"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
It is completely perverse to accept any decline in living standards. It is absolutely being inflicted deliberately by an ideologically-crazed minority peddling climate alarmism, and we are badly in need of a counter-narrative.
There are dozens of reasons for accepting declining living standards. We all have our hobbyhorses. I would, for example, accept a future where I was poorer - let's say one in which I need to work for another 12 months before retirement to retire on the same level of comfort - in return for a UK less trewn with graffiti and litter and with more trains. Others will have different priorities for what the state might do which might not equal 'living standards', or at least easily measurable ones.
If for example we suddenly had no smartphones or streaming tv would people be less happy. Probably not. Technology has made a small number of uber nerds rich but as time goes on its contribution to human happiness becomes less and less. Would i want to live without a refrigarator..hell no. Could i live without streaming tv. Of course.
Hugely agree with this. Though the irony of me agreeing with this on my smartphone is not lost on me. But I'm only on my phone at all because I can't find my kindle.
I cancelled Netflix last July. My wife didn’t realise until the Prince Harry interview was on it.
"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
It is completely perverse to accept any decline in living standards. It is absolutely being inflicted deliberately by an ideologically-crazed minority peddling climate alarmism, and we are badly in need of a counter-narrative.
There are dozens of reasons for accepting declining living standards. We all have our hobbyhorses. I would, for example, accept a future where I was poorer - let's say one in which I need to work for another 12 months before retirement to retire on the same level of comfort - in return for a UK less trewn with graffiti and litter and with more trains. Others will have different priorities for what the state might do which might not equal 'living standards', or at least easily measurable ones.
If for example we suddenly had no smartphones or streaming tv would people be less happy. Probably not. Technology has made a small number of uber nerds rich but as time goes on its contribution to human happiness becomes less and less. Would i want to live without a refrigarator..hell no. Could i live without streaming tv. Of course.
Ridiculous notion.
Could I live without streaming TV? Yes of course I could.
Would I happily go back to the 20th Century TV? No, not on your nelly.
Having experienced better technology today, going backwards absolutely would make things worse.
My wife and I are children of the 80s, we each got satellite TV with Cartoon Network when we were still kids in the 90s . . . but talk to our kids and they are as amazed by what we had and think how backwards it is. Describing terrestrial TV to them with commercial breaks you couldn't skip or pause, an inability to choose what to watch and TVs you controlled via a dial instead of a remote control . . . that's as alien to them as black and white TV was to me.
Actually more alien to them, since I still watched black and white TV as a kid. After school we had on TV I Dream of Jeannie, Lost In Space and other black and white shows. Black and white movies were still commonly on TV - but to them not having streaming is something they've never experienced. Its something they take for granted as much as running water or electricity and why not now?
Small change of democracy - 2023 changes to voting precincts in King County (Seattle) Washington
King Co Elections to KC Council:
'Precinct alterations for the year 2023 are for the most part the result of boundary changes due to mandated local redistricting required by State law following the decennial census. The remaining alterations were to accommodate recent city annexations and precinct balancing. This year the precinct alteration process included input and review by both major political parties in King County and a 10-day public review period. The cost of making the precinct revisions is fully funded as part of the adopted Department of Elections budget.
Precinct alteration highlights include: • 2,750 current precincts • 288 wholly moving districts • 116 altered • 11 added • 12 abolished • 1 net precinct loss • 2,749 new total number of precincts after ordinance adoption
SSI - note that size of voting precincts is regulated both by state law AND by King Co ordinance.
"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
Living standards in the 90s were perfectly fine. Foreign travel relatively cheap by then and affordable homes with still plenty of technology around for entertainment.
But there was a lot of prejudice around then, racism, sexism and homophobia. Also the dangers of climate change were not appreciated. Great if you’re a white male. Not good if you’re anyone else.
Also lucky with HIV and with human BSE - in the sense that those could have been a lot worse.
You’re absolutely right. I’d completely forgotten about NvCJD too. Now that was really quite scary.
It's a good thing we didn't have Twitter when the NvCJD scare happened.
"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
It is completely perverse to accept any decline in living standards. It is absolutely being inflicted deliberately by an ideologically-crazed minority peddling climate alarmism, and we are badly in need of a counter-narrative.
There are dozens of reasons for accepting declining living standards. We all have our hobbyhorses. I would, for example, accept a future where I was poorer - let's say one in which I need to work for another 12 months before retirement to retire on the same level of comfort - in return for a UK less trewn with graffiti and litter and with more trains. Others will have different priorities for what the state might do which might not equal 'living standards', or at least easily measurable ones.
If for example we suddenly had no smartphones or streaming tv would people be less happy. Probably not. Technology has made a small number of uber nerds rich but as time goes on its contribution to human happiness becomes less and less. Would i want to live without a refrigarator..hell no. Could i live without streaming tv. Of course.
Hugely agree with this. Though the irony of me agreeing with this on my smartphone is not lost on me. But I'm only on my phone at all because I can't find my kindle.
I cancelled Netflix last July. My wife didn’t realise until the Prince Harry interview was on it.
Netflix is the Daily Express of streaming services.
"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
200 AD/CE? Leastways south (enough) of Hadrian's Wall.
Bit shit if you were a slave. And as a peasant being north of the Military Zone was possibly an improvement on being under Roman control.
Must say your viewpoint is quite woke - what a surprise!
"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
Living standards in the 90s were perfectly fine. Foreign travel relatively cheap by then and affordable homes with still plenty of technology around for entertainment.
I'm sorry, but this is absurd.
Good luck getting people to go back to unreliable cars, no streaming TV, etc.
The reality is that there have been massive improvements in many parts of peoples' lives. Albeit tempered by issues such as rising unaffordability of housing.
Unreliable cars? I thought that was the 70s, not the 90s.
Ah my first car a 1965 Austin A40 bought in 1974. Had to start it with a starting handle, water poured through the windscreen to such an extent I had to remove the rubber bungs from the floor as otherwise I would drown and both headlights fell out with rust and I fibre glassed them back in. Those were the days.
"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
Living standards in the 90s were perfectly fine. Foreign travel relatively cheap by then and affordable homes with still plenty of technology around for entertainment.
But there was a lot of prejudice around then, racism, sexism and homophobia. Also the dangers of climate change were not appreciated. Great if you’re a white male. Not good if you’re anyone else.
I dont know if you were alive then but certainly by the late 90s there wasnt a great deal of racism and homophobia. Queer as Folk a groundbreaking tv show on gays came out in 1999 and actually showed a gay man having sex with a 15 year old boy.
Ha ha, yes I was alive then😂
There is still a lot of prejudice today but it is better than it was.
Reaction to Queer as Folk was mixed at the time. This from RTD
“And Canal Street was destroyed; Canal Street was King. You decide which story you want to believe. But in "the gay community", the argument had to polarise into: is this show good for us, or bad? Sometimes I think it's a question no TV programme should have to bear. It's rarely applied to "straight" drama (was Cracker good for us, or bad? Cold Feet? Midsomer Murders? I, Claudius?) But maybe that's sophistry. If the question is asked, then the question exists.
And I still don't know the answer. Come back in 20 years. But one story in particular haunts me, and shows the difficulty of applying a simple "good" or "bad". A gay teacher told me that Nathan inspired a 15-year-old boy at his school to come out. (Good.) In the yard, he was beaten up so severely, he had his cheekbones crushed. (Bad.) “
"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
It is completely perverse to accept any decline in living standards. It is absolutely being inflicted deliberately by an ideologically-crazed minority peddling climate alarmism, and we are badly in need of a counter-narrative.
There are dozens of reasons for accepting declining living standards. We all have our hobbyhorses. I would, for example, accept a future where I was poorer - let's say one in which I need to work for another 12 months before retirement to retire on the same level of comfort - in return for a UK less trewn with graffiti and litter and with more trains. Others will have different priorities for what the state might do which might not equal 'living standards', or at least easily measurable ones.
If for example we suddenly had no smartphones or streaming tv would people be less happy. Probably not. Technology has made a small number of uber nerds rich but as time goes on its contribution to human happiness becomes less and less. Would i want to live without a refrigarator..hell no. Could i live without streaming tv. Of course.
Hugely agree with this. Though the irony of me agreeing with this on my smartphone is not lost on me. But I'm only on my phone at all because I can't find my kindle.
I cancelled Netflix last July. My wife didn’t realise until the Prince Harry interview was on it.
Were he & Meghan tapping into your subscription? They really have no shame!
"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
Living standards in the 90s were perfectly fine. Foreign travel relatively cheap by then and affordable homes with still plenty of technology around for entertainment.
But there was a lot of prejudice around then, racism, sexism and homophobia. Also the dangers of climate change were not appreciated. Great if you’re a white male. Not good if you’re anyone else.
I dont know if you were alive then but certainly by the late 90s there wasnt a great deal of racism and homophobia. Queer as Folk a groundbreaking tv show on gays came out in 1999 and actually showed a gay man having sex with a 15 year old boy.
Did you actually live through the Nineties as a gay man, or are you basing your conclusions about an entire decade on the existence of a TV programme?
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
Living standards in the 90s were perfectly fine. Foreign travel relatively cheap by then and affordable homes with still plenty of technology around for entertainment.
I'm sorry, but this is absurd.
Good luck getting people to go back to unreliable cars, no streaming TV, etc.
The reality is that there have been massive improvements in many parts of peoples' lives. Albeit tempered by issues such as rising unaffordability of housing.
Unreliable cars? I thought that was the 70s, not the 90s.
Mass produced cars were pretty shit, in my view, until the late 90s.
What does Ford stand for? Fix Or Repair Daily.
I'd go later than that, mid noughties is when mass produced cars had a step change in reliability in my humble opinion. With longer warranties then following in the 2010s mainly.
"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
It is completely perverse to accept any decline in living standards. It is absolutely being inflicted deliberately by an ideologically-crazed minority peddling climate alarmism, and we are badly in need of a counter-narrative.
There are dozens of reasons for accepting declining living standards. We all have our hobbyhorses. I would, for example, accept a future where I was poorer - let's say one in which I need to work for another 12 months before retirement to retire on the same level of comfort - in return for a UK less trewn with graffiti and litter and with more trains. Others will have different priorities for what the state might do which might not equal 'living standards', or at least easily measurable ones.
If for example we suddenly had no smartphones or streaming tv would people be less happy. Probably not. Technology has made a small number of uber nerds rich but as time goes on its contribution to human happiness becomes less and less. Would i want to live without a refrigarator..hell no. Could i live without streaming tv. Of course.
Hugely agree with this. Though the irony of me agreeing with this on my smartphone is not lost on me. But I'm only on my phone at all because I can't find my kindle.
I cancelled Netflix last July. My wife didn’t realise until the Prince Harry interview was on it.
"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
Living standards in the 90s were perfectly fine. Foreign travel relatively cheap by then and affordable homes with still plenty of technology around for entertainment.
But there was a lot of prejudice around then, racism, sexism and homophobia. Also the dangers of climate change were not appreciated. Great if you’re a white male. Not good if you’re anyone else.
I dont know if you were alive then but certainly by the late 90s there wasnt a great deal of racism and homophobia. Queer as Folk a groundbreaking tv show on gays came out in 1999 and actually showed a gay man having sex with a 15 year old boy.
Did you actually live through the Nineties as a gay man, or are you basing your conclusions about an entire decade on the existence of a TV programme?
He's Leon/SeanT - He's just trying to .. well, who knows.
"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
It is completely perverse to accept any decline in living standards. It is absolutely being inflicted deliberately by an ideologically-crazed minority peddling climate alarmism, and we are badly in need of a counter-narrative.
Well if we don't do something about climate change you might not have any choice re a decline in living standards some time in the future and it may be dramatic.
We will be in a far better position to deal with any future changes that are fundamentally beyond our control, if we do everything we can to promote prosperity, and with it, the advance of technology. It is fundamentally illogical to attempt to constrain the natural progress of humankind in a sort of canute-like attempt to achieve a set of unspecified goals on climate - still less to attempt to do so when the other half of the world is clearly saying 'sod that', and getting on with it.
"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
Living standards in the 90s were perfectly fine. Foreign travel relatively cheap by then and affordable homes with still plenty of technology around for entertainment.
I'm sorry, but this is absurd.
Good luck getting people to go back to unreliable cars, no streaming TV, etc.
The reality is that there have been massive improvements in many parts of peoples' lives. Albeit tempered by issues such as rising unaffordability of housing.
Unreliable cars? I thought that was the 70s, not the 90s.
Mass produced cars were pretty shit, in my view, until the late 90s.
What does Ford stand for? Fix Or Repair Daily.
I'd go later than that, mid noughties is when mass produced cars had a step change in reliability in my humble opinion. With longer warranties then following in the 2010s mainly.
"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
Living standards in the 90s were perfectly fine. Foreign travel relatively cheap by then and affordable homes with still plenty of technology around for entertainment.
But there was a lot of prejudice around then, racism, sexism and homophobia. Also the dangers of climate change were not appreciated. Great if you’re a white male. Not good if you’re anyone else.
I dont know if you were alive then but certainly by the late 90s there wasnt a great deal of racism and homophobia. Queer as Folk a groundbreaking tv show on gays came out in 1999 and actually showed a gay man having sex with a 15 year old boy.
Did you actually live through the Nineties as a gay man, or are you basing your conclusions about an entire decade on the existence of a TV programme?
Plenty of out and proud gays in london in the 90s. Some where i worked too. They didnt suffer particular prejudice.
"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
It is completely perverse to accept any decline in living standards. It is absolutely being inflicted deliberately by an ideologically-crazed minority peddling climate alarmism, and we are badly in need of a counter-narrative.
There are dozens of reasons for accepting declining living standards. We all have our hobbyhorses. I would, for example, accept a future where I was poorer - let's say one in which I need to work for another 12 months before retirement to retire on the same level of comfort - in return for a UK less trewn with graffiti and litter and with more trains. Others will have different priorities for what the state might do which might not equal 'living standards', or at least easily measurable ones.
If for example we suddenly had no smartphones or streaming tv would people be less happy. Probably not. Technology has made a small number of uber nerds rich but as time goes on its contribution to human happiness becomes less and less. Would i want to live without a refrigarator..hell no. Could i live without streaming tv. Of course.
Hugely agree with this. Though the irony of me agreeing with this on my smartphone is not lost on me. But I'm only on my phone at all because I can't find my kindle.
I cancelled Netflix last July. My wife didn’t realise until the Prince Harry interview was on it.
"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
Living standards in the 90s were perfectly fine. Foreign travel relatively cheap by then and affordable homes with still plenty of technology around for entertainment.
I'm sorry, but this is absurd.
Good luck getting people to go back to unreliable cars, no streaming TV, etc.
The reality is that there have been massive improvements in many parts of peoples' lives. Albeit tempered by issues such as rising unaffordability of housing.
Unreliable cars? I thought that was the 70s, not the 90s.
Mass produced cars were pretty shit, in my view, until the late 90s.
What does Ford stand for? Fix Or Repair Daily.
I'd go later than that, mid noughties is when mass produced cars had a step change in reliability in my humble opinion. With longer warranties then following in the 2010s mainly.
Yes, probably true.
I think this was a joke in a Ben Elton book:
"In the old days, you could get pawed in a Ford, do it in a Buick, and have it away in a Chevrolet. Nowadays you can do f-all in a Vauxhall."
"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
Living standards in the 90s were perfectly fine. Foreign travel relatively cheap by then and affordable homes with still plenty of technology around for entertainment.
But there was a lot of prejudice around then, racism, sexism and homophobia. Also the dangers of climate change were not appreciated. Great if you’re a white male. Not good if you’re anyone else.
I dont know if you were alive then but certainly by the late 90s there wasnt a great deal of racism and homophobia. Queer as Folk a groundbreaking tv show on gays came out in 1999 and actually showed a gay man having sex with a 15 year old boy.
Did you actually live through the Nineties as a gay man, or are you basing your conclusions about an entire decade on the existence of a TV programme?
Plenty of out and proud gays in london in the 90s. Some where i worked too. They didnt suffer particular prejudice.
London in the 90s was far more progressive and woke than the rest of the U.K., and a far better place for it.
"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
Living standards in the 90s were perfectly fine. Foreign travel relatively cheap by then and affordable homes with still plenty of technology around for entertainment.
But there was a lot of prejudice around then, racism, sexism and homophobia. Also the dangers of climate change were not appreciated. Great if you’re a white male. Not good if you’re anyone else.
I dont know if you were alive then but certainly by the late 90s there wasnt a great deal of racism and homophobia. Queer as Folk a groundbreaking tv show on gays came out in 1999 and actually showed a gay man having sex with a 15 year old boy.
Did you actually live through the Nineties as a gay man, or are you basing your conclusions about an entire decade on the existence of a TV programme?
Plenty of out and proud gays in london in the 90s. Some where i worked too. They didnt suffer particular prejudice.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
I don't want to subsidise them out of some big love of higher earners (I am not one) but because my (admittedly untested) belief is that the country will be better off if we can get higher earners earning (and paying tax). I would expect the benefit to cost ratio of paying for childcare for higher earners to be greater than 1 (indeed, it probably has a higher BCR than for medium earners).
"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
Living standards in the 90s were perfectly fine. Foreign travel relatively cheap by then and affordable homes with still plenty of technology around for entertainment.
But there was a lot of prejudice around then, racism, sexism and homophobia. Also the dangers of climate change were not appreciated. Great if you’re a white male. Not good if you’re anyone else.
I dont know if you were alive then but certainly by the late 90s there wasnt a great deal of racism and homophobia. Queer as Folk a groundbreaking tv show on gays came out in 1999 and actually showed a gay man having sex with a 15 year old boy.
Did you actually live through the Nineties as a gay man, or are you basing your conclusions about an entire decade on the existence of a TV programme?
Plenty of out and proud gays in london in the 90s. Some where i worked too. They didnt suffer particular prejudice.
The '90s I remember as the first easier decade for a couple of my friends as part of the London gay community. Soho, Covent Garden and Brighton were suddenly buzzing with gay nightlife, from around that time onwards.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
Plenty of marginal seats though at the next general election the Tories held in 2019 where a large percentage of voters earn over £100k a year eg Kensington, Cities of London and Westminster, Chelsea and Fulham and Esher and Walton and Chesham and Amersham in particular.
The safest Conservative seats are now those with the most over 65s not those with the highest earners as was the case in 1997
"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
Living standards in the 90s were perfectly fine. Foreign travel relatively cheap by then and affordable homes with still plenty of technology around for entertainment.
But there was a lot of prejudice around then, racism, sexism and homophobia. Also the dangers of climate change were not appreciated. Great if you’re a white male. Not good if you’re anyone else.
I dont know if you were alive then but certainly by the late 90s there wasnt a great deal of racism and homophobia. Queer as Folk a groundbreaking tv show on gays came out in 1999 and actually showed a gay man having sex with a 15 year old boy.
Did you actually live through the Nineties as a gay man, or are you basing your conclusions about an entire decade on the existence of a TV programme?
Plenty of out and proud gays in london in the 90s. Some where i worked too. They didnt suffer particular prejudice.
London in the 90s was far more progressive and woke than the rest of the U.K., and a far better place for it.
Oh definitely. A gay man in Barnsley would be a different prospect but that is still true today. Its why gays migrate to the metropolitan centres like london and manchester.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
That's completely beside the point: the tax and benefits system should not have cliffs where the marginal tax rate shoots up well above 100%.
We should be encouraging Casino to work, and to generate value and tax revenues.
The impact of this move is to discourage a large portion of the population from working.
"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
Living standards in the 90s were perfectly fine. Foreign travel relatively cheap by then and affordable homes with still plenty of technology around for entertainment.
But there was a lot of prejudice around then, racism, sexism and homophobia. Also the dangers of climate change were not appreciated. Great if you’re a white male. Not good if you’re anyone else.
I dont know if you were alive then but certainly by the late 90s there wasnt a great deal of racism and homophobia. Queer as Folk a groundbreaking tv show on gays came out in 1999 and actually showed a gay man having sex with a 15 year old boy.
Did you actually live through the Nineties as a gay man, or are you basing your conclusions about an entire decade on the existence of a TV programme?
Plenty of out and proud gays in london in the 90s. Some where i worked too. They didnt suffer particular prejudice.
So that's a "no" then. Figures.
Plenty of gays in my local community. We all got along great.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
I don't want to subsidise them out of some big love of higher earners (I am not one) but because my (admittedly untested) belief is that the country will be better off if we can get higher earners earning (and paying tax). I would expect the benefit to cost ratio of paying for childcare for higher earners to be greater than 1 (indeed, it probably has a higher BCR than for medium earners).
At over £100k a year they can afford child care out of their taxed income. Just as I did when paying private school fees. There are some who cannot earn because the absurd cost of child care in this country is higher than what they can hope to receive. People earning over £100k are not in that category and we need to focus the limited funds available to those who are.
"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
Living standards in the 90s were perfectly fine. Foreign travel relatively cheap by then and affordable homes with still plenty of technology around for entertainment.
I'm sorry, but this is absurd.
Good luck getting people to go back to unreliable cars, no streaming TV, etc.
The reality is that there have been massive improvements in many parts of peoples' lives. Albeit tempered by issues such as rising unaffordability of housing.
Unreliable cars? I thought that was the 70s, not the 90s.
Mass produced cars were pretty shit, in my view, until the late 90s.
What does Ford stand for? Fix Or Repair Daily.
I'd go later than that, mid noughties is when mass produced cars had a step change in reliability in my humble opinion. With longer warranties then following in the 2010s mainly.
Yes, probably true.
I think this was a joke in a Ben Elton book:
"In the old days, you could get pawed in a Ford, do it in a Buick, and have it away in a Chevrolet. Nowadays you can do f-all in a Vauxhall."
It my case it was being laughed at in an Austin Metro, which I couldn't even get a girl in to do f-all with.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
I don't want to subsidise them out of some big love of higher earners (I am not one) but because my (admittedly untested) belief is that the country will be better off if we can get higher earners earning (and paying tax). I would expect the benefit to cost ratio of paying for childcare for higher earners to be greater than 1 (indeed, it probably has a higher BCR than for medium earners).
If a higher earner, out of pique that we are not lobbing still more money down his/her gullet, fucks off to America ..; well then his/her job is occupied by another high earner.
With the exception of Erling Haaland, most people are actually very easily replaceable.
This idea that we have to go down on our knees & bribe & plead with high earners to work with massive bribes for their childcare, otherwise the entire country will become deprived of their taxes & sink into penury, is the most insane I have yet heard on pb.com.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
I don't want to subsidise them out of some big love of higher earners (I am not one) but because my (admittedly untested) belief is that the country will be better off if we can get higher earners earning (and paying tax). I would expect the benefit to cost ratio of paying for childcare for higher earners to be greater than 1 (indeed, it probably has a higher BCR than for medium earners).
At over £100k a year they can afford child care out of their taxed income. Just as I did when paying private school fees. There are some who cannot earn because the absurd cost of child care in this country is higher than what they can hope to receive. People earning over £100k are not in that category and we need to focus the limited funds available to those who are.
Totally agree with this. Those with the broadest shoulders should pay their own way. We are talking about the top 5% of earners here.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
Plenty of marginal seats though at the next general election the Tories held in 2019 where a large percentage of voters earn over £100k a year eg Kensington, Cities of London and Westminster, Chelsea and Fulham and Esher and Walton and Chesham and Amersham in particular.
The safest Conservative seats are now those with the most over 65s not those with the highest earners as was the case in 1997
You may be right @HYUFD but, frankly, there are more important issues of national interest than how many seats the Tories can bribe into their column at the next election. Tories used to recognise that. Its one of the reasons I was one.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
I don't want to subsidise them out of some big love of higher earners (I am not one) but because my (admittedly untested) belief is that the country will be better off if we can get higher earners earning (and paying tax). I would expect the benefit to cost ratio of paying for childcare for higher earners to be greater than 1 (indeed, it probably has a higher BCR than for medium earners).
If a higher earner, out of pique that we are not lobbing still more money down his/her gullet, fucks off to America ..; well then his/her job is occupied by another high earner.
With the exception of Erling Haaland, most people are actually very easily replaceable.
This idea that we have to go down on our knees & bribe & plead with high earners to work with massive bribes for their childcare, otherwise the entire country will become deprived of their taxes & sink into penury, is the most insane I have yet heard on pb.com.
High earners use this argument all the time. Yet would they really want to leave the cultural attractions of London for a low tax cultural desert.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
I agree entirely with the sentiment and the pensions allowance but on the logistics of childcare how many are we really talking about? If its sub 5%, which I expect it is, are there admin costs in filtering out the few? Does it put eligible people off claiming?
It would also have made more sense if having this kind of system to specifically avoid £100k as marginal rates were already high around there. Either £70k or £130k might have been better.
"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
Living standards in the 90s were perfectly fine. Foreign travel relatively cheap by then and affordable homes with still plenty of technology around for entertainment.
I'm sorry, but this is absurd.
Good luck getting people to go back to unreliable cars, no streaming TV, etc.
The reality is that there have been massive improvements in many parts of peoples' lives. Albeit tempered by issues such as rising unaffordability of housing.
Unreliable cars? I thought that was the 70s, not the 90s.
Mass produced cars were pretty shit, in my view, until the late 90s.
What does Ford stand for? Fix Or Repair Daily.
I'd go later than that, mid noughties is when mass produced cars had a step change in reliability in my humble opinion. With longer warranties then following in the 2010s mainly.
Yes, probably true.
I think this was a joke in a Ben Elton book:
"In the old days, you could get pawed in a Ford, do it in a Buick, and have it away in a Chevrolet. Nowadays you can do f-all in a Vauxhall."
It my case it was being laughed at in an Austin Metro, which I couldn't even get a girl in to do f-all with.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
That's completely beside the point: the tax and benefits system should not have cliffs where the marginal tax rate shoots up well above 100%.
We should be encouraging Casino to work, and to generate value and tax revenues.
The impact of this move is to discourage a large portion of the population from working.
Madness.
Indeed.
If someone is a high earner they should be paying a high amount of tax - if they're not then we need to address that. But we shouldn't be having cliff edges where the high amount of tax is over 100% - it shouldn't really ever be over 50%.
And the same is an issue for low earners too via benefits withdrawal. Indeed the problem is greater for lower earners I suspect, but either way cliff edges are obscene and counter productive and create transformations in behaviour that are not desirable.
"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
Living standards in the 90s were perfectly fine. Foreign travel relatively cheap by then and affordable homes with still plenty of technology around for entertainment.
I'm sorry, but this is absurd.
Good luck getting people to go back to unreliable cars, no streaming TV, etc.
The reality is that there have been massive improvements in many parts of peoples' lives. Albeit tempered by issues such as rising unaffordability of housing.
Unreliable cars? I thought that was the 70s, not the 90s.
Mass produced cars were pretty shit, in my view, until the late 90s.
What does Ford stand for? Fix Or Repair Daily.
I'd go later than that, mid noughties is when mass produced cars had a step change in reliability in my humble opinion. With longer warranties then following in the 2010s mainly.
Yes, probably true.
I think this was a joke in a Ben Elton book:
"In the old days, you could get pawed in a Ford, do it in a Buick, and have it away in a Chevrolet. Nowadays you can do f-all in a Vauxhall."
It my case it was being laughed at in an Austin Metro, which I couldn't even get a girl in to do f-all with.
The back of my Land Rover was fun - if it had its roof on, that is, and the girl didn't mind the smell of dirt, smoke and diesel.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
Yep, that's me.
I'm gambling I can work for Partner and get a big uplift but right now I'm worse off (and also mentally worse off healthwise) no question.
If you’re just over the threshold can‘t you stuff a large chunk of your pay into your pension as an employer contribution? That way you can choose to cut your pre-tax pay back under the threshold if you want to.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
The trouble is that old socialists, like @NickPalmer, agree with me.
The £100k cliff-edge is retarded and totally counterproductive. And it's not right that two earners in a household earning £95k each get all the help and none of the extra tax and a household with one earner on £105k and another on zero get nothing. Have a think about what that incentivises for a minute.
As @DougSeal said on the previous thread £100k today is equivalent to about £55k in 1999 prices. It's a yardstick now of a successful career built over many years of hard graft, not of "repulsive" wealth and your use of such language is disgusting.
"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
Living standards in the 90s were perfectly fine. Foreign travel relatively cheap by then and affordable homes with still plenty of technology around for entertainment.
But there was a lot of prejudice around then, racism, sexism and homophobia. Also the dangers of climate change were not appreciated. Great if you’re a white male. Not good if you’re anyone else.
I dont know if you were alive then but certainly by the late 90s there wasnt a great deal of racism and homophobia. Queer as Folk a groundbreaking tv show on gays came out in 1999 and actually showed a gay man having sex with a 15 year old boy.
Did you actually live through the Nineties as a gay man, or are you basing your conclusions about an entire decade on the existence of a TV programme?
Plenty of out and proud gays in london in the 90s. Some where i worked too. They didnt suffer particular prejudice.
So that's a "no" then. Figures.
Plenty of gays in my local community. We all got along great.
Well bully for you. If the rest of the country had been like "your local community" then life for us would've been a whole lot more pleasant.
It wasn't, of course. A lot of it still isn't now, but it's a hell of a lot better than it used to be. You-know-who wasn't stupid when she came up with Section 28 (passed into law in 1988, not repealed until 2003.) It didn't just make her party members all wet with excitement, most of the country would've approved at the time as well.
"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
Living standards in the 90s were perfectly fine. Foreign travel relatively cheap by then and affordable homes with still plenty of technology around for entertainment.
But there was a lot of prejudice around then, racism, sexism and homophobia. Also the dangers of climate change were not appreciated. Great if you’re a white male. Not good if you’re anyone else.
I dont know if you were alive then but certainly by the late 90s there wasnt a great deal of racism and homophobia. Queer as Folk a groundbreaking tv show on gays came out in 1999 and actually showed a gay man having sex with a 15 year old boy.
Ha ha, yes I was alive then😂
There is still a lot of prejudice today but it is better than it was.
Reaction to Queer as Folk was mixed at the time. This from RTD
“And Canal Street was destroyed; Canal Street was King. You decide which story you want to believe. But in "the gay community", the argument had to polarise into: is this show good for us, or bad? Sometimes I think it's a question no TV programme should have to bear. It's rarely applied to "straight" drama (was Cracker good for us, or bad? Cold Feet? Midsomer Murders? I, Claudius?) But maybe that's sophistry. If the question is asked, then the question exists.
And I still don't know the answer. Come back in 20 years. But one story in particular haunts me, and shows the difficulty of applying a simple "good" or "bad". A gay teacher told me that Nathan inspired a 15-year-old boy at his school to come out. (Good.) In the yard, he was beaten up so severely, he had his cheekbones crushed. (Bad.) “
I remember the times when the street signs for Canal Street were regularly altered with the 'C' on Canal and 'S' on Street scribbled over....
I look back on the 60’s …. from mid 62 onward ….. as a Good Time. Newly married, (eventually) two children, financially comfortable. Lots of good things. Wasn’t really as good for us until the mid 90’s to 2013 or thereabouts. Although there were ups and downs before and after.
"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
Living standards in the 90s were perfectly fine. Foreign travel relatively cheap by then and affordable homes with still plenty of technology around for entertainment.
But there was a lot of prejudice around then, racism, sexism and homophobia. Also the dangers of climate change were not appreciated. Great if you’re a white male. Not good if you’re anyone else.
I dont know if you were alive then but certainly by the late 90s there wasnt a great deal of racism and homophobia. Queer as Folk a groundbreaking tv show on gays came out in 1999 and actually showed a gay man having sex with a 15 year old boy.
Did you actually live through the Nineties as a gay man, or are you basing your conclusions about an entire decade on the existence of a TV programme?
Plenty of out and proud gays in london in the 90s. Some where i worked too. They didnt suffer particular prejudice.
So that's a "no" then. Figures.
Plenty of gays in my local community. We all got along great.
Well bully for you. If the rest of the country had been like "your local community" then life for us would've been a whole lot more pleasant.
It wasn't, of course. A lot of it still isn't now, but it's a hell of a lot better than it used to be. You-know-who wasn't stupid when she came up with Section 28 (passed into law in 1988, not repealed until 2003.) It didn't just make her party members all wet with excitement, most of the country would've approved at the time as well.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
That's completely beside the point: the tax and benefits system should not have cliffs where the marginal tax rate shoots up well above 100%.
We should be encouraging Casino to work, and to generate value and tax revenues.
The impact of this move is to discourage a large portion of the population from working.
Madness.
... a large portion ... guffaws.
How many people are affected? A very tiny portion of the UK earn over 100k per annum, and they only need childcare for a very small portion of their working life.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
Plenty of marginal seats though at the next general election the Tories held in 2019 where a large percentage of voters earn over £100k a year eg Kensington, Cities of London and Westminster, Chelsea and Fulham and Esher and Walton and Chesham and Amersham in particular.
The safest Conservative seats are now those with the most over 65s not those with the highest earners as was the case in 1997
You may be right @HYUFD but, frankly, there are more important issues of national interest than how many seats the Tories can bribe into their column at the next election. Tories used to recognise that. Its one of the reasons I was one.
Indeed.
After thinking about it, this Budget has made me even more firm in my decision not to vote for the Tories next time. This lot simply don't deserve my vote.
Its not a 'bad' Budget, there's not much in it that is objectionable yet. But that's about it, there's not much in it. Its a Budget for managed decline and no aspiration at all.
One of the best achievements of the Conservative-led Coalition onwards was raising tax allowances etc so that people kept more of what they earn. All that is being reversed by rampant tax rises through fiscal drag and fiddling at the edges resolving some valid concerns for the affluent and the poor, but leaving major problems for everyone in the middle.
"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
Living standards in the 90s were perfectly fine. Foreign travel relatively cheap by then and affordable homes with still plenty of technology around for entertainment.
But there was a lot of prejudice around then, racism, sexism and homophobia. Also the dangers of climate change were not appreciated. Great if you’re a white male. Not good if you’re anyone else.
I dont know if you were alive then but certainly by the late 90s there wasnt a great deal of racism and homophobia. Queer as Folk a groundbreaking tv show on gays came out in 1999 and actually showed a gay man having sex with a 15 year old boy.
Did you actually live through the Nineties as a gay man, or are you basing your conclusions about an entire decade on the existence of a TV programme?
Plenty of out and proud gays in london in the 90s. Some where i worked too. They didnt suffer particular prejudice.
London in the 90s was far more progressive and woke than the rest of the U.K., and a far better place for it.
Oh definitely. A gay man in Barnsley would be a different prospect but that is still true today. Its why gays migrate to the metropolitan centres like london and manchester.
The biggest gayer I know is born and bred in Barnsley.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
I don't want to subsidise them out of some big love of higher earners (I am not one) but because my (admittedly untested) belief is that the country will be better off if we can get higher earners earning (and paying tax). I would expect the benefit to cost ratio of paying for childcare for higher earners to be greater than 1 (indeed, it probably has a higher BCR than for medium earners).
If a higher earner, out of pique that we are not lobbing still more money down his/her gullet, fucks off to America ..; well then his/her job is occupied by another high earner.
With the exception of Erling Haaland, most people are actually very easily replaceable.
This idea that we have to go down on our knees & bribe & plead with high earners to work with massive bribes for their childcare, otherwise the entire country will become deprived of their taxes & sink into penury, is the most insane I have yet heard on pb.com.
High earners use this argument all the time. Yet would they really want to leave the cultural attractions of London for a low tax cultural desert.
The highest earners ie those who earn over £150k a year can pick between Kensington and Chelsea or Westminster, Manhattan, Paris or Singapore, we want them to stay here.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
That's completely beside the point: the tax and benefits system should not have cliffs where the marginal tax rate shoots up well above 100%.
We should be encouraging Casino to work, and to generate value and tax revenues.
The impact of this move is to discourage a large portion of the population from working.
Madness.
... a large portion ... guffaws.
How many people are affected? A very tiny portion of the UK earn over 100k per annum, and they only need childcare for a very small portion of their working life.
How many people are affected by cliff edges and tax and benefits rates shooting upto around 100%?
Many millions of people actually.
For starters anyone on UC paying IC and NI is already at 70% marginal tax rate even before anything else. These cliff edges exist throughout our NYC skyline tax code and it is damaging.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
That's completely beside the point: the tax and benefits system should not have cliffs where the marginal tax rate shoots up well above 100%.
We should be encouraging Casino to work, and to generate value and tax revenues.
The impact of this move is to discourage a large portion of the population from working.
Madness.
... a large portion ... guffaws.
How many people are affected? A very tiny portion of the UK earn over 100k per annum, and they only need childcare for a very small portion of their working life.
Yes but when you are apart of the elite 3 to 5% you start to believe the average income is near £100k. After all all your friends and acquaintances earn that much. Its called living in a bubble.
"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
Living standards in the 90s were perfectly fine. Foreign travel relatively cheap by then and affordable homes with still plenty of technology around for entertainment.
I'm sorry, but this is absurd.
Good luck getting people to go back to unreliable cars, no streaming TV, etc.
The reality is that there have been massive improvements in many parts of peoples' lives. Albeit tempered by issues such as rising unaffordability of housing.
Unreliable cars? I thought that was the 70s, not the 90s.
Mass produced cars were pretty shit, in my view, until the late 90s.
What does Ford stand for? Fix Or Repair Daily.
I'd go later than that, mid noughties is when mass produced cars had a step change in reliability in my humble opinion. With longer warranties then following in the 2010s mainly.
Yes, probably true.
I think this was a joke in a Ben Elton book:
"In the old days, you could get pawed in a Ford, do it in a Buick, and have it away in a Chevrolet. Nowadays you can do f-all in a Vauxhall."
It my case it was being laughed at in an Austin Metro, which I couldn't even get a girl in to do f-all with.
The best thing about the 90s, indeed any period before about 2011, was the lack of social media. John Burns-Murdoch had some terrifying data in the FT about the rise of social media and the decline in mental health in adolescents over the last decade or so. Finally deleted my long disused FB account yesterday.
"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
Living standards in the 90s were perfectly fine. Foreign travel relatively cheap by then and affordable homes with still plenty of technology around for entertainment.
But there was a lot of prejudice around then, racism, sexism and homophobia. Also the dangers of climate change were not appreciated. Great if you’re a white male. Not good if you’re anyone else.
I dont know if you were alive then but certainly by the late 90s there wasnt a great deal of racism and homophobia. Queer as Folk a groundbreaking tv show on gays came out in 1999 and actually showed a gay man having sex with a 15 year old boy.
Did you actually live through the Nineties as a gay man, or are you basing your conclusions about an entire decade on the existence of a TV programme?
Plenty of out and proud gays in london in the 90s. Some where i worked too. They didnt suffer particular prejudice.
London in the 90s was far more progressive and woke than the rest of the U.K., and a far better place for it.
Oh definitely. A gay man in Barnsley would be a different prospect but that is still true today. Its why gays migrate to the metropolitan centres like london and manchester.
The biggest gayer I know is born and bred in Barnsley.
The most gay gay man (*) I've ever met was Rhodesian.
"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
Living standards in the 90s were perfectly fine. Foreign travel relatively cheap by then and affordable homes with still plenty of technology around for entertainment.
But there was a lot of prejudice around then, racism, sexism and homophobia. Also the dangers of climate change were not appreciated. Great if you’re a white male. Not good if you’re anyone else.
I dont know if you were alive then but certainly by the late 90s there wasnt a great deal of racism and homophobia. Queer as Folk a groundbreaking tv show on gays came out in 1999 and actually showed a gay man having sex with a 15 year old boy.
Did you actually live through the Nineties as a gay man, or are you basing your conclusions about an entire decade on the existence of a TV programme?
Plenty of out and proud gays in london in the 90s. Some where i worked too. They didnt suffer particular prejudice.
So that's a "no" then. Figures.
Plenty of gays in my local community. We all got along great.
Well bully for you. If the rest of the country had been like "your local community" then life for us would've been a whole lot more pleasant.
It wasn't, of course. A lot of it still isn't now, but it's a hell of a lot better than it used to be. You-know-who wasn't stupid when she came up with Section 28 (passed into law in 1988, not repealed until 2003.) It didn't just make her party members all wet with excitement, most of the country would've approved at the time as well.
Were you the only gay in the village?
Ha ha ha, well fucking funny.
I haven't a clue how many gay people there were in the town. A lot of us would've been closeted. I still was at the time. Some, particularly those whose families are amongst the third of the country that, according to recent survey data, remain irreconciled to our existence, still are.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
The trouble is that old socialists, like @NickPalmer, agree with me.
The £100k cliff-edge is retarded and totally counterproductive. And it's not right that two earners in a household earning £95k each get all the help and none of the extra tax and a household with one earner on £105k and another on zero get nothing. Have a think about what that incentivises for a minute.
As @DougSeal said on the previous thread £100k today is equivalent to about £55k in 1999 prices. It's a yardstick now of a successful career built over many years of hard graft, not of "repulsive" wealth and your use of such language is disgusting.
My wife largely gave up her career to mind our kids. I agree it is very unfair that a single wage of £120k pays nearly twice as much as 2 people earning £60K. Believe me, I have a wardrobe of T shirts that confirm this.
There are many absurdities in our tax system and the loss of PA after £110k is certainly one of them. But you cannot lose sight of the big picture. The average earnings are now around £30K. Can you imagine living on so little? I am not sure that I can. But the majority do. And they pay taxes that have to be spent carefully and fairly. Not on those earning 4x as much.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
Plenty of marginal seats though at the next general election the Tories held in 2019 where a large percentage of voters earn over £100k a year eg Kensington, Cities of London and Westminster, Chelsea and Fulham and Esher and Walton and Chesham and Amersham in particular.
The safest Conservative seats are now those with the most over 65s not those with the highest earners as was the case in 1997
You may be right @HYUFD but, frankly, there are more important issues of national interest than how many seats the Tories can bribe into their column at the next election. Tories used to recognise that. Its one of the reasons I was one.
Indeed.
After thinking about it, this Budget has made me even more firm in my decision not to vote for the Tories next time. This lot simply don't deserve my vote.
Its not a 'bad' Budget, there's not much in it that is objectionable yet. But that's about it, there's not much in it. Its a Budget for managed decline and no aspiration at all.
One of the best achievements of the Conservative-led Coalition onwards was raising tax allowances etc so that people kept more of what they earn. All that is being reversed by rampant tax rises through fiscal drag and fiddling at the edges resolving some valid concerns for the affluent and the poor, but leaving major problems for everyone in the middle.
In so many areas, this Government is chucking in the towel and just waiting for Labour to come in.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
The trouble is that old socialists, like @NickPalmer, agree with me.
The £100k cliff-edge is retarded and totally counterproductive. And it's not right that two earners in a household earning £95k each get all the help and none of the extra tax and a household with one earner on £105k and another on zero get nothing. Have a think about what that incentivises for a minute.
As @DougSeal said on the previous thread £100k today is equivalent to about £55k in 1999 prices. It's a yardstick now of a successful career built over many years of hard graft, not of "repulsive" wealth and your use of such language is disgusting.
The point is that there is lots of unfairness in our tax and benefit system.
Sure .. in an ideal world, there should not be and it should be fixed.
But, I doubt if anyone would pick on this as the most serious and glaring unfairness that needs urgent attention (except on pb.com).
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
I don't want to subsidise them out of some big love of higher earners (I am not one) but because my (admittedly untested) belief is that the country will be better off if we can get higher earners earning (and paying tax). I would expect the benefit to cost ratio of paying for childcare for higher earners to be greater than 1 (indeed, it probably has a higher BCR than for medium earners).
At over £100k a year they can afford child care out of their taxed income. Just as I did when paying private school fees. There are some who cannot earn because the absurd cost of child care in this country is higher than what they can hope to receive. People earning over £100k are not in that category and we need to focus the limited funds available to those who are.
Totally agree with this. Those with the broadest shoulders should pay their own way. We are talking about the top 5% of earners here.
I'd agree with this. However, it does seem rather mental that if you have young kids then there is no point earning between £100K and £140K. You would literally be worth negotiating with your employers to work a day less for less money to keep your income below £100K. This is the exact opposite of what the government is trying to achieve with the childcare offer and also reduces tax income.
"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
It is completely perverse to accept any decline in living standards. It is absolutely being inflicted deliberately by an ideologically-crazed minority peddling climate alarmism, and we are badly in need of a counter-narrative.
There are dozens of reasons for accepting declining living standards. We all have our hobbyhorses. I would, for example, accept a future where I was poorer - let's say one in which I need to work for another 12 months before retirement to retire on the same level of comfort - in return for a UK less trewn with graffiti and litter and with more trains. Others will have different priorities for what the state might do which might not equal 'living standards', or at least easily measurable ones.
If for example we suddenly had no smartphones or streaming tv would people be less happy. Probably not. Technology has made a small number of uber nerds rich but as time goes on its contribution to human happiness becomes less and less. Would i want to live without a refrigarator..hell no. Could i live without streaming tv. Of course.
That was, I'm sure, the argument of Communists in eastern Europe.
If people in the UK didn't have smartphones, and people in France did, I think people would notice.
Thats the point. In eastern europe they did have unreliable cars and lacked basic consumer goods. that hasnt been true in the west since at least the 60s or 70s. And im talking of a situation where no country has a smartphone not one does one doesnt. Do you think smartphones have been major beneficiaries for humanity because i could certainly live without them.
Every generation can look back at life 25 years ago and say "hey, life was pretty good back then because we had [y] and do we really need new fangled [x]".
So, people in the 1930s could have said "Life in the 1910s was pretty good; I mean we didn't have cars yet, with all that nasty pollution and the risk of getting knocked over. And who actually needs to go to the cinema anyway?"
And people in the 1950s could say "Life in the 1930s was pretty good. They already the cinema and cars, which is all you really need to lead a modern life. Do we really need jetplanes? And you used to be able to send your washing out for almost nothing. Is it really an improvement to have an unreliable and expensive machine and to do it yourself?"
Then people in the 1970s would say "Life in the 1950s was great. Already you innovations like washing machines and fridges than make home care simple. And the railway system was great - you could get anywhere in the UK cheaply. All there is today is colour TV and ridiculously expensive VCRs and the shows are exactly the same!"
Etcetera. Etcetera.
If we didn't advance technologically and France did. People would notice. And they would be spitting mad.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
I don't want to subsidise them out of some big love of higher earners (I am not one) but because my (admittedly untested) belief is that the country will be better off if we can get higher earners earning (and paying tax). I would expect the benefit to cost ratio of paying for childcare for higher earners to be greater than 1 (indeed, it probably has a higher BCR than for medium earners).
If a higher earner, out of pique that we are not lobbing still more money down his/her gullet, fucks off to America ..; well then his/her job is occupied by another high earner.
With the exception of Erling Haaland, most people are actually very easily replaceable.
This idea that we have to go down on our knees & bribe & plead with high earners to work with massive bribes for their childcare, otherwise the entire country will become deprived of their taxes & sink into penury, is the most insane I have yet heard on pb.com.
High earners use this argument all the time. Yet would they really want to leave the cultural attractions of London for a low tax cultural desert.
The highest earners ie those who earn over £150k a year can pick between Kensington and Chelsea, Manhattan, Paris or Singapore, we want them to stay here.
I don’t think anyone earning less than £250k could afford to live in K&C.
"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
Living standards in the 90s were perfectly fine. Foreign travel relatively cheap by then and affordable homes with still plenty of technology around for entertainment.
But there was a lot of prejudice around then, racism, sexism and homophobia. Also the dangers of climate change were not appreciated. Great if you’re a white male. Not good if you’re anyone else.
I dont know if you were alive then but certainly by the late 90s there wasnt a great deal of racism and homophobia. Queer as Folk a groundbreaking tv show on gays came out in 1999 and actually showed a gay man having sex with a 15 year old boy.
Did you actually live through the Nineties as a gay man, or are you basing your conclusions about an entire decade on the existence of a TV programme?
Plenty of out and proud gays in london in the 90s. Some where i worked too. They didnt suffer particular prejudice.
London in the 90s was far more progressive and woke than the rest of the U.K., and a far better place for it.
Oh definitely. A gay man in Barnsley would be a different prospect but that is still true today. Its why gays migrate to the metropolitan centres like london and manchester.
The biggest gayer I know is born and bred in Barnsley.
"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
Living standards in the 90s were perfectly fine. Foreign travel relatively cheap by then and affordable homes with still plenty of technology around for entertainment.
But there was a lot of prejudice around then, racism, sexism and homophobia. Also the dangers of climate change were not appreciated. Great if you’re a white male. Not good if you’re anyone else.
I dont know if you were alive then but certainly by the late 90s there wasnt a great deal of racism and homophobia. Queer as Folk a groundbreaking tv show on gays came out in 1999 and actually showed a gay man having sex with a 15 year old boy.
Did you actually live through the Nineties as a gay man, or are you basing your conclusions about an entire decade on the existence of a TV programme?
Plenty of out and proud gays in london in the 90s. Some where i worked too. They didnt suffer particular prejudice.
London in the 90s was far more progressive and woke than the rest of the U.K., and a far better place for it.
Oh definitely. A gay man in Barnsley would be a different prospect but that is still true today. Its why gays migrate to the metropolitan centres like london and manchester.
The biggest gayer I know is born and bred in Barnsley.
"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
Living standards in the 90s were perfectly fine. Foreign travel relatively cheap by then and affordable homes with still plenty of technology around for entertainment.
But there was a lot of prejudice around then, racism, sexism and homophobia. Also the dangers of climate change were not appreciated. Great if you’re a white male. Not good if you’re anyone else.
I dont know if you were alive then but certainly by the late 90s there wasnt a great deal of racism and homophobia. Queer as Folk a groundbreaking tv show on gays came out in 1999 and actually showed a gay man having sex with a 15 year old boy.
Did you actually live through the Nineties as a gay man, or are you basing your conclusions about an entire decade on the existence of a TV programme?
Plenty of out and proud gays in london in the 90s. Some where i worked too. They didnt suffer particular prejudice.
London in the 90s was far more progressive and woke than the rest of the U.K., and a far better place for it.
Oh definitely. A gay man in Barnsley would be a different prospect but that is still true today. Its why gays migrate to the metropolitan centres like london and manchester.
The biggest gayer I know is born and bred in Barnsley.
The most gay gay man (*) I've ever met was Rhodesian.
(*) I assume that's what 'biggest gayer' means
Means flamboyant, or in Daily Mail parlance, outrageously gay.
He used to call our group nights out 'Tom's big gayer night out.'
The WhatsApp group I'm in with him is called 'Gayers and twinks.'
"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
Living standards in the 90s were perfectly fine. Foreign travel relatively cheap by then and affordable homes with still plenty of technology around for entertainment.
But there was a lot of prejudice around then, racism, sexism and homophobia. Also the dangers of climate change were not appreciated. Great if you’re a white male. Not good if you’re anyone else.
I dont know if you were alive then but certainly by the late 90s there wasnt a great deal of racism and homophobia. Queer as Folk a groundbreaking tv show on gays came out in 1999 and actually showed a gay man having sex with a 15 year old boy.
Did you actually live through the Nineties as a gay man, or are you basing your conclusions about an entire decade on the existence of a TV programme?
Plenty of out and proud gays in london in the 90s. Some where i worked too. They didnt suffer particular prejudice.
London in the 90s was far more progressive and woke than the rest of the U.K., and a far better place for it.
Oh definitely. A gay man in Barnsley would be a different prospect but that is still true today. Its why gays migrate to the metropolitan centres like london and manchester.
The biggest gayer I know is born and bred in Barnsley.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
That's completely beside the point: the tax and benefits system should not have cliffs where the marginal tax rate shoots up well above 100%.
We should be encouraging Casino to work, and to generate value and tax revenues.
The impact of this move is to discourage a large portion of the population from working.
Madness.
... a large portion ... guffaws.
How many people are affected? A very tiny portion of the UK earn over 100k per annum, and they only need childcare for a very small portion of their working life.
How many people are affected by cliff edges and tax and benefits rates shooting upto around 100%?
Many millions of people actually.
For starters anyone on UC paying IC and NI is already at 70% marginal tax rate even before anything else. These cliff edges exist throughout our NYC skyline tax code and it is damaging.
Of course, cliff edges are bad. The question is why pb.com is fixated on this cliff edge.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
The trouble is that old socialists, like @NickPalmer, agree with me.
The £100k cliff-edge is retarded and totally counterproductive. And it's not right that two earners in a household earning £95k each get all the help and none of the extra tax and a household with one earner on £105k and another on zero get nothing. Have a think about what that incentivises for a minute.
As @DougSeal said on the previous thread £100k today is equivalent to about £55k in 1999 prices. It's a yardstick now of a successful career built over many years of hard graft, not of "repulsive" wealth and your use of such language is disgusting.
The point is that there is lots of unfairness in our tax and benefit system.
Sure .. in an ideal world, there should not be and it should be fixed.
But, I doubt if anyone would pick on this as the most serious and glaring unfairness that needs urgent attention (except on pb.com).
I get just as worked up about the tax and benefits system having more than 100% marginal tax rates for the poorest. It's just that (a) this is being introduced today, and is therefore news; and (b) the scale of the absurdity (that there's no point earning between £100k and £140k) is absolutely huge.
"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
It is completely perverse to accept any decline in living standards. It is absolutely being inflicted deliberately by an ideologically-crazed minority peddling climate alarmism, and we are badly in need of a counter-narrative.
There are dozens of reasons for accepting declining living standards. We all have our hobbyhorses. I would, for example, accept a future where I was poorer - let's say one in which I need to work for another 12 months before retirement to retire on the same level of comfort - in return for a UK less trewn with graffiti and litter and with more trains. Others will have different priorities for what the state might do which might not equal 'living standards', or at least easily measurable ones.
If for example we suddenly had no smartphones or streaming tv would people be less happy. Probably not. Technology has made a small number of uber nerds rich but as time goes on its contribution to human happiness becomes less and less. Would i want to live without a refrigarator..hell no. Could i live without streaming tv. Of course.
That was, I'm sure, the argument of Communists in eastern Europe.
If people in the UK didn't have smartphones, and people in France did, I think people would notice.
Thats the point. In eastern europe they did have unreliable cars and lacked basic consumer goods. that hasnt been true in the west since at least the 60s or 70s. And im talking of a situation where no country has a smartphone not one does one doesnt. Do you think smartphones have been major beneficiaries for humanity because i could certainly live without them.
Every generation can look back at life 25 years ago and say "hey, life was pretty good back then because we had [y] and do we really need new fangled [x]".
So, people in the 1930s could have said "Life in the 1910s was pretty good; I mean we didn't have cars yet, with all that nasty pollution and the risk of getting knocked over. And who actually needs to go to the cinema anyway?"
And people in the 1950s could say "Life in the 1930s was pretty good. They already the cinema and cars, which is all you really need to lead a modern life. Do we really need jetplanes? And you used to be able to send your washing out for almost nothing. Is it really an improvement to have an unreliable and expensive machine and to do it yourself?"
Then people in the 1970s would say "Life in the 1950s was great. Already you innovations like washing machines and fridges than make home care simple. And the railway system was great - you could get anywhere in the UK cheaply. All there is today is colour TV and ridiculously expensive VCRs and the shows are exactly the same!"
Etcetera. Etcetera.
If we didn't advance technologically and France did. People would notice. And they would be spitting mad.
The difference is the tech elite actually shield their kids from tablets and smartphones. They know. The point is as im sure you will understand the marginal benefit of each wave of technological development is less and less and the associated costs more and more negative so that at some point the costs outweigh the benefits. We are arguably close to this point now which is why the dreams of silicon valley uber nerds will remain dreams,
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
That's completely beside the point: the tax and benefits system should not have cliffs where the marginal tax rate shoots up well above 100%.
We should be encouraging Casino to work, and to generate value and tax revenues.
The impact of this move is to discourage a large portion of the population from working.
Madness.
... a large portion ... guffaws.
How many people are affected? A very tiny portion of the UK earn over 100k per annum, and they only need childcare for a very small portion of their working life.
How many people are affected by cliff edges and tax and benefits rates shooting upto around 100%?
Many millions of people actually.
For starters anyone on UC paying IC and NI is already at 70% marginal tax rate even before anything else. These cliff edges exist throughout our NYC skyline tax code and it is damaging.
Of course, cliff edges are bad. The question is why pb.com is fixated on this cliff edge.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
The trouble is that old socialists, like @NickPalmer, agree with me.
The £100k cliff-edge is retarded and totally counterproductive. And it's not right that two earners in a household earning £95k each get all the help and none of the extra tax and a household with one earner on £105k and another on zero get nothing. Have a think about what that incentivises for a minute.
As @DougSeal said on the previous thread £100k today is equivalent to about £55k in 1999 prices. It's a yardstick now of a successful career built over many years of hard graft, not of "repulsive" wealth and your use of such language is disgusting.
I agree with DavidL that people on £100K aren't remotely a priority. But I like a logical system, where one gradually pays a higher proportion when one prospers. A system where the marginal rate swings from 70% on UC down to 20% on low incomes to 40% on middle incomes to 62% on high incomes and back down to 40% on higher incomes is just daft. I'd be fine with a marginal rate of 50% at £100K, rising to 55% at £125K and 60% at £150K, in return for good public services. Someone more right-wing might argue for 40/45/50 or even 35/40/45. But 40/62/40 is silly, and yes, it really does affect behaviour.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
The trouble is that old socialists, like @NickPalmer, agree with me.
The £100k cliff-edge is retarded and totally counterproductive. And it's not right that two earners in a household earning £95k each get all the help and none of the extra tax and a household with one earner on £105k and another on zero get nothing. Have a think about what that incentivises for a minute.
As @DougSeal said on the previous thread £100k today is equivalent to about £55k in 1999 prices. It's a yardstick now of a successful career built over many years of hard graft, not of "repulsive" wealth and your use of such language is disgusting.
The point is that there is lots of unfairness in our tax and benefit system.
Sure .. in an ideal world, there should not be and it should be fixed.
But, I doubt if anyone would pick on this as the most serious and glaring unfairness that needs urgent attention (except on pb.com).
I get just as worked up about the tax and benefits system having more than 100% marginal tax rates for the poorest. It's just that (a) this is being introduced today, and is therefore news; and (b) the scale of the absurdity (that there's no point earning between £100k and £140k) is absolutely huge.
The scale of the absurdity (that there's no point earning between £100k and £140k) is absolutely huge for a very few years
"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
Living standards in the 90s were perfectly fine. Foreign travel relatively cheap by then and affordable homes with still plenty of technology around for entertainment.
I'm sorry, but this is absurd.
Good luck getting people to go back to unreliable cars, no streaming TV, etc.
The reality is that there have been massive improvements in many parts of peoples' lives. Albeit tempered by issues such as rising unaffordability of housing.
Unreliable cars? I thought that was the 70s, not the 90s.
Mass produced cars were pretty shit, in my view, until the late 90s.
What does Ford stand for? Fix Or Repair Daily.
I'd go later than that, mid noughties is when mass produced cars had a step change in reliability in my humble opinion. With longer warranties then following in the 2010s mainly.
Yes, probably true.
I think this was a joke in a Ben Elton book:
"In the old days, you could get pawed in a Ford, do it in a Buick, and have it away in a Chevrolet. Nowadays you can do f-all in a Vauxhall."
It my case it was being laughed at in an Austin Metro, which I couldn't even get a girl in to do f-all with.
It’s a Rover Metro.
Fellow student in the late 50’s had a van with a mattress in the back. Always at it. He said, anyway.
"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
It is completely perverse to accept any decline in living standards. It is absolutely being inflicted deliberately by an ideologically-crazed minority peddling climate alarmism, and we are badly in need of a counter-narrative.
There are dozens of reasons for accepting declining living standards. We all have our hobbyhorses. I would, for example, accept a future where I was poorer - let's say one in which I need to work for another 12 months before retirement to retire on the same level of comfort - in return for a UK less trewn with graffiti and litter and with more trains. Others will have different priorities for what the state might do which might not equal 'living standards', or at least easily measurable ones.
If for example we suddenly had no smartphones or streaming tv would people be less happy. Probably not. Technology has made a small number of uber nerds rich but as time goes on its contribution to human happiness becomes less and less. Would i want to live without a refrigarator..hell no. Could i live without streaming tv. Of course.
That was, I'm sure, the argument of Communists in eastern Europe.
If people in the UK didn't have smartphones, and people in France did, I think people would notice.
Thats the point. In eastern europe they did have unreliable cars and lacked basic consumer goods. that hasnt been true in the west since at least the 60s or 70s. And im talking of a situation where no country has a smartphone not one does one doesnt. Do you think smartphones have been major beneficiaries for humanity because i could certainly live without them.
Every generation can look back at life 25 years ago and say "hey, life was pretty good back then because we had [y] and do we really need new fangled [x]".
So, people in the 1930s could have said "Life in the 1910s was pretty good; I mean we didn't have cars yet, with all that nasty pollution and the risk of getting knocked over. And who actually needs to go to the cinema anyway?"
And people in the 1950s could say "Life in the 1930s was pretty good. They already the cinema and cars, which is all you really need to lead a modern life. Do we really need jetplanes? And you used to be able to send your washing out for almost nothing. Is it really an improvement to have an unreliable and expensive machine and to do it yourself?"
Then people in the 1970s would say "Life in the 1950s was great. Already you innovations like washing machines and fridges than make home care simple. And the railway system was great - you could get anywhere in the UK cheaply. All there is today is colour TV and ridiculously expensive VCRs and the shows are exactly the same!"
Etcetera. Etcetera.
If we didn't advance technologically and France did. People would notice. And they would be spitting mad.
The difference is the tech elite actually shield their kids from tablets and smartphones. They know. The point is as im sure you will understand the marginal benefit of each wave of technological development is less and less and the associated costs more and more negative so that at some point the costs outweigh the benefits. We are arguably close to this point now which is why the dreams of silicon valley uber nerds will remain dreams,
Absurd assertions without evidence.
And as a member of the tech elite, I can assure you that I teach my kids how to use tech, I don't shield them from it.
"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
Living standards in the 90s were perfectly fine. Foreign travel relatively cheap by then and affordable homes with still plenty of technology around for entertainment.
I'm sorry, but this is absurd.
Good luck getting people to go back to unreliable cars, no streaming TV, etc.
The reality is that there have been massive improvements in many parts of peoples' lives. Albeit tempered by issues such as rising unaffordability of housing.
Unreliable cars? I thought that was the 70s, not the 90s.
Mass produced cars were pretty shit, in my view, until the late 90s.
What does Ford stand for? Fix Or Repair Daily.
I'd go later than that, mid noughties is when mass produced cars had a step change in reliability in my humble opinion. With longer warranties then following in the 2010s mainly.
Yes, probably true.
I think this was a joke in a Ben Elton book:
"In the old days, you could get pawed in a Ford, do it in a Buick, and have it away in a Chevrolet. Nowadays you can do f-all in a Vauxhall."
It my case it was being laughed at in an Austin Metro, which I couldn't even get a girl in to do f-all with.
It’s a Rover Metro.
Fellow student in the late 50’s had a van with a mattress in the back. Always at it. He said, anyway.
This reminds me of one of the late '70s Carry On films, before they turned fully to smut.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
I don't want to subsidise them out of some big love of higher earners (I am not one) but because my (admittedly untested) belief is that the country will be better off if we can get higher earners earning (and paying tax). I would expect the benefit to cost ratio of paying for childcare for higher earners to be greater than 1 (indeed, it probably has a higher BCR than for medium earners).
At over £100k a year they can afford child care out of their taxed income. Just as I did when paying private school fees. There are some who cannot earn because the absurd cost of child care in this country is higher than what they can hope to receive. People earning over £100k are not in that category and we need to focus the limited funds available to those who are.
But it doesn't make any sense that someone earning £130k would be better off in practice, in terms of take home pay etc, reducing their salary to £100k, which is what this situation effectively is. It is total madness.
I've been based in London with work recently and think that these people, earning £100k, are not even vaguely rich in this context, where a terraced house costs £700k. If you are earning £5k per month (after pensions) a large chunk of money would go servicing a mortgage, it is not like school/nursery fees are just a trivial expense, you can't actually afford to pay them.
The system is creating bizarre incentives, ie to work less, or to move out of London and the south east; this has caused a lot of problems within the public sector.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
That's completely beside the point: the tax and benefits system should not have cliffs where the marginal tax rate shoots up well above 100%.
We should be encouraging Casino to work, and to generate value and tax revenues.
The impact of this move is to discourage a large portion of the population from working.
Madness.
... a large portion ... guffaws.
How many people are affected? A very tiny portion of the UK earn over 100k per annum, and they only need childcare for a very small portion of their working life.
How many people are affected by cliff edges and tax and benefits rates shooting upto around 100%?
Many millions of people actually.
For starters anyone on UC paying IC and NI is already at 70% marginal tax rate even before anything else. These cliff edges exist throughout our NYC skyline tax code and it is damaging.
Of course, cliff edges are bad. The question is why pb.com is fixated on this cliff edge.
Rather off-topic, though a recurring subject. GPT developer walks through the improvements in today's GPT-4 release vs the 3/3.5 one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=outcGtbnMuQ
"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
200 AD/CE? Leastways south (enough) of Hadrian's Wall.
Bit shit if you were a slave. And as a peasant being north of the Military Zone was possibly an improvement on being under Roman control.
Must say your viewpoint is quite woke - what a surprise!
There’s a fair amount of historical evidence that the end of the Roman empire wasn’t seen as a disaster by quite a few people living in parts of it.
Rather off-topic, though a recurring subject. GPT developer walks through the improvements in today's GPT-4 release vs the 3/3.5 one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=outcGtbnMuQ
I'm a OpenAI partner and have been using GPT-4, for a few days. It's better. But pretty subtly better. The leap in generations has gone from 100x with 1 to 2, 10x from 2 to 3, 2x from 3 to 3.5, and now it's 1.25x for 3.5 to 4.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
That's completely beside the point: the tax and benefits system should not have cliffs where the marginal tax rate shoots up well above 100%.
We should be encouraging Casino to work, and to generate value and tax revenues.
The impact of this move is to discourage a large portion of the population from working.
Madness.
... a large portion ... guffaws.
How many people are affected? A very tiny portion of the UK earn over 100k per annum, and they only need childcare for a very small portion of their working life.
How many people are affected by cliff edges and tax and benefits rates shooting upto around 100%?
Many millions of people actually.
For starters anyone on UC paying IC and NI is already at 70% marginal tax rate even before anything else. These cliff edges exist throughout our NYC skyline tax code and it is damaging.
Of course, cliff edges are bad. The question is why pb.com is fixated on this cliff edge.
Because PB is full of middle class/high earners.
I think I'm the only working class PBer.
Anyone who says they are working class clearly isn't.
Re ; the original Mini model, that was courtesy of Sir Alec Issigonis, half a cousin of the BMW family, and half very old greek communities from Smyrna (Izmir).
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
I don't want to subsidise them out of some big love of higher earners (I am not one) but because my (admittedly untested) belief is that the country will be better off if we can get higher earners earning (and paying tax). I would expect the benefit to cost ratio of paying for childcare for higher earners to be greater than 1 (indeed, it probably has a higher BCR than for medium earners).
At over £100k a year they can afford child care out of their taxed income. Just as I did when paying private school fees. There are some who cannot earn because the absurd cost of child care in this country is higher than what they can hope to receive. People earning over £100k are not in that category and we need to focus the limited funds available to those who are.
But it doesn't make any sense that someone earning £130k would be better off in practice, in terms of take home pay etc, reducing their salary to £100k, which is what this situation effectively is. It is total madness.
I've been based in London with work recently and think that these people, earning £100k, are not even vaguely rich in this context, where a terraced house costs £700k. If you are earning £5k per month (after pensions) a large chunk of money would go servicing a mortgage, it is not like school/nursery fees are just a trivial expense, you can't actually afford to pay them.
The system is creating bizarre incentives, ie to work less, or to move out of London and the south east; this has caused a lot of problems within the public sector.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
That's completely beside the point: the tax and benefits system should not have cliffs where the marginal tax rate shoots up well above 100%.
We should be encouraging Casino to work, and to generate value and tax revenues.
The impact of this move is to discourage a large portion of the population from working.
Madness.
... a large portion ... guffaws.
How many people are affected? A very tiny portion of the UK earn over 100k per annum, and they only need childcare for a very small portion of their working life.
How many people are affected by cliff edges and tax and benefits rates shooting upto around 100%?
Many millions of people actually.
For starters anyone on UC paying IC and NI is already at 70% marginal tax rate even before anything else. These cliff edges exist throughout our NYC skyline tax code and it is damaging.
Of course, cliff edges are bad. The question is why pb.com is fixated on this cliff edge.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
That's completely beside the point: the tax and benefits system should not have cliffs where the marginal tax rate shoots up well above 100%.
We should be encouraging Casino to work, and to generate value and tax revenues.
The impact of this move is to discourage a large portion of the population from working.
Madness.
... a large portion ... guffaws.
How many people are affected? A very tiny portion of the UK earn over 100k per annum, and they only need childcare for a very small portion of their working life.
How many people are affected by cliff edges and tax and benefits rates shooting upto around 100%?
Many millions of people actually.
For starters anyone on UC paying IC and NI is already at 70% marginal tax rate even before anything else. These cliff edges exist throughout our NYC skyline tax code and it is damaging.
Of course, cliff edges are bad. The question is why pb.com is fixated on this cliff edge.
Because PB is full of middle class/high earners.
I think I'm the only working class PBer.
You voted Liberal Democrat at the last general election, nobody who is working class votes Liberal Democrat now!
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
That's completely beside the point: the tax and benefits system should not have cliffs where the marginal tax rate shoots up well above 100%.
We should be encouraging Casino to work, and to generate value and tax revenues.
The impact of this move is to discourage a large portion of the population from working.
Madness.
... a large portion ... guffaws.
How many people are affected? A very tiny portion of the UK earn over 100k per annum, and they only need childcare for a very small portion of their working life.
How many people are affected by cliff edges and tax and benefits rates shooting upto around 100%?
Many millions of people actually.
For starters anyone on UC paying IC and NI is already at 70% marginal tax rate even before anything else. These cliff edges exist throughout our NYC skyline tax code and it is damaging.
Of course, cliff edges are bad. The question is why pb.com is fixated on this cliff edge.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
I mean, that's all well and good. But where does it end? Should I also not have my children's schooling paid for? Or my healthcare?
My wife is a midwife and so it has been completely uneconomical for her to return to work while we have young children (other than the minimum amount to accrue maternity leave between children). Why would she work for practically zero marginal net income uplift and lots of stress?
Economically, the end result is likely greater shortfalls in a skilled part of the workforce until both children are in school in a few years' time.
For us we can manage fine as we are and she enjoys time with the kids, but I'm not sure that large cliff edges in the tax system are the best way to encourage economic growth.
"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
It is completely perverse to accept any decline in living standards. It is absolutely being inflicted deliberately by an ideologically-crazed minority peddling climate alarmism, and we are badly in need of a counter-narrative.
There are dozens of reasons for accepting declining living standards. We all have our hobbyhorses. I would, for example, accept a future where I was poorer - let's say one in which I need to work for another 12 months before retirement to retire on the same level of comfort - in return for a UK less trewn with graffiti and litter and with more trains. Others will have different priorities for what the state might do which might not equal 'living standards', or at least easily measurable ones.
If for example we suddenly had no smartphones or streaming tv would people be less happy. Probably not. Technology has made a small number of uber nerds rich but as time goes on its contribution to human happiness becomes less and less. Would i want to live without a refrigarator..hell no. Could i live without streaming tv. Of course.
That was, I'm sure, the argument of Communists in eastern Europe.
If people in the UK didn't have smartphones, and people in France did, I think people would notice.
Thats the point. In eastern europe they did have unreliable cars and lacked basic consumer goods. that hasnt been true in the west since at least the 60s or 70s. And im talking of a situation where no country has a smartphone not one does one doesnt. Do you think smartphones have been major beneficiaries for humanity because i could certainly live without them.
Every generation can look back at life 25 years ago and say "hey, life was pretty good back then because we had [y] and do we really need new fangled [x]".
So, people in the 1930s could have said "Life in the 1910s was pretty good; I mean we didn't have cars yet, with all that nasty pollution and the risk of getting knocked over. And who actually needs to go to the cinema anyway?"
And people in the 1950s could say "Life in the 1930s was pretty good. They already the cinema and cars, which is all you really need to lead a modern life. Do we really need jetplanes? And you used to be able to send your washing out for almost nothing. Is it really an improvement to have an unreliable and expensive machine and to do it yourself?"
Then people in the 1970s would say "Life in the 1950s was great. Already you innovations like washing machines and fridges than make home care simple. And the railway system was great - you could get anywhere in the UK cheaply. All there is today is colour TV and ridiculously expensive VCRs and the shows are exactly the same!"
Etcetera. Etcetera.
If we didn't advance technologically and France did. People would notice. And they would be spitting mad.
The difference is the tech elite actually shield their kids from tablets and smartphones. They know. The point is as im sure you will understand the marginal benefit of each wave of technological development is less and less and the associated costs more and more negative so that at some point the costs outweigh the benefits. We are arguably close to this point now which is why the dreams of silicon valley uber nerds will remain dreams,
Absurd assertions without evidence.
And as a member of the tech elite, I can assure you that I teach my kids how to use tech, I don't shield them from it.
ok an example. Social media like facebook and twitter. Have they contributed to the sum of human happiness in the same way as the invention of the automobile or refrigarator. I think not.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
I don't want to subsidise them out of some big love of higher earners (I am not one) but because my (admittedly untested) belief is that the country will be better off if we can get higher earners earning (and paying tax). I would expect the benefit to cost ratio of paying for childcare for higher earners to be greater than 1 (indeed, it probably has a higher BCR than for medium earners).
If a higher earner, out of pique that we are not lobbing still more money down his/her gullet, fucks off to America ..; well then his/her job is occupied by another high earner.
With the exception of Erling Haaland, most people are actually very easily replaceable.
This idea that we have to go down on our knees & bribe & plead with high earners to work with massive bribes for their childcare, otherwise the entire country will become deprived of their taxes & sink into penury, is the most insane I have yet heard on pb.com.
High earners use this argument all the time. Yet would they really want to leave the cultural attractions of London for a low tax cultural desert.
The highest earners ie those who earn over £150k a year can pick between Kensington and Chelsea, Manhattan, Paris or Singapore, we want them to stay here.
I don’t think anyone earning less than £250k could afford to live in K&C.
Renting they certainly could if they still earn 6 figures, then move out to Surrey to buy
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
The trouble is that old socialists, like @NickPalmer, agree with me.
The £100k cliff-edge is retarded and totally counterproductive. And it's not right that two earners in a household earning £95k each get all the help and none of the extra tax and a household with one earner on £105k and another on zero get nothing. Have a think about what that incentivises for a minute.
As @DougSeal said on the previous thread £100k today is equivalent to about £55k in 1999 prices. It's a yardstick now of a successful career built over many years of hard graft, not of "repulsive" wealth and your use of such language is disgusting.
The point is that there is lots of unfairness in our tax and benefit system.
Sure .. in an ideal world, there should not be and it should be fixed.
But, I doubt if anyone would pick on this as the most serious and glaring unfairness that needs urgent attention (except on pb.com).
If you follow my posts you'll see (earlier today in fact) that as part of a package for growth I have advocated (a) further streamlining the UC withdrawal taper (b) reducing tax on young people and student loans and (c) removing the £100k cliff edge.
I would pay for it upfront by trimming pensioner benefits. In the longer term I expect it would easily pay for itself.
It's all about aspiration, getting people into work and making work pay, which benefits all of us.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
That's completely beside the point: the tax and benefits system should not have cliffs where the marginal tax rate shoots up well above 100%.
We should be encouraging Casino to work, and to generate value and tax revenues.
The impact of this move is to discourage a large portion of the population from working.
Madness.
... a large portion ... guffaws.
How many people are affected? A very tiny portion of the UK earn over 100k per annum, and they only need childcare for a very small portion of their working life.
How many people are affected by cliff edges and tax and benefits rates shooting upto around 100%?
Many millions of people actually.
For starters anyone on UC paying IC and NI is already at 70% marginal tax rate even before anything else. These cliff edges exist throughout our NYC skyline tax code and it is damaging.
Of course, cliff edges are bad. The question is why pb.com is fixated on this cliff edge.
Because PB is full of middle class/high earners.
I think I'm the only working class PBer.
Jolly well done to you.
The 8th baronet always used to say to me that the poor are always with us, and we mustn't patronise them as they do what they can. That's always been a mantra I have lived by.
Of course, he was referring to the beaters on the Passmore grouse moors, but I'm sure it applies equally to PB.com.
"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
It is completely perverse to accept any decline in living standards. It is absolutely being inflicted deliberately by an ideologically-crazed minority peddling climate alarmism, and we are badly in need of a counter-narrative.
There are dozens of reasons for accepting declining living standards. We all have our hobbyhorses. I would, for example, accept a future where I was poorer - let's say one in which I need to work for another 12 months before retirement to retire on the same level of comfort - in return for a UK less trewn with graffiti and litter and with more trains. Others will have different priorities for what the state might do which might not equal 'living standards', or at least easily measurable ones.
If for example we suddenly had no smartphones or streaming tv would people be less happy. Probably not. Technology has made a small number of uber nerds rich but as time goes on its contribution to human happiness becomes less and less. Would i want to live without a refrigarator..hell no. Could i live without streaming tv. Of course.
That was, I'm sure, the argument of Communists in eastern Europe.
If people in the UK didn't have smartphones, and people in France did, I think people would notice.
Thats the point. In eastern europe they did have unreliable cars and lacked basic consumer goods. that hasnt been true in the west since at least the 60s or 70s. And im talking of a situation where no country has a smartphone not one does one doesnt. Do you think smartphones have been major beneficiaries for humanity because i could certainly live without them.
Every generation can look back at life 25 years ago and say "hey, life was pretty good back then because we had [y] and do we really need new fangled [x]".
So, people in the 1930s could have said "Life in the 1910s was pretty good; I mean we didn't have cars yet, with all that nasty pollution and the risk of getting knocked over. And who actually needs to go to the cinema anyway?"
And people in the 1950s could say "Life in the 1930s was pretty good. They already the cinema and cars, which is all you really need to lead a modern life. Do we really need jetplanes? And you used to be able to send your washing out for almost nothing. Is it really an improvement to have an unreliable and expensive machine and to do it yourself?"
Then people in the 1970s would say "Life in the 1950s was great. Already you innovations like washing machines and fridges than make home care simple. And the railway system was great - you could get anywhere in the UK cheaply. All there is today is colour TV and ridiculously expensive VCRs and the shows are exactly the same!"
Etcetera. Etcetera.
If we didn't advance technologically and France did. People would notice. And they would be spitting mad.
The difference is the tech elite actually shield their kids from tablets and smartphones. They know. The point is as im sure you will understand the marginal benefit of each wave of technological development is less and less and the associated costs more and more negative so that at some point the costs outweigh the benefits. We are arguably close to this point now which is why the dreams of silicon valley uber nerds will remain dreams,
Absurd assertions without evidence.
And as a member of the tech elite, I can assure you that I teach my kids how to use tech, I don't shield them from it.
ok an example. Social media like facebook and twitter. Have they contributed to the sum of human happiness in the same way as the invention of the automobile or refrigarator. I think not.
You honestly think that Facebook and Twitter are even in the top 10,000 innovations of this century?
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
I don't want to subsidise them out of some big love of higher earners (I am not one) but because my (admittedly untested) belief is that the country will be better off if we can get higher earners earning (and paying tax). I would expect the benefit to cost ratio of paying for childcare for higher earners to be greater than 1 (indeed, it probably has a higher BCR than for medium earners).
At over £100k a year they can afford child care out of their taxed income. Just as I did when paying private school fees. There are some who cannot earn because the absurd cost of child care in this country is higher than what they can hope to receive. People earning over £100k are not in that category and we need to focus the limited funds available to those who are.
But it doesn't make any sense that someone earning £130k would be better off in practice, in terms of take home pay etc, reducing their salary to £100k, which is what this situation effectively is. It is total madness.
I've been based in London with work recently and think that these people, earning £100k, are not even vaguely rich in this context, where a terraced house costs £700k. If you are earning £5k per month (after pensions) a large chunk of money would go servicing a mortgage, it is not like school/nursery fees are just a trivial expense, you can't actually afford to pay them.
The system is creating bizarre incentives, ie to work less, or to move out of London and the south east; this has caused a lot of problems within the public sector.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
That's completely beside the point: the tax and benefits system should not have cliffs where the marginal tax rate shoots up well above 100%.
We should be encouraging Casino to work, and to generate value and tax revenues.
The impact of this move is to discourage a large portion of the population from working.
Madness.
... a large portion ... guffaws.
How many people are affected? A very tiny portion of the UK earn over 100k per annum, and they only need childcare for a very small portion of their working life.
How many people are affected by cliff edges and tax and benefits rates shooting upto around 100%?
Many millions of people actually.
For starters anyone on UC paying IC and NI is already at 70% marginal tax rate even before anything else. These cliff edges exist throughout our NYC skyline tax code and it is damaging.
Of course, cliff edges are bad. The question is why pb.com is fixated on this cliff edge.
Because PB is full of middle class/high earners.
I think I'm the only working class PBer.
I thought I was the only working class PB-er.
No, me.
Ah ... student days when we had long discussions on who was the most working class.
I was so pleased when my father was changing jobs, as I could describe him as unemployed for a few weeks.
"Disposal income per person will fall by 6% this financial year and next, according to the OBR, representing the largest two-year fall in living standards since records began in the 1950s.
That could lead to people dipping into their savings to pay for things."
22m have less than £1k of savings, half of which have less than £100 and they are going to be the ones hit hardest......
The largest two-year fall in living standars since the 1950s - true, but that takes us back to, what, 2014 standards? Which weren't exactly penury. And given that the last two years have seen us paying for lockdown and the impact of war in Ukraine, not unexpected - when has there been a confluence of events like this?
And what do the BBC expect to be done about this? One strongly suspects they expect the chancellor to conjure up money from nowhere. Which was what got us into this mess in the first place.
As an intellectual exercise, to what year would PB readers be willing to retreat, in terms of living standards, before it would be considered unacceptable? To the nearest decade for older readers….
It is completely perverse to accept any decline in living standards. It is absolutely being inflicted deliberately by an ideologically-crazed minority peddling climate alarmism, and we are badly in need of a counter-narrative.
There are dozens of reasons for accepting declining living standards. We all have our hobbyhorses. I would, for example, accept a future where I was poorer - let's say one in which I need to work for another 12 months before retirement to retire on the same level of comfort - in return for a UK less trewn with graffiti and litter and with more trains. Others will have different priorities for what the state might do which might not equal 'living standards', or at least easily measurable ones.
If for example we suddenly had no smartphones or streaming tv would people be less happy. Probably not. Technology has made a small number of uber nerds rich but as time goes on its contribution to human happiness becomes less and less. Would i want to live without a refrigarator..hell no. Could i live without streaming tv. Of course.
That was, I'm sure, the argument of Communists in eastern Europe.
If people in the UK didn't have smartphones, and people in France did, I think people would notice.
Thats the point. In eastern europe they did have unreliable cars and lacked basic consumer goods. that hasnt been true in the west since at least the 60s or 70s. And im talking of a situation where no country has a smartphone not one does one doesnt. Do you think smartphones have been major beneficiaries for humanity because i could certainly live without them.
Every generation can look back at life 25 years ago and say "hey, life was pretty good back then because we had [y] and do we really need new fangled [x]".
So, people in the 1930s could have said "Life in the 1910s was pretty good; I mean we didn't have cars yet, with all that nasty pollution and the risk of getting knocked over. And who actually needs to go to the cinema anyway?"
And people in the 1950s could say "Life in the 1930s was pretty good. They already the cinema and cars, which is all you really need to lead a modern life. Do we really need jetplanes? And you used to be able to send your washing out for almost nothing. Is it really an improvement to have an unreliable and expensive machine and to do it yourself?"
Then people in the 1970s would say "Life in the 1950s was great. Already you innovations like washing machines and fridges than make home care simple. And the railway system was great - you could get anywhere in the UK cheaply. All there is today is colour TV and ridiculously expensive VCRs and the shows are exactly the same!"
Etcetera. Etcetera.
If we didn't advance technologically and France did. People would notice. And they would be spitting mad.
The difference is the tech elite actually shield their kids from tablets and smartphones. They know. The point is as im sure you will understand the marginal benefit of each wave of technological development is less and less and the associated costs more and more negative so that at some point the costs outweigh the benefits. We are arguably close to this point now which is why the dreams of silicon valley uber nerds will remain dreams,
Absurd assertions without evidence.
And as a member of the tech elite, I can assure you that I teach my kids how to use tech, I don't shield them from it.
ok an example. Social media like facebook and twitter. Have they contributed to the sum of human happiness in the same way as the invention of the automobile or refrigarator. I think not.
You honestly think that Facebook and Twitter are even in the top 10,000 innovations of this century?
ok well the smartphone then. I think that counts. Do you regard zombies walking down the street staring at their phones as a societal improvement.
Bought a new Mini in 1962. Had it for two years. Never any problems.
You never drove in heavy rain? The distributor was vulnerable to water ingress and the engine conked out, in my experience anyway.
No; at least one trip in a storm ….. we were living in Lancashire…. and several times in heavy snow…… January/February 1963. It was excellent in snow. Front wheel drive.
Comments
Could I live without streaming TV? Yes of course I could.
Would I happily go back to the 20th Century TV? No, not on your nelly.
Having experienced better technology today, going backwards absolutely would make things worse.
My wife and I are children of the 80s, we each got satellite TV with Cartoon Network when we were still kids in the 90s . . . but talk to our kids and they are as amazed by what we had and think how backwards it is. Describing terrestrial TV to them with commercial breaks you couldn't skip or pause, an inability to choose what to watch and TVs you controlled via a dial instead of a remote control . . . that's as alien to them as black and white TV was to me.
Actually more alien to them, since I still watched black and white TV as a kid. After school we had on TV I Dream of Jeannie, Lost In Space and other black and white shows. Black and white movies were still commonly on TV - but to them not having streaming is something they've never experienced. Its something they take for granted as much as running water or electricity and why not now?
King Co Elections to KC Council:
'Precinct alterations for the year 2023 are for the most part the result of boundary changes due to mandated local redistricting required by State law following the decennial census. The remaining alterations were to accommodate recent city annexations and precinct balancing. This year the
precinct alteration process included input and review by both major political parties in King County and a 10-day public review period. The cost of making the precinct revisions is fully funded as part of the adopted Department of Elections budget.
Precinct alteration highlights include:
• 2,750 current precincts
• 288 wholly moving districts
• 116 altered
• 11 added
• 12 abolished
• 1 net precinct loss
• 2,749 new total number of precincts after ordinance adoption
SSI - note that size of voting precincts is regulated both by state law AND by King Co ordinance.
There is still a lot of prejudice today but it is better than it was.
Reaction to Queer as Folk was mixed at the time. This from RTD
“And Canal Street was destroyed; Canal Street was King. You decide which story you want to believe. But in "the gay community", the argument had to polarise into: is this show good for us, or bad? Sometimes I think it's a question no TV programme should have to bear. It's rarely applied to "straight" drama (was Cracker good for us, or bad? Cold Feet? Midsomer Murders? I, Claudius?) But maybe that's sophistry. If the question is asked, then the question exists.
And I still don't know the answer. Come back in 20 years. But one story in particular haunts me, and shows the difficulty of applying a simple "good" or "bad". A gay teacher told me that Nathan inspired a 15-year-old boy at his school to come out. (Good.) In the yard, he was beaten up so severely, he had his cheekbones crushed. (Bad.) “
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
I'd go later than that, mid noughties is when mass produced cars had a step change in reliability in my humble opinion. With longer warranties then following in the 2010s mainly.
"In the old days, you could get pawed in a Ford, do it in a Buick, and have it away in a Chevrolet. Nowadays you can do f-all in a Vauxhall."
The safest Conservative seats are now those with the most over 65s not those with the highest earners as was the case in 1997
We should be encouraging Casino to work, and to generate value and tax revenues.
The impact of this move is to discourage a large portion of the population from working.
Madness.
With the exception of Erling Haaland, most people are actually very easily replaceable.
This idea that we have to go down on our knees & bribe & plead with high earners to work with massive bribes for their childcare, otherwise the entire country will become deprived of their taxes & sink into penury, is the most insane I have yet heard on pb.com.
It would also have made more sense if having this kind of system to specifically avoid £100k as marginal rates were already high around there. Either £70k or £130k might have been better.
In that era Volvo drivers were seen as wankers.
As 17 year old it felt like I was driving a tank.
If someone is a high earner they should be paying a high amount of tax - if they're not then we need to address that. But we shouldn't be having cliff edges where the high amount of tax is over 100% - it shouldn't really ever be over 50%.
And the same is an issue for low earners too via benefits withdrawal. Indeed the problem is greater for lower earners I suspect, but either way cliff edges are obscene and counter productive and create transformations in behaviour that are not desirable.
The car sometimes smelt as well...
The £100k cliff-edge is retarded and totally counterproductive. And it's not right that two earners in a household earning £95k each get all the help and none of the extra tax and a household with one earner on £105k and another on zero get nothing. Have a think about what that incentivises for a minute.
As @DougSeal said on the previous thread £100k today is equivalent to about £55k in 1999 prices. It's a yardstick now of a successful career built over many years of hard graft, not of "repulsive" wealth and your use of such language is disgusting.
It wasn't, of course. A lot of it still isn't now, but it's a hell of a lot better than it used to be. You-know-who wasn't stupid when she came up with Section 28 (passed into law in 1988, not repealed until 2003.) It didn't just make her party members all wet with excitement, most of the country would've approved at the time as well.
Wasn’t really as good for us until the mid 90’s to 2013 or thereabouts. Although there were ups and downs before and after.
How many people are affected? A very tiny portion of the UK earn over 100k per annum, and they only need childcare for a very small portion of their working life.
After thinking about it, this Budget has made me even more firm in my decision not to vote for the Tories next time. This lot simply don't deserve my vote.
Its not a 'bad' Budget, there's not much in it that is objectionable yet. But that's about it, there's not much in it. Its a Budget for managed decline and no aspiration at all.
One of the best achievements of the Conservative-led Coalition onwards was raising tax allowances etc so that people kept more of what they earn. All that is being reversed by rampant tax rises through fiscal drag and fiddling at the edges resolving some valid concerns for the affluent and the poor, but leaving major problems for everyone in the middle.
Many millions of people actually.
For starters anyone on UC paying IC and NI is already at 70% marginal tax rate even before anything else. These cliff edges exist throughout our NYC skyline tax code and it is damaging.
(*) I assume that's what 'biggest gayer' means
I haven't a clue how many gay people there were in the town. A lot of us would've been closeted. I still was at the time. Some, particularly those whose families are amongst the third of the country that, according to recent survey data, remain irreconciled to our existence, still are.
There are many absurdities in our tax system and the loss of PA after £110k is certainly one of them. But you cannot lose sight of the big picture. The average earnings are now around £30K. Can you imagine living on so little? I am not sure that I can. But the majority do. And they pay taxes that have to be spent carefully and fairly. Not on those earning 4x as much.
Sure .. in an ideal world, there should not be and it should be fixed.
But, I doubt if anyone would pick on this as the most serious and glaring unfairness that needs urgent attention (except on pb.com).
So, people in the 1930s could have said "Life in the 1910s was pretty good; I mean we didn't have cars yet, with all that nasty pollution and the risk of getting knocked over. And who actually needs to go to the cinema anyway?"
And people in the 1950s could say "Life in the 1930s was pretty good. They already the cinema and cars, which is all you really need to lead a modern life. Do we really need jetplanes? And you used to be able to send your washing out for almost nothing. Is it really an improvement to have an unreliable and expensive machine and to do it yourself?"
Then people in the 1970s would say "Life in the 1950s was great. Already you innovations like washing machines and fridges than make home care simple. And the railway system was great - you could get anywhere in the UK cheaply. All there is today is colour TV and ridiculously expensive VCRs and the shows are exactly the same!"
Etcetera. Etcetera.
If we didn't advance technologically and France did. People would notice. And they would be spitting mad.
He used to call our group nights out 'Tom's big gayer night out.'
The WhatsApp group I'm in with him is called 'Gayers and twinks.'
The point is as im sure you will understand the marginal benefit of each wave of technological development is less and less and the associated costs more and more negative so that at some point the costs outweigh the benefits. We are arguably close to this point now which is why the dreams of silicon valley uber nerds will remain dreams,
I think I'm the only working class PBer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1fiOJDXA-E
Because children grow up.
He said, anyway.
And as a member of the tech elite, I can assure you that I teach my kids how to use tech, I don't shield them from it.
I've been based in London with work recently and think that these people, earning £100k, are not even vaguely rich in this context, where a terraced house costs £700k. If you are earning £5k per month (after pensions) a large chunk of money would go servicing a mortgage, it is not like school/nursery fees are just a trivial expense, you can't actually afford to pay them.
The system is creating bizarre incentives, ie to work less, or to move out of London and the south east; this has caused a lot of problems within the public sector.
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/4339215/#Comment_4339215
https://www.rightmove.co.uk/house-prices/enfield.html
https://twitter.com/grdecter/status/1635996439171018757?s=12
My three for Day 3 at Cheltenham tomorrow:
1.30: APPRECIATE IT
2.50: BLUE LORD (each way)
3.30: GOLD TWEET (each way)
My wife is a midwife and so it has been completely uneconomical for her to return to work while we have young children (other than the minimum amount to accrue maternity leave between children). Why would she work for practically zero marginal net income uplift and lots of stress?
Economically, the end result is likely greater shortfalls in a skilled part of the workforce until both children are in school in a few years' time.
For us we can manage fine as we are and she enjoys time with the kids, but I'm not sure that large cliff edges in the tax system are the best way to encourage economic growth.
Social media like facebook and twitter.
Have they contributed to the sum of human happiness in the same way as the invention of the automobile or refrigarator. I think not.
I would pay for it upfront by trimming pensioner benefits. In the longer term I expect it would easily pay for itself.
It's all about aspiration, getting people into work and making work pay, which benefits all of us.
The 8th baronet always used to say to me that the poor are always with us, and we mustn't patronise them as they do what they can. That's always been a mantra I have lived by.
Of course, he was referring to the beaters on the Passmore grouse moors, but I'm sure it applies equally to PB.com.
I was so pleased when my father was changing jobs, as I could describe him as unemployed for a few weeks.
It was excellent in snow. Front wheel drive.