private schools, security or pensions then the result is the same. There is no more money in the pocket, just different bills.
Still no one addresses the elephant in the room. They complain about services being underfunded and how dare tax be cut.
If all services were properly funded and paid for out of tax we would have the government taking about 90% of gdp as tax.
Time to start asking what the state should be saying no we dont do that anymore. Sadly a conversation no politician seems to want to have.
The answer is not tax more when half the country is struggling to make ends meet as it is. The answer is reduce spending.
The really huge bits of state managed expenditure go on:
pensions social security NHS debt interest defence education justice/police/prisons local government services.
Debt interest will steadily rise unless we take a North Korean approach to liabilities.
In each other area above there is gigantic pressure massively to increase expenditure. Add social care to the list too. I can't thinkmof a single big area where people are generally saying 'enough' or 'too much'.
Can you (or anyone) suggest where the first, say, £200 bn reductions will be found?
For a start while those area's are high expenditure doesn't mean they should do everything they do now.
Defence for a start we could save a huge amount on procurement by just buying off the shelf stuff rather than creating custom shit just because.
NHS - last night I suggested a cap on lifetime health care expense, would set it at the average to start with and people can take out insurance to cover any over that. Also services such as tattoo removal should not be available. I would also refuse IVF on the NHS, a round of IVF costs about 10k....if you cant afford to save up 10k once a year to pay for it can you really afford the child as raising a child is likely to cost that a year in any case plus we have a lot of kids crying out for adoption.
I am sure others could come up with savings in all the other areas as well
There is some truth in your first post - so many areas of public services are so significantly underfunded right now that redressing the balance is going to be financially really quite tricky.
But your reply to @algarkirk just reinforces their point - defence procurement, tattoo removal, IVF are all tiny nibbles.
If the country was to go down your suggested route, it would need to involve, say, revoking the right to free education entirely. That's the scale we're talking about.
Which is why I suspect the only answer is to muddle on through. Only not in the way Truss and Kwarteng want us to do so.
This wouldn't save much on it's own is not a good reason to not try and save that cash in the first place.
I agree. It just doesn't match the scale @Pagan2 is suggesting we need to work at.
You are however taking my post as this is all we should do rather than just a couple of examples
I'm not taking it that way - what I'm trying to say is that my instinct is that the scale of change needed to solve the problem you identify is so large that however many examples you can identify, they won't add up to anywhere near enough.
That's not to say they aren't worth doing, just that, if we were really having a conversation about the 'elephant in the room' - finding a way to properly fund that which we think is important enough to properly fund, and not doing the rest, we would need to be looking at an entirely dfferent scale.
The way to eat an elephant is in many meals not one gigantic roast dinner
Indeed. There should be a zero-based review of spending ahead of the next Budget. It’s not been done properly in decades.
We could save £48 billion per annum by disbanding the Army, Navy and RAF. It would also free up thousands of healthy young people for more productive work.
We could save about the same by abandoning the state education system.
The way things are going, they'll only be antedating its disorganised collapse by a few months anyway.
Good idea, it frees up all those teachers to work in financial services, and all those children to go down the mines, up chimneys and pick cabbages
So having disbanded the armed forces and schools, we should have enough to fund the £87 billion due in interest on the national debt this year.
We will need further savings as next year the amount payable will be higher.
Abolish NHS, close it down entirely. And stop paying all state pensions. That should do the trick.
Still no one addresses the elephant in the room. They complain about services being underfunded and how dare tax be cut.
If all services were properly funded and paid for out of tax we would have the government taking about 90% of gdp as tax.
Time to start asking what the state should be saying no we dont do that anymore. Sadly a conversation no politician seems to want to have.
The answer is not tax more when half the country is struggling to make ends meet as it is. The answer is reduce spending.
The really huge bits of state managed expenditure go on:
pensions social security NHS debt interest defence education justice/police/prisons local government services.
Debt interest will steadily rise unless we take a North Korean approach to liabilities.
In each other area above there is gigantic pressure massively to increase expenditure. Add social care to the list too. I can't thinkmof a single big area where people are generally saying 'enough' or 'too much'.
Can you (or anyone) suggest where the first, say, £200 bn reductions will be found?
For a start while those area's are high expenditure doesn't mean they should do everything they do now.
Defence for a start we could save a huge amount on procurement by just buying off the shelf stuff rather than creating custom shit just because.
NHS - last night I suggested a cap on lifetime health care expense, would set it at the average to start with and people can take out insurance to cover any over that. Also services such as tattoo removal should not be available. I would also refuse IVF on the NHS, a round of IVF costs about 10k....if you cant afford to save up 10k once a year to pay for it can you really afford the child as raising a child is likely to cost that a year in any case plus we have a lot of kids crying out for adoption.
I am sure others could come up with savings in all the other areas as well
There is some truth in your first post - so many areas of public services are so significantly underfunded right now that redressing the balance is going to be financially really quite tricky.
But your reply to @algarkirk just reinforces their point - defence procurement, tattoo removal, IVF are all tiny nibbles.
If the country was to go down your suggested route, it would need to involve, say, revoking the right to free education entirely. That's the scale we're talking about.
Which is why I suspect the only answer is to muddle on through. Only not in the way Truss and Kwarteng want us to do so.
They maybe tiny nibbles but I am sure there are plenty more tiny nibbles we can take and they start to add up. What we can't do is keep adding on things that need money because we are already taxing the majority of the country into the ground and there is no more to squeeze out.
The biggest change that ought to be made is public sector pensions switching from to db to dc and a cap on what the employer contributes. Currently employer contributions average about 20% in the public sector. Yes wouldn't help immediately but in the long term it would. I would also do a clawback on state pensions so for every 5£ you get from other pensions you state pension is reduced by a pound
The problem with state pension clawback is that many of us have planned retirement based on what we will need over state pension to get by. Is it really practical to say to someone who is expecting 14k a year in retirement (9k state approx plus 5k in his own schemes) that he has to take a 1k cut and live on 13k? Will rental incomes be counted as 'other pensions' for those that bought property as retirement provision? How would drawdown be handled?
Yes other income would be treated as other pensions and we all plan our lives everyday on facts that change over time and when the facts change we have to change our plans. I don't see why pensioners should be any different. If anything people facing clawback are probably in a better place to respond as chances are they have no mortgage or rent if they have significant enough pension. We could also start with a clawback free sum so only applies after first 5000 of additional income. HMRC will already have the figures for additional income so it could be handled via them.
Far far too harsh on low earners. Much higher clawback free amount required. And is this applied to future pensioners or to everyone, now? Will need to be worked out annually so all pensioners to complete tax returns? Youre basically telling a pensioner on average UK income youre taking 6 grand a year off them, the equivalent of increasing basic rate on an average earner in work to over 45%.
Most low earners will not be getting anywhere near 5K in additional pension.
HMRC already knows how much pensioners get in total as it taxes them above a certain figure so no tax returns required. Landlords also get taxed pensioner or not.
How do you get to taking 6K off them....for that level of clawback they would need additional income over the state pension of 30K or 35k if you give them the first 5K free of clawback. In my book someone with additional income of 30K doesnt need the state pension
Well if we give them the 5k allowance we are taking 5k of state pension back, or the equivalent of raising basic rate for an average wage earner to about 40%. Someone earning 60,000 a year doesn't 'need' the personal allowance. Why should a pensioner who planned his or her retirement fund some arse who earned 100k a year and pissed it all up the wall rather than saving? Why should income dependant pensioners suffer whilst asset rich ones laugh? If State pension was lavish, perhaps, but its a pittance in return for a lifetime of work and tax. I mean we might as well extend it and block access to NHS services for anybody on over average wage.
sighs you misunderstood I think
You get state pension of 9k You get additional income once the additional income is over 5k then for every 5£ you get state pension is reduced by £1
so additional income is 5k you get full state pension at 10K additional you get 1K removed from state pension at 20K additional you get 4k less state pension
so total for the 3 scenarios would be 14K, 18k,and 25K
So on practice not any different to increasing taxation on pensioners, for example by charging all pensioners NI.
In practise yes it would be like a tax.
Sorry but you can't all bang on about pension time bombs, demographic pressure and underfunded services and yet any time someone suggests reducing the things we spend on or trying to save money you are all up in arms.
We either reduce spending or it all collapses. Yes that means some are going to lose out. Doing nothing is no longer an option.
May I refer you to my header on the NHS, where I did address these issues, and make some proposals to address them.
The you in my post wasn't aimed at you personally but at all of the people who are constantly bemoaning underfunded services etc. Yet reacting in horror when anyone comes up with a proposal to change things. Cf Mays dementia tax
Agreed about the dementia tax. And keep coming with the proposals - they're much more constructive than much of what is posted on here, even if they're robustly challenged.
Thing is, right now, the most obvious proposal to change things is simply cancel what the government has announced. Wind back 48 hours, we had cheaper debt and less of it, and therefore very significantly better funded public services, for a given level of deficit.
If you're insisting on gentle nibbles rather than voracious gulps, let's at least not feed the elephant up so its even bigger. (This isn't directed at you specifically - you haven't as far as I can see argued for the governmeent's economic idiocy).
I am staying clear about the debate on the last budget and trying to take a broader view. I start at the point of what I want
a) Well funded services that we do continue b) People not having so much money taken from them to fund the services the state offers that they struggle c) not kicking debt down the road to our children and grandchildren
Entirely agree with the overall sentiment, and its worth pursuing 'out there' solutions, at least in theory.
I disagree with (b) though. I don't think that people are struggling because of the levels of taxation. It's possible the economy as a whole is hampered, but individual struggles are affected much more by other things than taxation (above all else, costs of renting/buying a house).
Yes I agree that housing is a major cause of poverty in the country. However not much we can do about that without building more houses and we know how problematic that gets.
The lever we do have however is how much money we leave in peoples pockets
renting a room costs anything from 100 to 200 a week. someone earning 20k a year is taking home 328 a week so is left with only 228 to 128 a week out of which they will have to pay transport, fuel, and food. If we hadn't taken 45£ out of their pocket in tax and ni they would be better able to cope
Still no one addresses the elephant in the room. They complain about services being underfunded and how dare tax be cut.
If all services were properly funded and paid for out of tax we would have the government taking about 90% of gdp as tax.
Time to start asking what the state should be saying no we dont do that anymore. Sadly a conversation no politician seems to want to have.
The answer is not tax more when half the country is struggling to make ends meet as it is. The answer is reduce spending.
The really huge bits of state managed expenditure go on:
pensions social security NHS debt interest defence education justice/police/prisons local government services.
Debt interest will steadily rise unless we take a North Korean approach to liabilities.
In each other area above there is gigantic pressure massively to increase expenditure. Add social care to the list too. I can't thinkmof a single big area where people are generally saying 'enough' or 'too much'.
Can you (or anyone) suggest where the first, say, £200 bn reductions will be found?
For a start while those area's are high expenditure doesn't mean they should do everything they do now.
Defence for a start we could save a huge amount on procurement by just buying off the shelf stuff rather than creating custom shit just because.
NHS - last night I suggested a cap on lifetime health care expense, would set it at the average to start with and people can take out insurance to cover any over that. Also services such as tattoo removal should not be available. I would also refuse IVF on the NHS, a round of IVF costs about 10k....if you cant afford to save up 10k once a year to pay for it can you really afford the child as raising a child is likely to cost that a year in any case plus we have a lot of kids crying out for adoption.
I am sure others could come up with savings in all the other areas as well
There is some truth in your first post - so many areas of public services are so significantly underfunded right now that redressing the balance is going to be financially really quite tricky.
But your reply to @algarkirk just reinforces their point - defence procurement, tattoo removal, IVF are all tiny nibbles.
If the country was to go down your suggested route, it would need to involve, say, revoking the right to free education entirely. That's the scale we're talking about.
Which is why I suspect the only answer is to muddle on through. Only not in the way Truss and Kwarteng want us to do so.
They maybe tiny nibbles but I am sure there are plenty more tiny nibbles we can take and they start to add up. What we can't do is keep adding on things that need money because we are already taxing the majority of the country into the ground and there is no more to squeeze out.
The biggest change that ought to be made is public sector pensions switching from to db to dc and a cap on what the employer contributes. Currently employer contributions average about 20% in the public sector. Yes wouldn't help immediately but in the long term it would. I would also do a clawback on state pensions so for every 5£ you get from other pensions you state pension is reduced by a pound
The problem with state pension clawback is that many of us have planned retirement based on what we will need over state pension to get by. Is it really practical to say to someone who is expecting 14k a year in retirement (9k state approx plus 5k in his own schemes) that he has to take a 1k cut and live on 13k? Will rental incomes be counted as 'other pensions' for those that bought property as retirement provision? How would drawdown be handled?
Yes other income would be treated as other pensions and we all plan our lives everyday on facts that change over time and when the facts change we have to change our plans. I don't see why pensioners should be any different. If anything people facing clawback are probably in a better place to respond as chances are they have no mortgage or rent if they have significant enough pension. We could also start with a clawback free sum so only applies after first 5000 of additional income. HMRC will already have the figures for additional income so it could be handled via them.
Far far too harsh on low earners. Much higher clawback free amount required. And is this applied to future pensioners or to everyone, now? Will need to be worked out annually so all pensioners to complete tax returns? Youre basically telling a pensioner on average UK income youre taking 6 grand a year off them, the equivalent of increasing basic rate on an average earner in work to over 45%.
Most low earners will not be getting anywhere near 5K in additional pension.
HMRC already knows how much pensioners get in total as it taxes them above a certain figure so no tax returns required. Landlords also get taxed pensioner or not.
How do you get to taking 6K off them....for that level of clawback they would need additional income over the state pension of 30K or 35k if you give them the first 5K free of clawback. In my book someone with additional income of 30K doesnt need the state pension
Well if we give them the 5k allowance we are taking 5k of state pension back, or the equivalent of raising basic rate for an average wage earner to about 40%. Someone earning 60,000 a year doesn't 'need' the personal allowance. Why should a pensioner who planned his or her retirement fund some arse who earned 100k a year and pissed it all up the wall rather than saving? Why should income dependant pensioners suffer whilst asset rich ones laugh? If State pension was lavish, perhaps, but its a pittance in return for a lifetime of work and tax. I mean we might as well extend it and block access to NHS services for anybody on over average wage.
sighs you misunderstood I think
You get state pension of 9k You get additional income once the additional income is over 5k then for every 5£ you get state pension is reduced by £1
so additional income is 5k you get full state pension at 10K additional you get 1K removed from state pension at 20K additional you get 4k less state pension
so total for the 3 scenarios would be 14K, 18k,and 25K
So on practice not any different to increasing taxation on pensioners, for example by charging all pensioners NI.
In practise yes it would be like a tax.
Sorry but you can't all bang on about pension time bombs, demographic pressure and underfunded services and yet any time someone suggests reducing the things we spend on or trying to save money you are all up in arms.
We either reduce spending or it all collapses. Yes that means some are going to lose out. Doing nothing is no longer an option.
May I refer you to my header on the NHS, where I did address these issues, and make some proposals to address them.
The you in my post wasn't aimed at you personally but at all of the people who are constantly bemoaning underfunded services etc. Yet reacting in horror when anyone comes up with a proposal to change things. Cf Mays dementia tax
Agreed about the dementia tax. And keep coming with the proposals - they're much more constructive than much of what is posted on here, even if they're robustly challenged.
Thing is, right now, the most obvious proposal to change things is simply cancel what the government has announced. Wind back 48 hours, we had cheaper debt and less of it, and therefore very significantly better funded public services, for a given level of deficit.
If you're insisting on gentle nibbles rather than voracious gulps, let's at least not feed the elephant up so its even bigger. (This isn't directed at you specifically - you haven't as far as I can see argued for the governmeent's economic idiocy).
I am staying clear about the debate on the last budget and trying to take a broader view. I start at the point of what I want
a) Well funded services that we do continue b) People not having so much money taken from them to fund the services the state offers that they struggle c) not kicking debt down the road to our children and grandchildren
It remains true that you can pick a maximum of any two out of these three: Decent public services, manageable taxes, sound public finances.
Currently government scores Zero out of three.
My point a) is predicated on a reduction in the services the state offers and just funding well the ones we continue, not carrying on doing everything we do now
Still no one addresses the elephant in the room. They complain about services being underfunded and how dare tax be cut.
If all services were properly funded and paid for out of tax we would have the government taking about 90% of gdp as tax.
Time to start asking what the state should be saying no we dont do that anymore. Sadly a conversation no politician seems to want to have.
The answer is not tax more when half the country is struggling to make ends meet as it is. The answer is reduce spending.
The really huge bits of state managed expenditure go on:
pensions social security NHS debt interest defence education justice/police/prisons local government services.
Debt interest will steadily rise unless we take a North Korean approach to liabilities.
In each other area above there is gigantic pressure massively to increase expenditure. Add social care to the list too. I can't thinkmof a single big area where people are generally saying 'enough' or 'too much'.
Can you (or anyone) suggest where the first, say, £200 bn reductions will be found?
For a start while those area's are high expenditure doesn't mean they should do everything they do now.
Defence for a start we could save a huge amount on procurement by just buying off the shelf stuff rather than creating custom shit just because.
NHS - last night I suggested a cap on lifetime health care expense, would set it at the average to start with and people can take out insurance to cover any over that. Also services such as tattoo removal should not be available. I would also refuse IVF on the NHS, a round of IVF costs about 10k....if you cant afford to save up 10k once a year to pay for it can you really afford the child as raising a child is likely to cost that a year in any case plus we have a lot of kids crying out for adoption.
I am sure others could come up with savings in all the other areas as well
There is some truth in your first post - so many areas of public services are so significantly underfunded right now that redressing the balance is going to be financially really quite tricky.
But your reply to @algarkirk just reinforces their point - defence procurement, tattoo removal, IVF are all tiny nibbles.
If the country was to go down your suggested route, it would need to involve, say, revoking the right to free education entirely. That's the scale we're talking about.
Which is why I suspect the only answer is to muddle on through. Only not in the way Truss and Kwarteng want us to do so.
They maybe tiny nibbles but I am sure there are plenty more tiny nibbles we can take and they start to add up. What we can't do is keep adding on things that need money because we are already taxing the majority of the country into the ground and there is no more to squeeze out.
The biggest change that ought to be made is public sector pensions switching from to db to dc and a cap on what the employer contributes. Currently employer contributions average about 20% in the public sector. Yes wouldn't help immediately but in the long term it would. I would also do a clawback on state pensions so for every 5£ you get from other pensions you state pension is reduced by a pound
The problem with state pension clawback is that many of us have planned retirement based on what we will need over state pension to get by. Is it really practical to say to someone who is expecting 14k a year in retirement (9k state approx plus 5k in his own schemes) that he has to take a 1k cut and live on 13k? Will rental incomes be counted as 'other pensions' for those that bought property as retirement provision? How would drawdown be handled?
Yes other income would be treated as other pensions and we all plan our lives everyday on facts that change over time and when the facts change we have to change our plans. I don't see why pensioners should be any different. If anything people facing clawback are probably in a better place to respond as chances are they have no mortgage or rent if they have significant enough pension. We could also start with a clawback free sum so only applies after first 5000 of additional income. HMRC will already have the figures for additional income so it could be handled via them.
Far far too harsh on low earners. Much higher clawback free amount required. And is this applied to future pensioners or to everyone, now? Will need to be worked out annually so all pensioners to complete tax returns? Youre basically telling a pensioner on average UK income youre taking 6 grand a year off them, the equivalent of increasing basic rate on an average earner in work to over 45%.
Most low earners will not be getting anywhere near 5K in additional pension.
HMRC already knows how much pensioners get in total as it taxes them above a certain figure so no tax returns required. Landlords also get taxed pensioner or not.
How do you get to taking 6K off them....for that level of clawback they would need additional income over the state pension of 30K or 35k if you give them the first 5K free of clawback. In my book someone with additional income of 30K doesnt need the state pension
Well if we give them the 5k allowance we are taking 5k of state pension back, or the equivalent of raising basic rate for an average wage earner to about 40%. Someone earning 60,000 a year doesn't 'need' the personal allowance. Why should a pensioner who planned his or her retirement fund some arse who earned 100k a year and pissed it all up the wall rather than saving? Why should income dependant pensioners suffer whilst asset rich ones laugh? If State pension was lavish, perhaps, but its a pittance in return for a lifetime of work and tax. I mean we might as well extend it and block access to NHS services for anybody on over average wage.
sighs you misunderstood I think
You get state pension of 9k You get additional income once the additional income is over 5k then for every 5£ you get state pension is reduced by £1
so additional income is 5k you get full state pension at 10K additional you get 1K removed from state pension at 20K additional you get 4k less state pension
so total for the 3 scenarios would be 14K, 18k,and 25K
So on practice not any different to increasing taxation on pensioners, for example by charging all pensioners NI.
In practise yes it would be like a tax.
Sorry but you can't all bang on about pension time bombs, demographic pressure and underfunded services and yet any time someone suggests reducing the things we spend on or trying to save money you are all up in arms.
We either reduce spending or it all collapses. Yes that means some are going to lose out. Doing nothing is no longer an option.
May I refer you to my header on the NHS, where I did address these issues, and make some proposals to address them.
The you in my post wasn't aimed at you personally but at all of the people who are constantly bemoaning underfunded services etc. Yet reacting in horror when anyone comes up with a proposal to change things. Cf Mays dementia tax
Agreed about the dementia tax. And keep coming with the proposals - they're much more constructive than much of what is posted on here, even if they're robustly challenged.
Thing is, right now, the most obvious proposal to change things is simply cancel what the government has announced. Wind back 48 hours, we had cheaper debt and less of it, and therefore very significantly better funded public services, for a given level of deficit.
If you're insisting on gentle nibbles rather than voracious gulps, let's at least not feed the elephant up so its even bigger. (This isn't directed at you specifically - you haven't as far as I can see argued for the governmeent's economic idiocy).
I am staying clear about the debate on the last budget and trying to take a broader view. I start at the point of what I want
a) Well funded services that we do continue b) People not having so much money taken from them to fund the services the state offers that they struggle c) not kicking debt down the road to our children and grandchildren
Entirely agree with the overall sentiment, and its worth pursuing 'out there' solutions, at least in theory.
I disagree with (b) though. I don't think that people are struggling because of the levels of taxation. It's possible the economy as a whole is hampered, but individual struggles are affected much more by other things than taxation (above all else, costs of renting/buying a house).
Yes I agree that housing is a major cause of poverty in the country. However not much we can do about that without building more houses and we know how problematic that gets.
The lever we do have however is how much money we leave in peoples pockets
renting a room costs anything from 100 to 200 a week. someone earning 20k a year is taking home 328 a week so is left with only 228 to 128 a week out of which they will have to pay transport, fuel, and food. If we hadn't taken 45£ out of their pocket in tax and ni they would be better able to cope
They wouldn't be better off if that £45 went on health insurance or private pension contribution.
Still no one addresses the elephant in the room. They complain about services being underfunded and how dare tax be cut.
If all services were properly funded and paid for out of tax we would have the government taking about 90% of gdp as tax.
Time to start asking what the state should be saying no we dont do that anymore. Sadly a conversation no politician seems to want to have.
The answer is not tax more when half the country is struggling to make ends meet as it is. The answer is reduce spending.
The really huge bits of state managed expenditure go on:
pensions social security NHS debt interest defence education justice/police/prisons local government services.
Debt interest will steadily rise unless we take a North Korean approach to liabilities.
In each other area above there is gigantic pressure massively to increase expenditure. Add social care to the list too. I can't thinkmof a single big area where people are generally saying 'enough' or 'too much'.
Can you (or anyone) suggest where the first, say, £200 bn reductions will be found?
For a start while those area's are high expenditure doesn't mean they should do everything they do now.
Defence for a start we could save a huge amount on procurement by just buying off the shelf stuff rather than creating custom shit just because.
NHS - last night I suggested a cap on lifetime health care expense, would set it at the average to start with and people can take out insurance to cover any over that. Also services such as tattoo removal should not be available. I would also refuse IVF on the NHS, a round of IVF costs about 10k....if you cant afford to save up 10k once a year to pay for it can you really afford the child as raising a child is likely to cost that a year in any case plus we have a lot of kids crying out for adoption.
I am sure others could come up with savings in all the other areas as well
There is some truth in your first post - so many areas of public services are so significantly underfunded right now that redressing the balance is going to be financially really quite tricky.
But your reply to @algarkirk just reinforces their point - defence procurement, tattoo removal, IVF are all tiny nibbles.
If the country was to go down your suggested route, it would need to involve, say, revoking the right to free education entirely. That's the scale we're talking about.
Which is why I suspect the only answer is to muddle on through. Only not in the way Truss and Kwarteng want us to do so.
They maybe tiny nibbles but I am sure there are plenty more tiny nibbles we can take and they start to add up. What we can't do is keep adding on things that need money because we are already taxing the majority of the country into the ground and there is no more to squeeze out.
The biggest change that ought to be made is public sector pensions switching from to db to dc and a cap on what the employer contributes. Currently employer contributions average about 20% in the public sector. Yes wouldn't help immediately but in the long term it would. I would also do a clawback on state pensions so for every 5£ you get from other pensions you state pension is reduced by a pound
The problem with state pension clawback is that many of us have planned retirement based on what we will need over state pension to get by. Is it really practical to say to someone who is expecting 14k a year in retirement (9k state approx plus 5k in his own schemes) that he has to take a 1k cut and live on 13k? Will rental incomes be counted as 'other pensions' for those that bought property as retirement provision? How would drawdown be handled?
Yes other income would be treated as other pensions and we all plan our lives everyday on facts that change over time and when the facts change we have to change our plans. I don't see why pensioners should be any different. If anything people facing clawback are probably in a better place to respond as chances are they have no mortgage or rent if they have significant enough pension. We could also start with a clawback free sum so only applies after first 5000 of additional income. HMRC will already have the figures for additional income so it could be handled via them.
Far far too harsh on low earners. Much higher clawback free amount required. And is this applied to future pensioners or to everyone, now? Will need to be worked out annually so all pensioners to complete tax returns? Youre basically telling a pensioner on average UK income youre taking 6 grand a year off them, the equivalent of increasing basic rate on an average earner in work to over 45%.
Most low earners will not be getting anywhere near 5K in additional pension.
HMRC already knows how much pensioners get in total as it taxes them above a certain figure so no tax returns required. Landlords also get taxed pensioner or not.
How do you get to taking 6K off them....for that level of clawback they would need additional income over the state pension of 30K or 35k if you give them the first 5K free of clawback. In my book someone with additional income of 30K doesnt need the state pension
Well if we give them the 5k allowance we are taking 5k of state pension back, or the equivalent of raising basic rate for an average wage earner to about 40%. Someone earning 60,000 a year doesn't 'need' the personal allowance. Why should a pensioner who planned his or her retirement fund some arse who earned 100k a year and pissed it all up the wall rather than saving? Why should income dependant pensioners suffer whilst asset rich ones laugh? If State pension was lavish, perhaps, but its a pittance in return for a lifetime of work and tax. I mean we might as well extend it and block access to NHS services for anybody on over average wage.
sighs you misunderstood I think
You get state pension of 9k You get additional income once the additional income is over 5k then for every 5£ you get state pension is reduced by £1
so additional income is 5k you get full state pension at 10K additional you get 1K removed from state pension at 20K additional you get 4k less state pension
so total for the 3 scenarios would be 14K, 18k,and 25K
So on practice not any different to increasing taxation on pensioners, for example by charging all pensioners NI.
In practise yes it would be like a tax.
Sorry but you can't all bang on about pension time bombs, demographic pressure and underfunded services and yet any time someone suggests reducing the things we spend on or trying to save money you are all up in arms.
We either reduce spending or it all collapses. Yes that means some are going to lose out. Doing nothing is no longer an option.
May I refer you to my header on the NHS, where I did address these issues, and make some proposals to address them.
The you in my post wasn't aimed at you personally but at all of the people who are constantly bemoaning underfunded services etc. Yet reacting in horror when anyone comes up with a proposal to change things. Cf Mays dementia tax
Agreed about the dementia tax. And keep coming with the proposals - they're much more constructive than much of what is posted on here, even if they're robustly challenged.
Thing is, right now, the most obvious proposal to change things is simply cancel what the government has announced. Wind back 48 hours, we had cheaper debt and less of it, and therefore very significantly better funded public services, for a given level of deficit.
If you're insisting on gentle nibbles rather than voracious gulps, let's at least not feed the elephant up so its even bigger. (This isn't directed at you specifically - you haven't as far as I can see argued for the governmeent's economic idiocy).
I am staying clear about the debate on the last budget and trying to take a broader view. I start at the point of what I want
a) Well funded services that we do continue b) People not having so much money taken from them to fund the services the state offers that they struggle c) not kicking debt down the road to our children and grandchildren
Entirely agree with the overall sentiment, and its worth pursuing 'out there' solutions, at least in theory.
I disagree with (b) though. I don't think that people are struggling because of the levels of taxation. It's possible the economy as a whole is hampered, but individual struggles are affected much more by other things than taxation (above all else, costs of renting/buying a house).
Yes I agree that housing is a major cause of poverty in the country. However not much we can do about that without building more houses and we know how problematic that gets.
The lever we do have however is how much money we leave in peoples pockets
renting a room costs anything from 100 to 200 a week. someone earning 20k a year is taking home 328 a week so is left with only 228 to 128 a week out of which they will have to pay transport, fuel, and food. If we hadn't taken 45£ out of their pocket in tax and ni they would be better able to cope
I suspect that doesn't matter.
Certainly in London, the supply-demand curve has reached the point where the market rent for anything half habitable is "wherever you can afford plus a bit".
So if you put £45 more in people's pockets by cutting taxes, it will go directly onto rents.
If I'm right, cutting the state to cut tax will just transfer even more cash to landlords.
Comments
He’s mediocre and unthreatening.
It will be the tories who can take the credit for it. Choosing to go on a right wing corbynite binge, screw the consequences.
Idiots.
Defending the territory of any country, is the first responsibility of the State.
(I’ll agree that many hundreds of the brass hats in Whitehall are not required).
PB was ever thus.
https://www7.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2018/07/01/three-score-and-ten-has-the-nhs-reached-the-end-of-its-natural-life/
If I were the Scottish Government, I would extend LBTT to cover sales as well as purchases, with a 10% tax on sales of properties over £1 million. If the rich want to move away, fine, but we’ll get our pound of flesh first.
The public don't necessarily give credit when a) They didn't much like you in the first place, and b) They expect you to provide assistance.
SNP 46%
Con 18%
And it’s the SNP that’s the smaller party.
PB was ever thus.
Not predicting that yet. Still Hung Parliament for me
Incidentally afaics those of them who were resident in Scotland are still resident in Scotland.
There's a big difference between 10% of high earners deciding to relocate and 0.1% doing so, but I have no doubt that at least some people will consider it. It's perhaps more likely to be part of the consideration when moving in the other direction. Why go through the hassle of moving to a new place, *and* get taxed more highly than staying put where you are? If a London high-flyer has the same job offer, but a choice of relocating to Scotland or Yorkshire, you could see why the lower tax rate would make Yorkshire a more appealing destination than if the difference wasn't there.
The counter-argument would be that the extra money raised for spending on public services made Scotland a better place to live, and that the lower tax rate for lower-paid people created a more equitable and happier society. If I was in government in Scotland that's the argument I would be working to make true. It's certainly the sort of argument that the current Scottish government makes, but they don't seem to be too focused on making it true, rather than making sure that everyone knows Westminster is to blame when it isn't.
My issue is that on their own, ceteris paribus, what the Bank are doing ought to be enough. However ceteris isn't paribus, the Fed are being far too aggressive and the Bank need to take that into account. A half a point rise ought to be sufficient, except what the Fed are doing means it's not. And the Bank, acting after the Fed, should have known that!
America sneezes and Europe catches a cold.
We have to reduce spending or increase revenue. That means it has to come from somewhere.The employed are already taxed to the point that many in full employment have to use food banks so increasing basic rates is out. There aren't enough higher earners to make a dent in our spending.
So you tell us where you think the reduction or increased revenue should be found. You are very quick to say "no not there".
But, sure, let’s look at some European models. In the UK, the state currently pays about 79% of all healthcare costs. Our nearest neighbour is France. The French state pays about 75% of all healthcare costs. It’s a similar figure in Germany, 77%. Switching to one of these European models doesn’t match what you proposed or deliver the savings you want.
Thing is, right now, the most obvious proposal to change things is simply cancel what the government has announced. Wind back 48 hours, we had cheaper debt and less of it, and therefore very significantly better funded public services, for a given level of deficit.
If you're insisting on gentle nibbles rather than voracious gulps, let's at least not feed the elephant up so its even bigger. (This isn't directed at you specifically - you haven't as far as I can see argued for the governmeent's economic idiocy).
PR however would give both a better chance of forming a government in a coalition, even without the small chance of a majority under FPTP
Also those stats on europe while they look comparable may not be. Does for example the french system or the german system do all the procedures the nhs does for free or do they go you want procedure x sorry need to go private for that. I don't know that answer so am speculating
The sandpit is going to be a very expensive place for Europeans on holidays this winter.
The pound and euro are bouncing around in normal variance ranges seen in recent years. It's the dollar that has moved significantly.
taxedmortgaged and billed to the point that many in full employment have to use food banks...Fixed it for ya. The current cost of living crisis is in no way generated by marginal rates of taxation. Taxation levels aren't the fundamental problem here, the way our economy has been skewed by the weird brand of capitalism we currently subscribe to, so that house prices and rental costs are unaffordable is.
I know, because I was the duty IT manager for a major UK bank, one of whose systems went tits up at the idea of £ < € and started offering free money to other companies' automatic trading systems. We had to shut it down sharpish in the early hours but not before we'd lost several £m.
By the time we fixed the system the £ was back up above the € again of course.
Tax rates in the UK are lower than in most of our European neighbours. We could comfortably be taxed more. Sure, one should target those taxes appropriately. Maybe people who are in no danger of needing a food bank, say those earning over £150,000, could pay a bit more in tax.
a) Well funded services that we do continue
b) People not having so much money taken from them to fund the services the state offers that they struggle
c) not kicking debt down the road to our children and grandchildren
Fox jr2 was via self funded IVF. £1200 per cycle at that time, but nothing like the psychological cost. It is a very gruelling process emotionally.
I don't regret it at all, but the costs since birth have been substantially more!
They used Fred Goodwin as an example. If only ...
I was duty IT manager for a hospitality retailer in Europe, on the night the Euro went live on 1st Jan 2002.
I wonder how many systems got caught out on that mad day in 2020, when the US oil price went negative?
Real tax rates are not that low in this country. In fact until yesterday they'd never been higher in 74 years.
Alastair Campbell
The Russian president has rejected requests from commanders in the field that they be allowed to retreat from Kherson, a vital city in Ukraine’s south.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/23/us/politics/putin-ukraine.html?smid=tw-share
But let's see how it fares over the next few months.
Paying £87 billion in interest on the national debt is only going to be increasing in the next few years as interest rates spiral ever upwards.
I disagree with (b) though. I don't think that people are struggling because of the levels of taxation. It's possible the economy as a whole is hampered, but individual struggles are affected much more by other things than taxation (above all else, costs of renting/buying a house).
Their rebuttals have been utterly pathetic. Like Seumus Milne levels of bad. Labour has played them like a fiddle
But you were suggesting something far more drastic, which is why I feel it’s fair enough to describe it abolishing the NHS.
Went to the Brian Cox 'Horizons' show last night. Very good. Seems like it's an interesting time for astrophysics as our understanding of black holes raises more and more questions about the nature of the universe.
Interestingly for all you alien hunters, Cox sounds decidedly more hesitant about the certainty of other intelligent life than he did when I went to a talk of his about 10 years ago.
'The human brain might be the only only thing in existence capable of giving meaning to the universe'. (I paraphrase)
Recommended if you happen to get chance to go to the show.
It’s now a one-in-four chance, according to Bloomberg's pricing model https://trib.al/JGqt8wL https://twitter.com/BloombergUK/status/1573665689419894784/photo/1
The only questions remaining, are how many troops get killed or captured, and whether the Ukranians can get their kit intact or destroyed.
The commanders want to be allowed to destroy equipment and retreat in an ordered manner - Putin wants them to fight to the inevitable end.
Currently government scores Zero out of three.
If taxes are cut but we wind up having to pay out for health insurance, private schools, security or pensions then the result is the same. There is no more money in the pocket, just different bills.
The lever we do have however is how much money we leave in peoples pockets
renting a room costs anything from 100 to 200 a week. someone earning 20k a year is taking home 328 a week so is left with only 228 to 128 a week out of which they will have to pay transport, fuel, and food. If we hadn't taken 45£ out of their pocket in tax and ni they would be better able to cope
The crises ahead this winter are going to catch a great many unawares
Here you go, no paywall: https://archive.ph/5s25K
Fathom = 6 ft
Certainly in London, the supply-demand curve has reached the point where the market rent for anything half habitable is "wherever you can afford plus a bit".
So if you put £45 more in people's pockets by cutting taxes, it will go directly onto rents.
If I'm right, cutting the state to cut tax will just transfer even more cash to landlords.