With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
No it doesn't, that's the whole point of tuition fees. We are talking about the difference between the current situation, and one where tuition fees are abolished. In the latter, the checkout lady would certainly notice it in her pay packet.
No she wouldn't. Not with my proposal, indeed her taxes could go down.
The people who benefit from the current system aren't checkout ladies, they're landlords and elderly lawyers and pensioners etc who can earn lots of income without seeing that income taxed at the same rates that others get taxed at.
We're talking about two separate things. Regardless of whether we are using the current tax system, or your tax system, abolishing tuition fees would result in a net cost to the taxpayer of around £8bn a year.
Which is absolutely a rounding error compared to the cost to the exchequer of ensuring the retired, landlords, inheritees etc don't pay the same rate of income tax as those actually working for their income pay.
Just to give a sense of scale, that "rounding error" is about the same as the revenue from the new NI tax hike.
Which again wouldn't have been needed if everyone paid the same share.
Tax everyone on the same income the same rate, regardless of how its earned. Don't punish people for being workers, or punish them even more for being young workers.
Yes, but regardless of what tax system you use, abolishing tuition fees will result in a net cost of £8bn, which will be a noticeable tax increase, at least based on the reaction to the NI one.
Am I the only one here who thinks government should mostly get out of higher education completely?
Let the universities, students and banks determine price in a free market.
Expand sixth form colleges into ‘community colleges’, if they want to keep a low-cost way of getting a degree without the students moving away from home.
There’s certainly no way that politicians should be making decisions on interest rates or repayment thresholds, because apart from anything else it’s politically unpopular!
That's a more reasonable suggestion than our current one. What we have right now isn't a market rate, its a convoluted income tax surcharge for certain people in the name of student finance.
How is it more reasonable? The implementation would be identical, with graduates repaying their loan over time.
It would be on commercial free market terms and it wouldn't be related to income. Universities would have to compete on price and not have the backing of the state to charge as much as they like and to then have the payments collected by the Exchequer via PAYE.
Do you honestly think that commercial free market terms unrelated to income would be beneficial for the less well-off?
No but then that'd actually be a charge for a service received. Not simply a tax that is simply taxed on some but not others.
There's no reason why a graduate with a salary of £30k should be on an even higher real tax rate than eg a landlord with an income of £70k.
How are the current tuition fees not a charge for a service received? And the repayment mechanism if it is in the private sector would be very similar, if not more onerous on the poorest graduates. Just look at the US.
Because the current tax levied on on income is not a fee, it is a tax based upon income.
If you're going to tax income, then tax income. If you're going to charge for a service, then charge for the service. The current mess does neither.
If all you're coming down to is its not fair to expect people to actually pay for fees so it should be income tax based, then just tax income properly. Don't tax a minority of income tax payers.
I think this is now just quibbling about semantics rather than discussing any real issue. You could just as well call it repayment of a fee based on income. In fact I think it would be fairer to call it that, you don't have a balance sheet of your expected income tax payments that you are trying to clear, do you?
It’s a proportion of your income, deducted at source by PAYE. Smells like an income tax, which of course was the competing proposal at the time the current scheme was introduced.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
No it doesn't, that's the whole point of tuition fees. We are talking about the difference between the current situation, and one where tuition fees are abolished. In the latter, the checkout lady would certainly notice it in her pay packet.
No she wouldn't. Not with my proposal, indeed her taxes could go down.
The people who benefit from the current system aren't checkout ladies, they're landlords and elderly lawyers and pensioners etc who can earn lots of income without seeing that income taxed at the same rates that others get taxed at.
We're talking about two separate things. Regardless of whether we are using the current tax system, or your tax system, abolishing tuition fees would result in a net cost to the taxpayer of around £8bn a year.
Which is absolutely a rounding error compared to the cost to the exchequer of ensuring the retired, landlords, inheritees etc don't pay the same rate of income tax as those actually working for their income pay.
Just to give a sense of scale, that "rounding error" is about the same as the revenue from the new NI tax hike.
Which again wouldn't have been needed if everyone paid the same share.
Tax everyone on the same income the same rate, regardless of how its earned. Don't punish people for being workers, or punish them even more for being young workers.
Yes, but regardless of what tax system you use, abolishing tuition fees will result in a net cost of £8bn, which will be a noticeable tax increase, at least based on the reaction to the NI one.
It will only be a tax increase for those who aren't paying their share. For those who are paying their share it will be a tax cut.
If you're going to charge for education then charge for education, but if you're going to charge based on earnings then that's income tax. Charging some different rates of income tax than others is not equitable.
Again you are conflating your proposed tax reforms with the narrow point regarding whether or not taxpayers should pay for tuition. If taxpayers are paying for it, regardless of the system, you will be in the situation Charles described right back at the start of this thread.
Taxpayers are already paying for it.
Its just the taxpayers are simply only some of the taxpayers paying a tax surcharge.
Come off it. Only graduates are paying for it, not all taxpayers.
Come off it. Via PAYE some taxpayers are paying for it, not all graduates.
Not all taxpayers are repaying student loans, maybe something like 20-25%? Many more taxpayers would have to foot the bill if tuition fees were abolished, including the checkout lady mentioned at the start.
Not all graduates are paying the graduate tax.
Taxpayers would have a fairer bill if all taxpayers were taxed the same rather than being taxed differently based upon age etc.
Its not a tax. Its repayment of a loan.
It is a tax.
If I am making a loan repayment then I have a fixed amount I repay each month. If I increase my earnings, I don't suddenly start having to pay more out of PAYE as a result.
This is a PAYE tax levied on certain people but not others. If it walks like a tax, and quacks like a tax ...
No. Its a variable loan repayment. Its not a tax, it never was a tax.
The student loan system is a graduate tax that is structured legally as a loan for political reasons.
But if it walks like a tax, talks like a tax & quacks like a tax then we should call it what it is - a tax on graduates.
Indeed. Worse a tax on some graduates.
Just like National Insurance it was a Gordon Brown Stealth Income Tax rise.
From my observations, any panic that there was in GM is already over. I filled up on Saturday - there was a queue of five minutes or so, but only for cars with pumps on their right. The left hand pumps were all free. Which made me think the problem was more a case of an imbalance of left- and right-handed pump cars turning up at the same time.
How does the left vs right thing work? Do manufacturers do a 50:50 split across each model, or do they make all cars within the same model either left or right to reduce costs? Presumably there is some goal to even the numbers out? We have the same car as our previous car (but 8 years newer) and the fuel inlet has switched from right to left - the source of much confusion the first few times I filled up the new car.
My wife pointed out to me (after I asked her for the nth time which side the filler was on the family car) that the fuel gauge has a little arrow telling you which side. That's a Ford, was also the case in another Ford we used to have, but I'm not sure whether all cars have that.
In most fuel stations the hoses are long enough to fill up on either side, particularly if you pull forwards a bit (never as comfortable on the far side, but normally very doable). You do have to accept everyone else looks at you as the idiot who forgot which side the filler cap was, but you don't have to queue so long.
Yes, all cars have them. I had been driving for over 20 years before I realised that.
In the garage I was in on Saturday, some did break ranks and fill up from the 'wrong' side - but I think most of us thought the extra wait was worth the not-looking-a-bit-awkward.
There’s a video somewhere on YouTube full of handy tips that many people don’t know about their cars - which includes the petrol pump arrow. Another was that if you get trapped in your car and can’t open the electric windows, you can smash the glass using the seat head rest, pulled out if its socket so that you hold the soft bit and smash the glass with the two metal rods.
Anyhow I was just passing the petrol station and of course the panic buyers were queuing back to the roundabout, snarling up the traffic. As I have to return to North Island midweek for my mother’s 90th and ferry various relatives about, I thought I should prudently pre-purchase my fuel by filling up today. So I joined the back of the queue. As we neared the entrance to the filling station there was a big notice “no diesel pumps 1,2,3,4,5 & 6” with the entire queue stretching back from pumps 7-8. The lower numbered pumps were all vacant.
Since I wanted petrol I pulled out of the queue and drove round to pump 1 and started filling up. Of course it turned out that half the numpties waiting in line for 7 & 8 also had petrol cars who then all pulled out to pumps 2-6 - so I managed to dissolve much of the queue through being the only driver apparently able to understand the notice….
What's the difference between a prudent pre-purchaser and a panic buyer?
I prudently pre-purchase You panic buy They are numpties.
Labour pledging to scrap business tax? A couple of weeks ago the Tories invented a new tax?
Anyway, another policy reason to keep Labour out of power, they shouldn’t promise what they can’t deliver. This policy promise is undeliverable. Miles behind the Tories on economic credibility because of big brush strokes fantasy policy like this.
Labour are focussing on old battles relating to high business rates on the high street.
In reality it means they now need to find another £15bn to fill alongside the existing holes. Which shows how stupid they are as they are re-opening new battle fronts without paying attention to the existing battle fronts where they could easily win votes.
I'm getting less and less impressed with the Labour party leadership ever single day.
I don't agree with you. The aim of Labour's proposals today is to shift the burden of taxation from SMEs that occupy the nation's high streets to digital companies that occupy the nation's phones and computers. One of the major problems in the Red Wall, and elsewhere, is that town centres are dying on their feet, making towns less appealing to live in, and destroying the sense of community. If getting rid of business rates can reverse this trend, this would be 'levelling-up' in action. The playing field between Amazon and high-street retailers needs to be levelled. It's a good policy.
OK, so where is the £15bn as it won't be coming from Amazon and co as Labour hasn't yet devised a means of collecting £15bn in tax from them.
I'm sure you and others will be listening to Rachel Reeves shortly. At this stage of the electoral cycle, it wouldn't be sensible to say precisely where the money's coming from, because things change. It will be in the manifesto in time for the next GE campaign.
I listened to Rachel a couple of times this weekend and her interview with Nick Robinson is worth watching on catch up
At school she won a British under 14 girls chess championship and her cv dwarfs the shadow cabinet with time at the Bank of England, British Embassy in Washington and HBOS
Labour should be falling over backwards to promote her to leader, she may even attract me to her policies but labour have to divest themselves of a lot of nonsense first
I haven't listened, but will - thank you.
Did she spend a lot of time going on about how awful the Tories are or did she set out the problems facing the country and broad ideas on how to address them and/or a vision for where to get to? If it's worth listening to, then I suspect the latter.
She's incredibly boring and lacks revolutionary zeal. She's exactly the type of person a never-labour voter would think would make a good leader of the Labour Party.
Sounds much like Starmer!
I must admit I can't remember ever having heard her, although I suspect I must have done.
Edit: And BigG has in fact voted Labour in the past, hasn't he? Or doesn't Blair count?
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
No it doesn't, that's the whole point of tuition fees. We are talking about the difference between the current situation, and one where tuition fees are abolished. In the latter, the checkout lady would certainly notice it in her pay packet.
No she wouldn't. Not with my proposal, indeed her taxes could go down.
The people who benefit from the current system aren't checkout ladies, they're landlords and elderly lawyers and pensioners etc who can earn lots of income without seeing that income taxed at the same rates that others get taxed at.
We're talking about two separate things. Regardless of whether we are using the current tax system, or your tax system, abolishing tuition fees would result in a net cost to the taxpayer of around £8bn a year.
Which is absolutely a rounding error compared to the cost to the exchequer of ensuring the retired, landlords, inheritees etc don't pay the same rate of income tax as those actually working for their income pay.
Just to give a sense of scale, that "rounding error" is about the same as the revenue from the new NI tax hike.
Which again wouldn't have been needed if everyone paid the same share.
Tax everyone on the same income the same rate, regardless of how its earned. Don't punish people for being workers, or punish them even more for being young workers.
Yes, but regardless of what tax system you use, abolishing tuition fees will result in a net cost of £8bn, which will be a noticeable tax increase, at least based on the reaction to the NI one.
It will only be a tax increase for those who aren't paying their share. For those who are paying their share it will be a tax cut.
If you're going to charge for education then charge for education, but if you're going to charge based on earnings then that's income tax. Charging some different rates of income tax than others is not equitable.
Again you are conflating your proposed tax reforms with the narrow point regarding whether or not taxpayers should pay for tuition. If taxpayers are paying for it, regardless of the system, you will be in the situation Charles described right back at the start of this thread.
Taxpayers are already paying for it.
Its just the taxpayers are simply only some of the taxpayers paying a tax surcharge.
Come off it. Only graduates are paying for it, not all taxpayers.
Come off it. Via PAYE some taxpayers are paying for it, not all graduates.
Not all taxpayers are repaying student loans, maybe something like 20-25%? Many more taxpayers would have to foot the bill if tuition fees were abolished, including the checkout lady mentioned at the start.
Not all graduates are paying the graduate tax.
Taxpayers would have a fairer bill if all taxpayers were taxed the same rather than being taxed differently based upon age etc.
Its not a tax. Its repayment of a loan.
It is a tax.
If I am making a loan repayment then I have a fixed amount I repay each month. If I increase my earnings, I don't suddenly start having to pay more out of PAYE as a result.
This is a PAYE tax levied on certain people but not others. If it walks like a tax, and quacks like a tax ...
No. Its a variable loan repayment. Its not a tax, it never was a tax.
Its charged by HMRC via PAYE and is paid in the same lump of money to HMRC as all other income taxes. Its a tax every bit as much as National Insurance and Income Tax is a tax.
Its a hypothecated and limited tax, but it absolutely 100% is a tax.
When I was young I was gifted a football shirt and we were getting a named put on it. As it was cost per letter I asked for someone other than my favourite player to save money. It's not as warming for me to remember as my trying to be sensible child mind thought at the time.
My favourite Wise Child story is a colleague who, aged 8, signed a petition to save Radio 3, not because he liked classical music - he just liked rock - but because he foresaw that he might one day come to like it.
I love stories like that.
Of course, it also explains why people don't like inheritance tax.
From my observations, any panic that there was in GM is already over. I filled up on Saturday - there was a queue of five minutes or so, but only for cars with pumps on their right. The left hand pumps were all free. Which made me think the problem was more a case of an imbalance of left- and right-handed pump cars turning up at the same time.
How does the left vs right thing work? Do manufacturers do a 50:50 split across each model, or do they make all cars within the same model either left or right to reduce costs? Presumably there is some goal to even the numbers out? We have the same car as our previous car (but 8 years newer) and the fuel inlet has switched from right to left - the source of much confusion the first few times I filled up the new car.
My wife pointed out to me (after I asked her for the nth time which side the filler was on the family car) that the fuel gauge has a little arrow telling you which side. That's a Ford, was also the case in another Ford we used to have, but I'm not sure whether all cars have that.
In most fuel stations the hoses are long enough to fill up on either side, particularly if you pull forwards a bit (never as comfortable on the far side, but normally very doable). You do have to accept everyone else looks at you as the idiot who forgot which side the filler cap was, but you don't have to queue so long.
Yes, all cars have them. I had been driving for over 20 years before I realised that.
In the garage I was in on Saturday, some did break ranks and fill up from the 'wrong' side - but I think most of us thought the extra wait was worth the not-looking-a-bit-awkward.
There’s a video somewhere on YouTube full of handy tips that many people don’t know about their cars - which includes the petrol pump arrow. Another was that if you get trapped in your car and can’t open the electric windows, you can smash the glass using the seat head rest, pulled out if its socket so that you hold the soft bit and smash the glass with the two metal rods.
Anyhow I was just passing the petrol station and of course the panic buyers were queuing back to the roundabout, snarling up the traffic. As I have to return to North Island midweek for my mother’s 90th and ferry various relatives about, I thought I should prudently pre-purchase my fuel by filling up today. So I joined the back of the queue. As we neared the entrance to the filling station there was a big notice “no diesel pumps 1,2,3,4,5 & 6” with the entire queue stretching back from pumps 7-8. The lower numbered pumps were all vacant.
Since I wanted petrol I pulled out of the queue and drove round to pump 1 and started filling up. Of course it turned out that half the numpties waiting in line for 7 & 8 also had petrol cars who then all pulled out to pumps 2-6 - so I managed to dissolve much of the queue through being the only driver apparently able to understand the notice….
What's the difference between a prudent pre-purchaser and a panic buyer?
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
No it doesn't, that's the whole point of tuition fees. We are talking about the difference between the current situation, and one where tuition fees are abolished. In the latter, the checkout lady would certainly notice it in her pay packet.
No she wouldn't. Not with my proposal, indeed her taxes could go down.
The people who benefit from the current system aren't checkout ladies, they're landlords and elderly lawyers and pensioners etc who can earn lots of income without seeing that income taxed at the same rates that others get taxed at.
We're talking about two separate things. Regardless of whether we are using the current tax system, or your tax system, abolishing tuition fees would result in a net cost to the taxpayer of around £8bn a year.
Which is absolutely a rounding error compared to the cost to the exchequer of ensuring the retired, landlords, inheritees etc don't pay the same rate of income tax as those actually working for their income pay.
Just to give a sense of scale, that "rounding error" is about the same as the revenue from the new NI tax hike.
Which again wouldn't have been needed if everyone paid the same share.
Tax everyone on the same income the same rate, regardless of how its earned. Don't punish people for being workers, or punish them even more for being young workers.
Yes, but regardless of what tax system you use, abolishing tuition fees will result in a net cost of £8bn, which will be a noticeable tax increase, at least based on the reaction to the NI one.
It will only be a tax increase for those who aren't paying their share. For those who are paying their share it will be a tax cut.
If you're going to charge for education then charge for education, but if you're going to charge based on earnings then that's income tax. Charging some different rates of income tax than others is not equitable.
Again you are conflating your proposed tax reforms with the narrow point regarding whether or not taxpayers should pay for tuition. If taxpayers are paying for it, regardless of the system, you will be in the situation Charles described right back at the start of this thread.
Taxpayers are already paying for it.
Its just the taxpayers are simply only some of the taxpayers paying a tax surcharge.
Come off it. Only graduates are paying for it, not all taxpayers.
Come off it. Via PAYE some taxpayers are paying for it, not all graduates.
Not all taxpayers are repaying student loans, maybe something like 20-25%? Many more taxpayers would have to foot the bill if tuition fees were abolished, including the checkout lady mentioned at the start.
Not all graduates are paying the graduate tax.
Taxpayers would have a fairer bill if all taxpayers were taxed the same rather than being taxed differently based upon age etc.
Its not a tax. Its repayment of a loan.
It is a tax.
If I am making a loan repayment then I have a fixed amount I repay each month. If I increase my earnings, I don't suddenly start having to pay more out of PAYE as a result.
This is a PAYE tax levied on certain people but not others. If it walks like a tax, and quacks like a tax ...
No. Its a variable loan repayment. Its not a tax, it never was a tax.
The student loan system is a graduate tax that is structured legally as a loan for political reasons.
But if it walks like a tax, talks like a tax & quacks like a tax then we should call it what it is - a tax on graduates.
It's not a tax on graduates because people like @MaxPB have earnt enough to pay it off. That wouldn't be the case were it a tax, they would need to continue paying it until they were 55 (or whatever the current end date is).
It's also collected via tax code and PAYE because that is the easiest way to ensure it's collected.
An alternative way of doing it (that would probably be an administrative nightmare) would be to give graduates their own tax code, with an additional tax rate to pay for their tuition. You'd raise more from high earners because they couldn't repay it, so you could probably get away with a lower rate overall.
That wouldn't be difficult as there is already a flag for student loans, you would just need to stop people being able to uncheck it until they reached the appropriate age.
I suspect, however, that "go to Uni and pay 9% more tax for 30+ years" would make selling University to 18 year olds far harder...
And remember this started as Labour needed a means of hiding Youth unemployment and decided to expand university numbers to fix that issue.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
No it doesn't, that's the whole point of tuition fees. We are talking about the difference between the current situation, and one where tuition fees are abolished. In the latter, the checkout lady would certainly notice it in her pay packet.
No she wouldn't. Not with my proposal, indeed her taxes could go down.
The people who benefit from the current system aren't checkout ladies, they're landlords and elderly lawyers and pensioners etc who can earn lots of income without seeing that income taxed at the same rates that others get taxed at.
We're talking about two separate things. Regardless of whether we are using the current tax system, or your tax system, abolishing tuition fees would result in a net cost to the taxpayer of around £8bn a year.
Which is absolutely a rounding error compared to the cost to the exchequer of ensuring the retired, landlords, inheritees etc don't pay the same rate of income tax as those actually working for their income pay.
Just to give a sense of scale, that "rounding error" is about the same as the revenue from the new NI tax hike.
Which again wouldn't have been needed if everyone paid the same share.
Tax everyone on the same income the same rate, regardless of how its earned. Don't punish people for being workers, or punish them even more for being young workers.
Yes, but regardless of what tax system you use, abolishing tuition fees will result in a net cost of £8bn, which will be a noticeable tax increase, at least based on the reaction to the NI one.
It will only be a tax increase for those who aren't paying their share. For those who are paying their share it will be a tax cut.
If you're going to charge for education then charge for education, but if you're going to charge based on earnings then that's income tax. Charging some different rates of income tax than others is not equitable.
Again you are conflating your proposed tax reforms with the narrow point regarding whether or not taxpayers should pay for tuition. If taxpayers are paying for it, regardless of the system, you will be in the situation Charles described right back at the start of this thread.
Taxpayers are already paying for it.
Its just the taxpayers are simply only some of the taxpayers paying a tax surcharge.
Come off it. Only graduates are paying for it, not all taxpayers.
Come off it. Via PAYE some taxpayers are paying for it, not all graduates.
Not all taxpayers are repaying student loans, maybe something like 20-25%? Many more taxpayers would have to foot the bill if tuition fees were abolished, including the checkout lady mentioned at the start.
Not all graduates are paying the graduate tax.
Taxpayers would have a fairer bill if all taxpayers were taxed the same rather than being taxed differently based upon age etc.
Its not a tax. Its repayment of a loan.
It is a tax.
If I am making a loan repayment then I have a fixed amount I repay each month. If I increase my earnings, I don't suddenly start having to pay more out of PAYE as a result.
This is a PAYE tax levied on certain people but not others. If it walks like a tax, and quacks like a tax ...
No. Its a variable loan repayment. Its not a tax, it never was a tax.
Its charged by HMRC via PAYE and is paid in the same lump of money to HMRC as all other income taxes. Its a tax every bit as much as National Insurance and Income Tax is a tax.
Its a hypothecated and limited tax, but it absolutely 100% is a tax.
The clue is in the title ... Student Loan.....
That's Gordon Brown's marketing spin. Its about as believable as eliminating boom and bust.
It doesn't matte what you call it, HMRC taking a proportion of your income at source via PAYE is income tax whether it be called income tax, national insurance or student loan.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
No it doesn't, that's the whole point of tuition fees. We are talking about the difference between the current situation, and one where tuition fees are abolished. In the latter, the checkout lady would certainly notice it in her pay packet.
No she wouldn't. Not with my proposal, indeed her taxes could go down.
The people who benefit from the current system aren't checkout ladies, they're landlords and elderly lawyers and pensioners etc who can earn lots of income without seeing that income taxed at the same rates that others get taxed at.
We're talking about two separate things. Regardless of whether we are using the current tax system, or your tax system, abolishing tuition fees would result in a net cost to the taxpayer of around £8bn a year.
Which is absolutely a rounding error compared to the cost to the exchequer of ensuring the retired, landlords, inheritees etc don't pay the same rate of income tax as those actually working for their income pay.
Just to give a sense of scale, that "rounding error" is about the same as the revenue from the new NI tax hike.
Which again wouldn't have been needed if everyone paid the same share.
Tax everyone on the same income the same rate, regardless of how its earned. Don't punish people for being workers, or punish them even more for being young workers.
Yes, but regardless of what tax system you use, abolishing tuition fees will result in a net cost of £8bn, which will be a noticeable tax increase, at least based on the reaction to the NI one.
It will only be a tax increase for those who aren't paying their share. For those who are paying their share it will be a tax cut.
If you're going to charge for education then charge for education, but if you're going to charge based on earnings then that's income tax. Charging some different rates of income tax than others is not equitable.
Again you are conflating your proposed tax reforms with the narrow point regarding whether or not taxpayers should pay for tuition. If taxpayers are paying for it, regardless of the system, you will be in the situation Charles described right back at the start of this thread.
Taxpayers are already paying for it.
Its just the taxpayers are simply only some of the taxpayers paying a tax surcharge.
Come off it. Only graduates are paying for it, not all taxpayers.
Come off it. Via PAYE some taxpayers are paying for it, not all graduates.
Not all taxpayers are repaying student loans, maybe something like 20-25%? Many more taxpayers would have to foot the bill if tuition fees were abolished, including the checkout lady mentioned at the start.
Not all graduates are paying the graduate tax.
Taxpayers would have a fairer bill if all taxpayers were taxed the same rather than being taxed differently based upon age etc.
Its not a tax. Its repayment of a loan.
It is a tax.
If I am making a loan repayment then I have a fixed amount I repay each month. If I increase my earnings, I don't suddenly start having to pay more out of PAYE as a result.
This is a PAYE tax levied on certain people but not others. If it walks like a tax, and quacks like a tax ...
No. Its a variable loan repayment. Its not a tax, it never was a tax.
The student loan system is a graduate tax that is structured legally as a loan for political reasons.
But if it walks like a tax, talks like a tax & quacks like a tax then we should call it what it is - a tax on graduates.
It's not a tax on graduates because people like @MaxPB have earnt enough to pay it off. That wouldn't be the case were it a tax, they would need to continue paying it until they were 55 (or whatever the current end date is).
It's also collected via tax code and PAYE because that is the easiest way to ensure it's collected.
An alternative way of doing it (that would probably be an administrative nightmare) would be to give graduates their own tax code, with an additional tax rate to pay for their tuition. You'd raise more from high earners because they couldn't repay it, so you could probably get away with a lower rate overall.
Balanced by the fact high earners abroad have to pay it these days ? That wouldn't be the case with a tax code.
Still got this really bad cold after about a week. It might be because people didn't get the usual immunity to colds last year because they were not mixing with others in the usual way.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
No it doesn't, that's the whole point of tuition fees. We are talking about the difference between the current situation, and one where tuition fees are abolished. In the latter, the checkout lady would certainly notice it in her pay packet.
No she wouldn't. Not with my proposal, indeed her taxes could go down.
The people who benefit from the current system aren't checkout ladies, they're landlords and elderly lawyers and pensioners etc who can earn lots of income without seeing that income taxed at the same rates that others get taxed at.
We're talking about two separate things. Regardless of whether we are using the current tax system, or your tax system, abolishing tuition fees would result in a net cost to the taxpayer of around £8bn a year.
Which is absolutely a rounding error compared to the cost to the exchequer of ensuring the retired, landlords, inheritees etc don't pay the same rate of income tax as those actually working for their income pay.
Just to give a sense of scale, that "rounding error" is about the same as the revenue from the new NI tax hike.
Which again wouldn't have been needed if everyone paid the same share.
Tax everyone on the same income the same rate, regardless of how its earned. Don't punish people for being workers, or punish them even more for being young workers.
Yes, but regardless of what tax system you use, abolishing tuition fees will result in a net cost of £8bn, which will be a noticeable tax increase, at least based on the reaction to the NI one.
It will only be a tax increase for those who aren't paying their share. For those who are paying their share it will be a tax cut.
If you're going to charge for education then charge for education, but if you're going to charge based on earnings then that's income tax. Charging some different rates of income tax than others is not equitable.
Again you are conflating your proposed tax reforms with the narrow point regarding whether or not taxpayers should pay for tuition. If taxpayers are paying for it, regardless of the system, you will be in the situation Charles described right back at the start of this thread.
Taxpayers are already paying for it.
Its just the taxpayers are simply only some of the taxpayers paying a tax surcharge.
Come off it. Only graduates are paying for it, not all taxpayers.
Come off it. Via PAYE some taxpayers are paying for it, not all graduates.
Not all taxpayers are repaying student loans, maybe something like 20-25%? Many more taxpayers would have to foot the bill if tuition fees were abolished, including the checkout lady mentioned at the start.
Not all graduates are paying the graduate tax.
Taxpayers would have a fairer bill if all taxpayers were taxed the same rather than being taxed differently based upon age etc.
Its not a tax. Its repayment of a loan.
It is a tax.
If I am making a loan repayment then I have a fixed amount I repay each month. If I increase my earnings, I don't suddenly start having to pay more out of PAYE as a result.
This is a PAYE tax levied on certain people but not others. If it walks like a tax, and quacks like a tax ...
No. Its a variable loan repayment. Its not a tax, it never was a tax.
The student loan system is a graduate tax that is structured legally as a loan for political reasons.
But if it walks like a tax, talks like a tax & quacks like a tax then we should call it what it is - a tax on graduates.
It's not a tax on graduates because people like @MaxPB have earnt enough to pay it off. That wouldn't be the case were it a tax, they would need to continue paying it until they were 55 (or whatever the current end date is).
It's also collected via tax code and PAYE because that is the easiest way to ensure it's collected.
An alternative way of doing it (that would probably be an administrative nightmare) would be to give graduates their own tax code, with an additional tax rate to pay for their tuition. You'd raise more from high earners because they couldn't repay it, so you could probably get away with a lower rate overall.
That wouldn't be difficult as there is already a flag for student loans, you would just need to stop people being able to uncheck it until they reached the appropriate limit.
A suspect go to Uni and pay 9% more tax for 30+ years would make selling University to 18 year olds far harder...
And remember this started as Labour needed a means of hiding Youth unemployment and decided to expand university numbers to fix that issue.
I wonder if any think tank has done the modelling of what rate you'd need to charge. I suspect it wouldn't be as high as 9%, but it might not be too much lower.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
No it doesn't, that's the whole point of tuition fees. We are talking about the difference between the current situation, and one where tuition fees are abolished. In the latter, the checkout lady would certainly notice it in her pay packet.
No she wouldn't. Not with my proposal, indeed her taxes could go down.
The people who benefit from the current system aren't checkout ladies, they're landlords and elderly lawyers and pensioners etc who can earn lots of income without seeing that income taxed at the same rates that others get taxed at.
We're talking about two separate things. Regardless of whether we are using the current tax system, or your tax system, abolishing tuition fees would result in a net cost to the taxpayer of around £8bn a year.
Which is absolutely a rounding error compared to the cost to the exchequer of ensuring the retired, landlords, inheritees etc don't pay the same rate of income tax as those actually working for their income pay.
Just to give a sense of scale, that "rounding error" is about the same as the revenue from the new NI tax hike.
Which again wouldn't have been needed if everyone paid the same share.
Tax everyone on the same income the same rate, regardless of how its earned. Don't punish people for being workers, or punish them even more for being young workers.
Yes, but regardless of what tax system you use, abolishing tuition fees will result in a net cost of £8bn, which will be a noticeable tax increase, at least based on the reaction to the NI one.
It will only be a tax increase for those who aren't paying their share. For those who are paying their share it will be a tax cut.
If you're going to charge for education then charge for education, but if you're going to charge based on earnings then that's income tax. Charging some different rates of income tax than others is not equitable.
Again you are conflating your proposed tax reforms with the narrow point regarding whether or not taxpayers should pay for tuition. If taxpayers are paying for it, regardless of the system, you will be in the situation Charles described right back at the start of this thread.
Taxpayers are already paying for it.
Its just the taxpayers are simply only some of the taxpayers paying a tax surcharge.
Come off it. Only graduates are paying for it, not all taxpayers.
Come off it. Via PAYE some taxpayers are paying for it, not all graduates.
Not all taxpayers are repaying student loans, maybe something like 20-25%? Many more taxpayers would have to foot the bill if tuition fees were abolished, including the checkout lady mentioned at the start.
Not all graduates are paying the graduate tax.
Taxpayers would have a fairer bill if all taxpayers were taxed the same rather than being taxed differently based upon age etc.
Its not a tax. Its repayment of a loan.
It is a tax.
If I am making a loan repayment then I have a fixed amount I repay each month. If I increase my earnings, I don't suddenly start having to pay more out of PAYE as a result.
This is a PAYE tax levied on certain people but not others. If it walks like a tax, and quacks like a tax ...
No. Its a variable loan repayment. Its not a tax, it never was a tax.
Its charged by HMRC via PAYE and is paid in the same lump of money to HMRC as all other income taxes. Its a tax every bit as much as National Insurance and Income Tax is a tax.
Its a hypothecated and limited tax, but it absolutely 100% is a tax.
The clue is in the title ... Student Loan.....
Just as National Insurance is obviously an insurance premium?
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
No it doesn't, that's the whole point of tuition fees. We are talking about the difference between the current situation, and one where tuition fees are abolished. In the latter, the checkout lady would certainly notice it in her pay packet.
No she wouldn't. Not with my proposal, indeed her taxes could go down.
The people who benefit from the current system aren't checkout ladies, they're landlords and elderly lawyers and pensioners etc who can earn lots of income without seeing that income taxed at the same rates that others get taxed at.
We're talking about two separate things. Regardless of whether we are using the current tax system, or your tax system, abolishing tuition fees would result in a net cost to the taxpayer of around £8bn a year.
Which is absolutely a rounding error compared to the cost to the exchequer of ensuring the retired, landlords, inheritees etc don't pay the same rate of income tax as those actually working for their income pay.
Just to give a sense of scale, that "rounding error" is about the same as the revenue from the new NI tax hike.
Which again wouldn't have been needed if everyone paid the same share.
Tax everyone on the same income the same rate, regardless of how its earned. Don't punish people for being workers, or punish them even more for being young workers.
Yes, but regardless of what tax system you use, abolishing tuition fees will result in a net cost of £8bn, which will be a noticeable tax increase, at least based on the reaction to the NI one.
It will only be a tax increase for those who aren't paying their share. For those who are paying their share it will be a tax cut.
If you're going to charge for education then charge for education, but if you're going to charge based on earnings then that's income tax. Charging some different rates of income tax than others is not equitable.
Again you are conflating your proposed tax reforms with the narrow point regarding whether or not taxpayers should pay for tuition. If taxpayers are paying for it, regardless of the system, you will be in the situation Charles described right back at the start of this thread.
Taxpayers are already paying for it.
Its just the taxpayers are simply only some of the taxpayers paying a tax surcharge.
Come off it. Only graduates are paying for it, not all taxpayers.
Come off it. Via PAYE some taxpayers are paying for it, not all graduates.
Not all taxpayers are repaying student loans, maybe something like 20-25%? Many more taxpayers would have to foot the bill if tuition fees were abolished, including the checkout lady mentioned at the start.
Not all graduates are paying the graduate tax.
Taxpayers would have a fairer bill if all taxpayers were taxed the same rather than being taxed differently based upon age etc.
Its not a tax. Its repayment of a loan.
It is a tax.
If I am making a loan repayment then I have a fixed amount I repay each month. If I increase my earnings, I don't suddenly start having to pay more out of PAYE as a result.
This is a PAYE tax levied on certain people but not others. If it walks like a tax, and quacks like a tax ...
No. Its a variable loan repayment. Its not a tax, it never was a tax.
The student loan system is a graduate tax that is structured legally as a loan for political reasons.
But if it walks like a tax, talks like a tax & quacks like a tax then we should call it what it is - a tax on graduates.
It's not a tax on graduates because people like @MaxPB have earnt enough to pay it off. That wouldn't be the case were it a tax, they would need to continue paying it until they were 55 (or whatever the current end date is).
It's also collected via tax code and PAYE because that is the easiest way to ensure it's collected.
An alternative way of doing it (that would probably be an administrative nightmare) would be to give graduates their own tax code, with an additional tax rate to pay for their tuition. You'd raise more from high earners because they couldn't repay it, so you could probably get away with a lower rate overall.
Doesn’t that assume a closed system, with no graduates moving overseas, and no overseas degree-holders moving to the UK?
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
No it doesn't, that's the whole point of tuition fees. We are talking about the difference between the current situation, and one where tuition fees are abolished. In the latter, the checkout lady would certainly notice it in her pay packet.
No she wouldn't. Not with my proposal, indeed her taxes could go down.
The people who benefit from the current system aren't checkout ladies, they're landlords and elderly lawyers and pensioners etc who can earn lots of income without seeing that income taxed at the same rates that others get taxed at.
We're talking about two separate things. Regardless of whether we are using the current tax system, or your tax system, abolishing tuition fees would result in a net cost to the taxpayer of around £8bn a year.
Which is absolutely a rounding error compared to the cost to the exchequer of ensuring the retired, landlords, inheritees etc don't pay the same rate of income tax as those actually working for their income pay.
Just to give a sense of scale, that "rounding error" is about the same as the revenue from the new NI tax hike.
Which again wouldn't have been needed if everyone paid the same share.
Tax everyone on the same income the same rate, regardless of how its earned. Don't punish people for being workers, or punish them even more for being young workers.
Yes, but regardless of what tax system you use, abolishing tuition fees will result in a net cost of £8bn, which will be a noticeable tax increase, at least based on the reaction to the NI one.
It will only be a tax increase for those who aren't paying their share. For those who are paying their share it will be a tax cut.
If you're going to charge for education then charge for education, but if you're going to charge based on earnings then that's income tax. Charging some different rates of income tax than others is not equitable.
Again you are conflating your proposed tax reforms with the narrow point regarding whether or not taxpayers should pay for tuition. If taxpayers are paying for it, regardless of the system, you will be in the situation Charles described right back at the start of this thread.
Taxpayers are already paying for it.
Its just the taxpayers are simply only some of the taxpayers paying a tax surcharge.
Come off it. Only graduates are paying for it, not all taxpayers.
Come off it. Via PAYE some taxpayers are paying for it, not all graduates.
Not all taxpayers are repaying student loans, maybe something like 20-25%? Many more taxpayers would have to foot the bill if tuition fees were abolished, including the checkout lady mentioned at the start.
Not all graduates are paying the graduate tax.
Taxpayers would have a fairer bill if all taxpayers were taxed the same rather than being taxed differently based upon age etc.
Its not a tax. Its repayment of a loan.
It is a tax.
If I am making a loan repayment then I have a fixed amount I repay each month. If I increase my earnings, I don't suddenly start having to pay more out of PAYE as a result.
This is a PAYE tax levied on certain people but not others. If it walks like a tax, and quacks like a tax ...
No. Its a variable loan repayment. Its not a tax, it never was a tax.
The student loan system is a graduate tax that is structured legally as a loan for political reasons.
But if it walks like a tax, talks like a tax & quacks like a tax then we should call it what it is - a tax on graduates.
It's not a tax on graduates because people like @MaxPB have earnt enough to pay it off. That wouldn't be the case were it a tax, they would need to continue paying it until they were 55 (or whatever the current end date is).
It's also collected via tax code and PAYE because that is the easiest way to ensure it's collected.
An alternative way of doing it (that would probably be an administrative nightmare) would be to give graduates their own tax code, with an additional tax rate to pay for their tuition. You'd raise more from high earners because they couldn't repay it, so you could probably get away with a lower rate overall.
Balanced by the fact high earners abroad have to pay it these days ? That wouldn't be the case with a tax code.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
No it doesn't, that's the whole point of tuition fees. We are talking about the difference between the current situation, and one where tuition fees are abolished. In the latter, the checkout lady would certainly notice it in her pay packet.
No she wouldn't. Not with my proposal, indeed her taxes could go down.
The people who benefit from the current system aren't checkout ladies, they're landlords and elderly lawyers and pensioners etc who can earn lots of income without seeing that income taxed at the same rates that others get taxed at.
We're talking about two separate things. Regardless of whether we are using the current tax system, or your tax system, abolishing tuition fees would result in a net cost to the taxpayer of around £8bn a year.
Which is absolutely a rounding error compared to the cost to the exchequer of ensuring the retired, landlords, inheritees etc don't pay the same rate of income tax as those actually working for their income pay.
Just to give a sense of scale, that "rounding error" is about the same as the revenue from the new NI tax hike.
Which again wouldn't have been needed if everyone paid the same share.
Tax everyone on the same income the same rate, regardless of how its earned. Don't punish people for being workers, or punish them even more for being young workers.
Yes, but regardless of what tax system you use, abolishing tuition fees will result in a net cost of £8bn, which will be a noticeable tax increase, at least based on the reaction to the NI one.
It will only be a tax increase for those who aren't paying their share. For those who are paying their share it will be a tax cut.
If you're going to charge for education then charge for education, but if you're going to charge based on earnings then that's income tax. Charging some different rates of income tax than others is not equitable.
Again you are conflating your proposed tax reforms with the narrow point regarding whether or not taxpayers should pay for tuition. If taxpayers are paying for it, regardless of the system, you will be in the situation Charles described right back at the start of this thread.
Taxpayers are already paying for it.
Its just the taxpayers are simply only some of the taxpayers paying a tax surcharge.
Come off it. Only graduates are paying for it, not all taxpayers.
Come off it. Via PAYE some taxpayers are paying for it, not all graduates.
Not all taxpayers are repaying student loans, maybe something like 20-25%? Many more taxpayers would have to foot the bill if tuition fees were abolished, including the checkout lady mentioned at the start.
Not all graduates are paying the graduate tax.
Taxpayers would have a fairer bill if all taxpayers were taxed the same rather than being taxed differently based upon age etc.
Its not a tax. Its repayment of a loan.
It is a tax.
If I am making a loan repayment then I have a fixed amount I repay each month. If I increase my earnings, I don't suddenly start having to pay more out of PAYE as a result.
This is a PAYE tax levied on certain people but not others. If it walks like a tax, and quacks like a tax ...
No. Its a variable loan repayment. Its not a tax, it never was a tax.
The student loan system is a graduate tax that is structured legally as a loan for political reasons.
But if it walks like a tax, talks like a tax & quacks like a tax then we should call it what it is - a tax on graduates.
Correct, unfortunately named a loan but is it a much more a graduate tax (in effect a higher rate of income tax) - with a novel features.
1) you are not put on to the higher tax rate until your income* is above a certain figure; 2) the liability to incur the higher tax rate ends at 30 years (or earlier death) and 3) you have the opportunity to buy yourself out of the punitive tax rate early by paying a lump sum (you would be mad to do so).
* note that it is taxable income that counts not earnings. So, for mature student, pensions can be liable and for everyone investment income too.
What appals me about the Chancellor's musing is the retrospective nature of the changes he contemplates. Any changes should apply to new students only, or it is retrospective taxation.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
No it doesn't, that's the whole point of tuition fees. We are talking about the difference between the current situation, and one where tuition fees are abolished. In the latter, the checkout lady would certainly notice it in her pay packet.
No she wouldn't. Not with my proposal, indeed her taxes could go down.
The people who benefit from the current system aren't checkout ladies, they're landlords and elderly lawyers and pensioners etc who can earn lots of income without seeing that income taxed at the same rates that others get taxed at.
We're talking about two separate things. Regardless of whether we are using the current tax system, or your tax system, abolishing tuition fees would result in a net cost to the taxpayer of around £8bn a year.
Which is absolutely a rounding error compared to the cost to the exchequer of ensuring the retired, landlords, inheritees etc don't pay the same rate of income tax as those actually working for their income pay.
Just to give a sense of scale, that "rounding error" is about the same as the revenue from the new NI tax hike.
Which again wouldn't have been needed if everyone paid the same share.
Tax everyone on the same income the same rate, regardless of how its earned. Don't punish people for being workers, or punish them even more for being young workers.
Yes, but regardless of what tax system you use, abolishing tuition fees will result in a net cost of £8bn, which will be a noticeable tax increase, at least based on the reaction to the NI one.
It will only be a tax increase for those who aren't paying their share. For those who are paying their share it will be a tax cut.
If you're going to charge for education then charge for education, but if you're going to charge based on earnings then that's income tax. Charging some different rates of income tax than others is not equitable.
Again you are conflating your proposed tax reforms with the narrow point regarding whether or not taxpayers should pay for tuition. If taxpayers are paying for it, regardless of the system, you will be in the situation Charles described right back at the start of this thread.
Taxpayers are already paying for it.
Its just the taxpayers are simply only some of the taxpayers paying a tax surcharge.
Come off it. Only graduates are paying for it, not all taxpayers.
Come off it. Via PAYE some taxpayers are paying for it, not all graduates.
Not all taxpayers are repaying student loans, maybe something like 20-25%? Many more taxpayers would have to foot the bill if tuition fees were abolished, including the checkout lady mentioned at the start.
Not all graduates are paying the graduate tax.
Taxpayers would have a fairer bill if all taxpayers were taxed the same rather than being taxed differently based upon age etc.
Its not a tax. Its repayment of a loan.
It is a tax.
If I am making a loan repayment then I have a fixed amount I repay each month. If I increase my earnings, I don't suddenly start having to pay more out of PAYE as a result.
This is a PAYE tax levied on certain people but not others. If it walks like a tax, and quacks like a tax ...
No. Its a variable loan repayment. Its not a tax, it never was a tax.
The student loan system is a graduate tax that is structured legally as a loan for political reasons.
But if it walks like a tax, talks like a tax & quacks like a tax then we should call it what it is - a tax on graduates.
It's not a tax on graduates because people like @MaxPB have earnt enough to pay it off. That wouldn't be the case were it a tax, they would need to continue paying it until they were 55 (or whatever the current end date is).
It's also collected via tax code and PAYE because that is the easiest way to ensure it's collected.
An alternative way of doing it (that would probably be an administrative nightmare) would be to give graduates their own tax code, with an additional tax rate to pay for their tuition. You'd raise more from high earners because they couldn't repay it, so you could probably get away with a lower rate overall.
Doesn’t that assume a closed system, with no graduates moving overseas, and no overseas degree-holders moving to the UK?
The latter doesn't matter. It'd only be for those that are UK resident with a degree from a UK institute.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
No it doesn't, that's the whole point of tuition fees. We are talking about the difference between the current situation, and one where tuition fees are abolished. In the latter, the checkout lady would certainly notice it in her pay packet.
No she wouldn't. Not with my proposal, indeed her taxes could go down.
The people who benefit from the current system aren't checkout ladies, they're landlords and elderly lawyers and pensioners etc who can earn lots of income without seeing that income taxed at the same rates that others get taxed at.
We're talking about two separate things. Regardless of whether we are using the current tax system, or your tax system, abolishing tuition fees would result in a net cost to the taxpayer of around £8bn a year.
Which is absolutely a rounding error compared to the cost to the exchequer of ensuring the retired, landlords, inheritees etc don't pay the same rate of income tax as those actually working for their income pay.
Just to give a sense of scale, that "rounding error" is about the same as the revenue from the new NI tax hike.
Which again wouldn't have been needed if everyone paid the same share.
Tax everyone on the same income the same rate, regardless of how its earned. Don't punish people for being workers, or punish them even more for being young workers.
Yes, but regardless of what tax system you use, abolishing tuition fees will result in a net cost of £8bn, which will be a noticeable tax increase, at least based on the reaction to the NI one.
It will only be a tax increase for those who aren't paying their share. For those who are paying their share it will be a tax cut.
If you're going to charge for education then charge for education, but if you're going to charge based on earnings then that's income tax. Charging some different rates of income tax than others is not equitable.
Again you are conflating your proposed tax reforms with the narrow point regarding whether or not taxpayers should pay for tuition. If taxpayers are paying for it, regardless of the system, you will be in the situation Charles described right back at the start of this thread.
Taxpayers are already paying for it.
Its just the taxpayers are simply only some of the taxpayers paying a tax surcharge.
Come off it. Only graduates are paying for it, not all taxpayers.
Come off it. Via PAYE some taxpayers are paying for it, not all graduates.
Not all taxpayers are repaying student loans, maybe something like 20-25%? Many more taxpayers would have to foot the bill if tuition fees were abolished, including the checkout lady mentioned at the start.
Not all graduates are paying the graduate tax.
Taxpayers would have a fairer bill if all taxpayers were taxed the same rather than being taxed differently based upon age etc.
Its not a tax. Its repayment of a loan.
It is a tax.
If I am making a loan repayment then I have a fixed amount I repay each month. If I increase my earnings, I don't suddenly start having to pay more out of PAYE as a result.
This is a PAYE tax levied on certain people but not others. If it walks like a tax, and quacks like a tax ...
No. Its a variable loan repayment. Its not a tax, it never was a tax.
The student loan system is a graduate tax that is structured legally as a loan for political reasons.
But if it walks like a tax, talks like a tax & quacks like a tax then we should call it what it is - a tax on graduates.
It's not a tax on graduates because people like @MaxPB have earnt enough to pay it off. That wouldn't be the case were it a tax, they would need to continue paying it until they were 55 (or whatever the current end date is).
Tbf, I went when fees were just £1k per year so my repayment was tiny compared to what we have today. I think the earnings for net repayment is something stupid like £60k for three year course and £70k for four year courses like mine.
Which is why Boris and co are talking about bring the repayment point lower because it seems the financial tricks that were used to justify loans have finally fallen apart in ways that are too obvious to ignore.
If it needs £60k a year to repay your loan, who really is paying the university fees of those who don't earn £60k a year. It can only be the tiller assistant who never went to Uni.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
No it doesn't, that's the whole point of tuition fees. We are talking about the difference between the current situation, and one where tuition fees are abolished. In the latter, the checkout lady would certainly notice it in her pay packet.
No she wouldn't. Not with my proposal, indeed her taxes could go down.
The people who benefit from the current system aren't checkout ladies, they're landlords and elderly lawyers and pensioners etc who can earn lots of income without seeing that income taxed at the same rates that others get taxed at.
We're talking about two separate things. Regardless of whether we are using the current tax system, or your tax system, abolishing tuition fees would result in a net cost to the taxpayer of around £8bn a year.
Which is absolutely a rounding error compared to the cost to the exchequer of ensuring the retired, landlords, inheritees etc don't pay the same rate of income tax as those actually working for their income pay.
Just to give a sense of scale, that "rounding error" is about the same as the revenue from the new NI tax hike.
Which again wouldn't have been needed if everyone paid the same share.
Tax everyone on the same income the same rate, regardless of how its earned. Don't punish people for being workers, or punish them even more for being young workers.
Yes, but regardless of what tax system you use, abolishing tuition fees will result in a net cost of £8bn, which will be a noticeable tax increase, at least based on the reaction to the NI one.
It will only be a tax increase for those who aren't paying their share. For those who are paying their share it will be a tax cut.
If you're going to charge for education then charge for education, but if you're going to charge based on earnings then that's income tax. Charging some different rates of income tax than others is not equitable.
Again you are conflating your proposed tax reforms with the narrow point regarding whether or not taxpayers should pay for tuition. If taxpayers are paying for it, regardless of the system, you will be in the situation Charles described right back at the start of this thread.
Taxpayers are already paying for it.
Its just the taxpayers are simply only some of the taxpayers paying a tax surcharge.
Come off it. Only graduates are paying for it, not all taxpayers.
Come off it. Via PAYE some taxpayers are paying for it, not all graduates.
Not all taxpayers are repaying student loans, maybe something like 20-25%? Many more taxpayers would have to foot the bill if tuition fees were abolished, including the checkout lady mentioned at the start.
Not all graduates are paying the graduate tax.
Taxpayers would have a fairer bill if all taxpayers were taxed the same rather than being taxed differently based upon age etc.
Its not a tax. Its repayment of a loan.
It is a tax.
If I am making a loan repayment then I have a fixed amount I repay each month. If I increase my earnings, I don't suddenly start having to pay more out of PAYE as a result.
This is a PAYE tax levied on certain people but not others. If it walks like a tax, and quacks like a tax ...
No. Its a variable loan repayment. Its not a tax, it never was a tax.
The student loan system is a graduate tax that is structured legally as a loan for political reasons.
But if it walks like a tax, talks like a tax & quacks like a tax then we should call it what it is - a tax on graduates.
It's not a tax on graduates because people like @MaxPB have earnt enough to pay it off. That wouldn't be the case were it a tax, they would need to continue paying it until they were 55 (or whatever the current end date is).
It's also collected via tax code and PAYE because that is the easiest way to ensure it's collected.
An alternative way of doing it (that would probably be an administrative nightmare) would be to give graduates their own tax code, with an additional tax rate to pay for their tuition. You'd raise more from high earners because they couldn't repay it, so you could probably get away with a lower rate overall.
That wouldn't be difficult as there is already a flag for student loans, you would just need to stop people being able to uncheck it until they reached the appropriate limit.
A suspect go to Uni and pay 9% more tax for 30+ years would make selling University to 18 year olds far harder...
And remember this started as Labour needed a means of hiding Youth unemployment and decided to expand university numbers to fix that issue.
I wonder if any think tank has done the modelling of what rate you'd need to charge. I suspect it wouldn't be as high as 9%, but it might not be too much lower.
Surely the simplest fix to avoid the issue of checkout ladies seeing their taxes go up would be to maintain the existing threshold but to charge it to all income regardless of when or whether you graduated.
That way instead of 9% tax for a minority of people, you might instead see a 1% rate for all people above that threshold.
Still got this really bad cold after about a week. It might be because people didn't get the usual immunity to colds last year because they were not mixing with others in the usual way.
One very useful side-effect of mask wearing is you reduce the potential to catch colds and flu quite considerably.
From my observations, any panic that there was in GM is already over. I filled up on Saturday - there was a queue of five minutes or so, but only for cars with pumps on their right. The left hand pumps were all free. Which made me think the problem was more a case of an imbalance of left- and right-handed pump cars turning up at the same time.
How does the left vs right thing work? Do manufacturers do a 50:50 split across each model, or do they make all cars within the same model either left or right to reduce costs? Presumably there is some goal to even the numbers out? We have the same car as our previous car (but 8 years newer) and the fuel inlet has switched from right to left - the source of much confusion the first few times I filled up the new car.
My wife pointed out to me (after I asked her for the nth time which side the filler was on the family car) that the fuel gauge has a little arrow telling you which side. That's a Ford, was also the case in another Ford we used to have, but I'm not sure whether all cars have that.
In most fuel stations the hoses are long enough to fill up on either side, particularly if you pull forwards a bit (never as comfortable on the far side, but normally very doable). You do have to accept everyone else looks at you as the idiot who forgot which side the filler cap was, but you don't have to queue so long.
Yes, all cars have them. I had been driving for over 20 years before I realised that.
In the garage I was in on Saturday, some did break ranks and fill up from the 'wrong' side - but I think most of us thought the extra wait was worth the not-looking-a-bit-awkward.
If you know how long your car is, filling up from the wrong side is easy.
But I always quote Partridge when I do it!
I saw the most obnoxious thing I've seen in a while today. Some Range Rover driver was filling up, with a long trailer that blocked anyone from using the pump behind him, while the queue stretched off the forecourt and down the busy dual carriageway.
What should he have done?
He should have flagellated himself on the forecourt, bought a thimble-full of petrol and begged forgiveness for having the temerity to drive a vehicle that excites loathing in the minds of the small minded and envious.
Still got this really bad cold after about a week. It might be because people didn't get the usual immunity to colds last year because they were not mixing with others in the usual way.
One very useful side-effect of mask wearing is you reduce the potential to catch colds and flu quite considerably.
Can you describe the principal function of an item as a side effect?
Still got this really bad cold after about a week. It might be because people didn't get the usual immunity to colds last year because they were not mixing with others in the usual way.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
No it doesn't, that's the whole point of tuition fees. We are talking about the difference between the current situation, and one where tuition fees are abolished. In the latter, the checkout lady would certainly notice it in her pay packet.
No she wouldn't. Not with my proposal, indeed her taxes could go down.
The people who benefit from the current system aren't checkout ladies, they're landlords and elderly lawyers and pensioners etc who can earn lots of income without seeing that income taxed at the same rates that others get taxed at.
We're talking about two separate things. Regardless of whether we are using the current tax system, or your tax system, abolishing tuition fees would result in a net cost to the taxpayer of around £8bn a year.
Which is absolutely a rounding error compared to the cost to the exchequer of ensuring the retired, landlords, inheritees etc don't pay the same rate of income tax as those actually working for their income pay.
Just to give a sense of scale, that "rounding error" is about the same as the revenue from the new NI tax hike.
Which again wouldn't have been needed if everyone paid the same share.
Tax everyone on the same income the same rate, regardless of how its earned. Don't punish people for being workers, or punish them even more for being young workers.
Yes, but regardless of what tax system you use, abolishing tuition fees will result in a net cost of £8bn, which will be a noticeable tax increase, at least based on the reaction to the NI one.
It will only be a tax increase for those who aren't paying their share. For those who are paying their share it will be a tax cut.
If you're going to charge for education then charge for education, but if you're going to charge based on earnings then that's income tax. Charging some different rates of income tax than others is not equitable.
Again you are conflating your proposed tax reforms with the narrow point regarding whether or not taxpayers should pay for tuition. If taxpayers are paying for it, regardless of the system, you will be in the situation Charles described right back at the start of this thread.
Taxpayers are already paying for it.
Its just the taxpayers are simply only some of the taxpayers paying a tax surcharge.
Come off it. Only graduates are paying for it, not all taxpayers.
Come off it. Via PAYE some taxpayers are paying for it, not all graduates.
Not all taxpayers are repaying student loans, maybe something like 20-25%? Many more taxpayers would have to foot the bill if tuition fees were abolished, including the checkout lady mentioned at the start.
Not all graduates are paying the graduate tax.
Taxpayers would have a fairer bill if all taxpayers were taxed the same rather than being taxed differently based upon age etc.
Its not a tax. Its repayment of a loan.
It is a tax.
If I am making a loan repayment then I have a fixed amount I repay each month. If I increase my earnings, I don't suddenly start having to pay more out of PAYE as a result.
This is a PAYE tax levied on certain people but not others. If it walks like a tax, and quacks like a tax ...
No. Its a variable loan repayment. Its not a tax, it never was a tax.
The student loan system is a graduate tax that is structured legally as a loan for political reasons.
But if it walks like a tax, talks like a tax & quacks like a tax then we should call it what it is - a tax on graduates.
It's not a tax on graduates because people like @MaxPB have earnt enough to pay it off. That wouldn't be the case were it a tax, they would need to continue paying it until they were 55 (or whatever the current end date is).
It's also collected via tax code and PAYE because that is the easiest way to ensure it's collected.
An alternative way of doing it (that would probably be an administrative nightmare) would be to give graduates their own tax code, with an additional tax rate to pay for their tuition. You'd raise more from high earners because they couldn't repay it, so you could probably get away with a lower rate overall.
Doesn’t that assume a closed system, with no graduates moving overseas, and no overseas degree-holders moving to the UK?
The latter doesn't matter. It'd only be for those that are UK resident with a degree from a UK institute.
That sounds like a good way of inducing a brain drain among the best of the twentysomethings.
Singapore and Dubai wave hello! In fact, New York probably waves hello too!
"I saw... its thoughts. I saw what they're planning to do. They're like locusts. They're moving from petrol station to petrol station... their whole civilization. After they've consumed every drop of petrol and diesel they move on... and we're next. Nuke 'em. Let's nuke the bastards!"
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
No it doesn't, that's the whole point of tuition fees. We are talking about the difference between the current situation, and one where tuition fees are abolished. In the latter, the checkout lady would certainly notice it in her pay packet.
No she wouldn't. Not with my proposal, indeed her taxes could go down.
The people who benefit from the current system aren't checkout ladies, they're landlords and elderly lawyers and pensioners etc who can earn lots of income without seeing that income taxed at the same rates that others get taxed at.
We're talking about two separate things. Regardless of whether we are using the current tax system, or your tax system, abolishing tuition fees would result in a net cost to the taxpayer of around £8bn a year.
Which is absolutely a rounding error compared to the cost to the exchequer of ensuring the retired, landlords, inheritees etc don't pay the same rate of income tax as those actually working for their income pay.
Just to give a sense of scale, that "rounding error" is about the same as the revenue from the new NI tax hike.
Which again wouldn't have been needed if everyone paid the same share.
Tax everyone on the same income the same rate, regardless of how its earned. Don't punish people for being workers, or punish them even more for being young workers.
Yes, but regardless of what tax system you use, abolishing tuition fees will result in a net cost of £8bn, which will be a noticeable tax increase, at least based on the reaction to the NI one.
It will only be a tax increase for those who aren't paying their share. For those who are paying their share it will be a tax cut.
If you're going to charge for education then charge for education, but if you're going to charge based on earnings then that's income tax. Charging some different rates of income tax than others is not equitable.
Again you are conflating your proposed tax reforms with the narrow point regarding whether or not taxpayers should pay for tuition. If taxpayers are paying for it, regardless of the system, you will be in the situation Charles described right back at the start of this thread.
Taxpayers are already paying for it.
Its just the taxpayers are simply only some of the taxpayers paying a tax surcharge.
Come off it. Only graduates are paying for it, not all taxpayers.
Come off it. Via PAYE some taxpayers are paying for it, not all graduates.
Not all taxpayers are repaying student loans, maybe something like 20-25%? Many more taxpayers would have to foot the bill if tuition fees were abolished, including the checkout lady mentioned at the start.
Not all graduates are paying the graduate tax.
Taxpayers would have a fairer bill if all taxpayers were taxed the same rather than being taxed differently based upon age etc.
Its not a tax. Its repayment of a loan.
It is a tax.
If I am making a loan repayment then I have a fixed amount I repay each month. If I increase my earnings, I don't suddenly start having to pay more out of PAYE as a result.
This is a PAYE tax levied on certain people but not others. If it walks like a tax, and quacks like a tax ...
No. Its a variable loan repayment. Its not a tax, it never was a tax.
The student loan system is a graduate tax that is structured legally as a loan for political reasons.
But if it walks like a tax, talks like a tax & quacks like a tax then we should call it what it is - a tax on graduates.
It's not a tax on graduates because people like @MaxPB have earnt enough to pay it off. That wouldn't be the case were it a tax, they would need to continue paying it until they were 55 (or whatever the current end date is).
It's also collected via tax code and PAYE because that is the easiest way to ensure it's collected.
An alternative way of doing it (that would probably be an administrative nightmare) would be to give graduates their own tax code, with an additional tax rate to pay for their tuition. You'd raise more from high earners because they couldn't repay it, so you could probably get away with a lower rate overall.
Doesn’t that assume a closed system, with no graduates moving overseas, and no overseas degree-holders moving to the UK?
Still got this really bad cold after about a week. It might be because people didn't get the usual immunity to colds last year because they were not mixing with others in the usual way.
Yeah, same for me. The strange thing is that I can't imagine where I caught it. We were on holiday in the Lake District at the time I caught it, walking the fells during the day without meeting anyone at all other than a brief greeting to the small number of other walkers we met. The only indoor contact we had was at breakfast and dinner in the small hotel where we were staying, where everything was well socially-distanced, staff all wearing masks, and no-one coughing, sneezing or even sniffling.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
No it doesn't, that's the whole point of tuition fees. We are talking about the difference between the current situation, and one where tuition fees are abolished. In the latter, the checkout lady would certainly notice it in her pay packet.
No she wouldn't. Not with my proposal, indeed her taxes could go down.
The people who benefit from the current system aren't checkout ladies, they're landlords and elderly lawyers and pensioners etc who can earn lots of income without seeing that income taxed at the same rates that others get taxed at.
We're talking about two separate things. Regardless of whether we are using the current tax system, or your tax system, abolishing tuition fees would result in a net cost to the taxpayer of around £8bn a year.
Which is absolutely a rounding error compared to the cost to the exchequer of ensuring the retired, landlords, inheritees etc don't pay the same rate of income tax as those actually working for their income pay.
Just to give a sense of scale, that "rounding error" is about the same as the revenue from the new NI tax hike.
Which again wouldn't have been needed if everyone paid the same share.
Tax everyone on the same income the same rate, regardless of how its earned. Don't punish people for being workers, or punish them even more for being young workers.
Yes, but regardless of what tax system you use, abolishing tuition fees will result in a net cost of £8bn, which will be a noticeable tax increase, at least based on the reaction to the NI one.
It will only be a tax increase for those who aren't paying their share. For those who are paying their share it will be a tax cut.
If you're going to charge for education then charge for education, but if you're going to charge based on earnings then that's income tax. Charging some different rates of income tax than others is not equitable.
Again you are conflating your proposed tax reforms with the narrow point regarding whether or not taxpayers should pay for tuition. If taxpayers are paying for it, regardless of the system, you will be in the situation Charles described right back at the start of this thread.
Taxpayers are already paying for it.
Its just the taxpayers are simply only some of the taxpayers paying a tax surcharge.
Come off it. Only graduates are paying for it, not all taxpayers.
Come off it. Via PAYE some taxpayers are paying for it, not all graduates.
Not all taxpayers are repaying student loans, maybe something like 20-25%? Many more taxpayers would have to foot the bill if tuition fees were abolished, including the checkout lady mentioned at the start.
Not all graduates are paying the graduate tax.
Taxpayers would have a fairer bill if all taxpayers were taxed the same rather than being taxed differently based upon age etc.
Its not a tax. Its repayment of a loan.
It is a tax.
If I am making a loan repayment then I have a fixed amount I repay each month. If I increase my earnings, I don't suddenly start having to pay more out of PAYE as a result.
This is a PAYE tax levied on certain people but not others. If it walks like a tax, and quacks like a tax ...
No. Its a variable loan repayment. Its not a tax, it never was a tax.
The student loan system is a graduate tax that is structured legally as a loan for political reasons.
But if it walks like a tax, talks like a tax & quacks like a tax then we should call it what it is - a tax on graduates.
It's not a tax on graduates because people like @MaxPB have earnt enough to pay it off. That wouldn't be the case were it a tax, they would need to continue paying it until they were 55 (or whatever the current end date is).
It's also collected via tax code and PAYE because that is the easiest way to ensure it's collected.
An alternative way of doing it (that would probably be an administrative nightmare) would be to give graduates their own tax code, with an additional tax rate to pay for their tuition. You'd raise more from high earners because they couldn't repay it, so you could probably get away with a lower rate overall.
Balanced by the fact high earners abroad have to pay it these days ? That wouldn't be the case with a tax code.
Considering this country has much more immigration than emigration that strikes me as a really weird reason it needs to be done this way. If it were a 1% tax paid by everyone, instead of a 9% tax paid by a few, then graduates who go abroad wouldn't pay true - but surely many more graduates who come from abroad would pay which more than makes up for it?
Labour pledging to scrap business tax? A couple of weeks ago the Tories invented a new tax?
Anyway, another policy reason to keep Labour out of power, they shouldn’t promise what they can’t deliver. This policy promise is undeliverable. Miles behind the Tories on economic credibility because of big brush strokes fantasy policy like this.
Labour are focussing on old battles relating to high business rates on the high street.
In reality it means they now need to find another £15bn to fill alongside the existing holes. Which shows how stupid they are as they are re-opening new battle fronts without paying attention to the existing battle fronts where they could easily win votes.
I'm getting less and less impressed with the Labour party leadership ever single day.
I don't agree with you. The aim of Labour's proposals today is to shift the burden of taxation from SMEs that occupy the nation's high streets to digital companies that occupy the nation's phones and computers. One of the major problems in the Red Wall, and elsewhere, is that town centres are dying on their feet, making towns less appealing to live in, and destroying the sense of community. If getting rid of business rates can reverse this trend, this would be 'levelling-up' in action. The playing field between Amazon and high-street retailers needs to be levelled. It's a good policy.
OK, so where is the £15bn as it won't be coming from Amazon and co as Labour hasn't yet devised a means of collecting £15bn in tax from them.
I'm sure you and others will be listening to Rachel Reeves shortly. At this stage of the electoral cycle, it wouldn't be sensible to say precisely where the money's coming from, because things change. It will be in the manifesto in time for the next GE campaign.
I listened to Rachel a couple of times this weekend and her interview with Nick Robinson is worth watching on catch up
At school she won a British under 14 girls chess championship and her cv dwarfs the shadow cabinet with time at the Bank of England, British Embassy in Washington and HBOS
Labour should be falling over backwards to promote her to leader, she may even attract me to her policies but labour have to divest themselves of a lot of nonsense first
I haven't listened, but will - thank you.
Did she spend a lot of time going on about how awful the Tories are or did she set out the problems facing the country and broad ideas on how to address them and/or a vision for where to get to? If it's worth listening to, then I suspect the latter.
She's incredibly boring and lacks revolutionary zeal. She's exactly the type of person a never-labour voter would think would make a good leader of the Labour Party.
Sounds much like Starmer!
I must admit I can't remember ever having heard her, although I suspect I must have done.
Edit: And BigG has in fact voted Labour in the past, hasn't he? Or doesn't Blair count?
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
No it doesn't, that's the whole point of tuition fees. We are talking about the difference between the current situation, and one where tuition fees are abolished. In the latter, the checkout lady would certainly notice it in her pay packet.
No she wouldn't. Not with my proposal, indeed her taxes could go down.
The people who benefit from the current system aren't checkout ladies, they're landlords and elderly lawyers and pensioners etc who can earn lots of income without seeing that income taxed at the same rates that others get taxed at.
We're talking about two separate things. Regardless of whether we are using the current tax system, or your tax system, abolishing tuition fees would result in a net cost to the taxpayer of around £8bn a year.
Which is absolutely a rounding error compared to the cost to the exchequer of ensuring the retired, landlords, inheritees etc don't pay the same rate of income tax as those actually working for their income pay.
Just to give a sense of scale, that "rounding error" is about the same as the revenue from the new NI tax hike.
Which again wouldn't have been needed if everyone paid the same share.
Tax everyone on the same income the same rate, regardless of how its earned. Don't punish people for being workers, or punish them even more for being young workers.
Yes, but regardless of what tax system you use, abolishing tuition fees will result in a net cost of £8bn, which will be a noticeable tax increase, at least based on the reaction to the NI one.
It will only be a tax increase for those who aren't paying their share. For those who are paying their share it will be a tax cut.
If you're going to charge for education then charge for education, but if you're going to charge based on earnings then that's income tax. Charging some different rates of income tax than others is not equitable.
Again you are conflating your proposed tax reforms with the narrow point regarding whether or not taxpayers should pay for tuition. If taxpayers are paying for it, regardless of the system, you will be in the situation Charles described right back at the start of this thread.
Taxpayers are already paying for it.
Its just the taxpayers are simply only some of the taxpayers paying a tax surcharge.
Come off it. Only graduates are paying for it, not all taxpayers.
Come off it. Via PAYE some taxpayers are paying for it, not all graduates.
Not all taxpayers are repaying student loans, maybe something like 20-25%? Many more taxpayers would have to foot the bill if tuition fees were abolished, including the checkout lady mentioned at the start.
Not all graduates are paying the graduate tax.
Taxpayers would have a fairer bill if all taxpayers were taxed the same rather than being taxed differently based upon age etc.
Its not a tax. Its repayment of a loan.
It is a tax.
If I am making a loan repayment then I have a fixed amount I repay each month. If I increase my earnings, I don't suddenly start having to pay more out of PAYE as a result.
This is a PAYE tax levied on certain people but not others. If it walks like a tax, and quacks like a tax ...
As a graduate who did not have to have a loan (from the days when IIRC only 9% of the population did degrees) I have some sympathy, but in the days when many more people go into higher education, do you think it appropriate that a plumber who did not go should help to pay for your choice to go to university?
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
No it doesn't, that's the whole point of tuition fees. We are talking about the difference between the current situation, and one where tuition fees are abolished. In the latter, the checkout lady would certainly notice it in her pay packet.
No she wouldn't. Not with my proposal, indeed her taxes could go down.
The people who benefit from the current system aren't checkout ladies, they're landlords and elderly lawyers and pensioners etc who can earn lots of income without seeing that income taxed at the same rates that others get taxed at.
We're talking about two separate things. Regardless of whether we are using the current tax system, or your tax system, abolishing tuition fees would result in a net cost to the taxpayer of around £8bn a year.
Which is absolutely a rounding error compared to the cost to the exchequer of ensuring the retired, landlords, inheritees etc don't pay the same rate of income tax as those actually working for their income pay.
Just to give a sense of scale, that "rounding error" is about the same as the revenue from the new NI tax hike.
Which again wouldn't have been needed if everyone paid the same share.
Tax everyone on the same income the same rate, regardless of how its earned. Don't punish people for being workers, or punish them even more for being young workers.
Yes, but regardless of what tax system you use, abolishing tuition fees will result in a net cost of £8bn, which will be a noticeable tax increase, at least based on the reaction to the NI one.
It will only be a tax increase for those who aren't paying their share. For those who are paying their share it will be a tax cut.
If you're going to charge for education then charge for education, but if you're going to charge based on earnings then that's income tax. Charging some different rates of income tax than others is not equitable.
Again you are conflating your proposed tax reforms with the narrow point regarding whether or not taxpayers should pay for tuition. If taxpayers are paying for it, regardless of the system, you will be in the situation Charles described right back at the start of this thread.
Taxpayers are already paying for it.
Its just the taxpayers are simply only some of the taxpayers paying a tax surcharge.
Come off it. Only graduates are paying for it, not all taxpayers.
Come off it. Via PAYE some taxpayers are paying for it, not all graduates.
Not all taxpayers are repaying student loans, maybe something like 20-25%? Many more taxpayers would have to foot the bill if tuition fees were abolished, including the checkout lady mentioned at the start.
Not all graduates are paying the graduate tax.
Taxpayers would have a fairer bill if all taxpayers were taxed the same rather than being taxed differently based upon age etc.
Its not a tax. Its repayment of a loan.
It is a tax.
If I am making a loan repayment then I have a fixed amount I repay each month. If I increase my earnings, I don't suddenly start having to pay more out of PAYE as a result.
This is a PAYE tax levied on certain people but not others. If it walks like a tax, and quacks like a tax ...
No. Its a variable loan repayment. Its not a tax, it never was a tax.
The student loan system is a graduate tax that is structured legally as a loan for political reasons.
But if it walks like a tax, talks like a tax & quacks like a tax then we should call it what it is - a tax on graduates.
Correct, unfortunately named a loan but is it a much more a graduate tax (in effect a higher rate of income tax) - with a novel features.
1) you are not put on to the higher tax rate until your income* is above a certain figure; 2) the liability to incur the higher tax rate ends at 30 years (or earlier death) and 3) you have the opportunity to buy yourself out of the punitive tax rate early by paying a lump sum (you would be mad to do so).
* note that it is taxable income that counts not earnings. So, for mature student, pensions can be liable and for everyone investment income too.
What appals me about the Chancellor's musing is the retrospective nature of the changes he contemplates. Any changes should apply to new students only, or it is retrospective taxation.
It is neither a tax nor a loan repayment. It isn't a tax because it isn't payable unless you have taken money out of the system, which is a voluntary act, and payment back is directly related to benefit received.
It isn't a loan because it is not repayable under law unless certain conditions are met (earnings in UK, at a certain level, cancelled at a certain point etc).
It is sui generis, and an abomination by the way, and needs its own silly name.
Still got this really bad cold after about a week. It might be because people didn't get the usual immunity to colds last year because they were not mixing with others in the usual way.
Yeah, same for me. The strange thing is that I can't imagine where I caught it. We were on holiday in the Lake District at the time I caught it, walking the fells during the day without meeting anyone at all other than a brief greeting to the small number of other walkers we met. The only indoor contact we had was at breakfast and dinner in the small hotel where we were staying, where everything was well socially-distanced, staff all wearing masks, and no-one coughing, sneezing or even sniffling.
Makes me think all the performative covid theatre is in fact pretty useless at stopping transmission of respiratory viruses, and has been all along...
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
No it doesn't, that's the whole point of tuition fees. We are talking about the difference between the current situation, and one where tuition fees are abolished. In the latter, the checkout lady would certainly notice it in her pay packet.
No she wouldn't. Not with my proposal, indeed her taxes could go down.
The people who benefit from the current system aren't checkout ladies, they're landlords and elderly lawyers and pensioners etc who can earn lots of income without seeing that income taxed at the same rates that others get taxed at.
We're talking about two separate things. Regardless of whether we are using the current tax system, or your tax system, abolishing tuition fees would result in a net cost to the taxpayer of around £8bn a year.
Which is absolutely a rounding error compared to the cost to the exchequer of ensuring the retired, landlords, inheritees etc don't pay the same rate of income tax as those actually working for their income pay.
Just to give a sense of scale, that "rounding error" is about the same as the revenue from the new NI tax hike.
Which again wouldn't have been needed if everyone paid the same share.
Tax everyone on the same income the same rate, regardless of how its earned. Don't punish people for being workers, or punish them even more for being young workers.
Yes, but regardless of what tax system you use, abolishing tuition fees will result in a net cost of £8bn, which will be a noticeable tax increase, at least based on the reaction to the NI one.
It will only be a tax increase for those who aren't paying their share. For those who are paying their share it will be a tax cut.
If you're going to charge for education then charge for education, but if you're going to charge based on earnings then that's income tax. Charging some different rates of income tax than others is not equitable.
Again you are conflating your proposed tax reforms with the narrow point regarding whether or not taxpayers should pay for tuition. If taxpayers are paying for it, regardless of the system, you will be in the situation Charles described right back at the start of this thread.
Taxpayers are already paying for it.
Its just the taxpayers are simply only some of the taxpayers paying a tax surcharge.
Come off it. Only graduates are paying for it, not all taxpayers.
Come off it. Via PAYE some taxpayers are paying for it, not all graduates.
Not all taxpayers are repaying student loans, maybe something like 20-25%? Many more taxpayers would have to foot the bill if tuition fees were abolished, including the checkout lady mentioned at the start.
Not all graduates are paying the graduate tax.
Taxpayers would have a fairer bill if all taxpayers were taxed the same rather than being taxed differently based upon age etc.
Its not a tax. Its repayment of a loan.
It is a tax.
If I am making a loan repayment then I have a fixed amount I repay each month. If I increase my earnings, I don't suddenly start having to pay more out of PAYE as a result.
This is a PAYE tax levied on certain people but not others. If it walks like a tax, and quacks like a tax ...
No. Its a variable loan repayment. Its not a tax, it never was a tax.
The student loan system is a graduate tax that is structured legally as a loan for political reasons.
But if it walks like a tax, talks like a tax & quacks like a tax then we should call it what it is - a tax on graduates.
It's not a tax on graduates because people like @MaxPB have earnt enough to pay it off. That wouldn't be the case were it a tax, they would need to continue paying it until they were 55 (or whatever the current end date is).
It's also collected via tax code and PAYE because that is the easiest way to ensure it's collected.
An alternative way of doing it (that would probably be an administrative nightmare) would be to give graduates their own tax code, with an additional tax rate to pay for their tuition. You'd raise more from high earners because they couldn't repay it, so you could probably get away with a lower rate overall.
Balanced by the fact high earners abroad have to pay it these days ? That wouldn't be the case with a tax code.
Considering this country has much more immigration than emigration that strikes me as a really weird reason it needs to be done this way. If it were a 1% tax paid by everyone, instead of a 9% tax paid by a few, then graduates who go abroad wouldn't pay true - but surely many more graduates who come from abroad would pay which more than makes up for it?
Hypothecated taxes are a poor idea. They might sound good to voters but in general they are inefficient and we saw that with the idiotic 0.7% aid target. All that happened is aid money got pissed away because they had to spend it.
I'm all for funding tertiary education properly and funding high value degrees out of general taxation, a hypothecated fund will just result in university fat cats getting rich.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
No it doesn't, that's the whole point of tuition fees. We are talking about the difference between the current situation, and one where tuition fees are abolished. In the latter, the checkout lady would certainly notice it in her pay packet.
No she wouldn't. Not with my proposal, indeed her taxes could go down.
The people who benefit from the current system aren't checkout ladies, they're landlords and elderly lawyers and pensioners etc who can earn lots of income without seeing that income taxed at the same rates that others get taxed at.
We're talking about two separate things. Regardless of whether we are using the current tax system, or your tax system, abolishing tuition fees would result in a net cost to the taxpayer of around £8bn a year.
Which is absolutely a rounding error compared to the cost to the exchequer of ensuring the retired, landlords, inheritees etc don't pay the same rate of income tax as those actually working for their income pay.
Just to give a sense of scale, that "rounding error" is about the same as the revenue from the new NI tax hike.
Which again wouldn't have been needed if everyone paid the same share.
Tax everyone on the same income the same rate, regardless of how its earned. Don't punish people for being workers, or punish them even more for being young workers.
Yes, but regardless of what tax system you use, abolishing tuition fees will result in a net cost of £8bn, which will be a noticeable tax increase, at least based on the reaction to the NI one.
It will only be a tax increase for those who aren't paying their share. For those who are paying their share it will be a tax cut.
If you're going to charge for education then charge for education, but if you're going to charge based on earnings then that's income tax. Charging some different rates of income tax than others is not equitable.
Again you are conflating your proposed tax reforms with the narrow point regarding whether or not taxpayers should pay for tuition. If taxpayers are paying for it, regardless of the system, you will be in the situation Charles described right back at the start of this thread.
Taxpayers are already paying for it.
Its just the taxpayers are simply only some of the taxpayers paying a tax surcharge.
Come off it. Only graduates are paying for it, not all taxpayers.
Come off it. Via PAYE some taxpayers are paying for it, not all graduates.
Not all taxpayers are repaying student loans, maybe something like 20-25%? Many more taxpayers would have to foot the bill if tuition fees were abolished, including the checkout lady mentioned at the start.
Not all graduates are paying the graduate tax.
Taxpayers would have a fairer bill if all taxpayers were taxed the same rather than being taxed differently based upon age etc.
Its not a tax. Its repayment of a loan.
It is a tax.
If I am making a loan repayment then I have a fixed amount I repay each month. If I increase my earnings, I don't suddenly start having to pay more out of PAYE as a result.
This is a PAYE tax levied on certain people but not others. If it walks like a tax, and quacks like a tax ...
No. Its a variable loan repayment. Its not a tax, it never was a tax.
The student loan system is a graduate tax that is structured legally as a loan for political reasons.
But if it walks like a tax, talks like a tax & quacks like a tax then we should call it what it is - a tax on graduates.
It's not a tax on graduates because people like @MaxPB have earnt enough to pay it off. That wouldn't be the case were it a tax, they would need to continue paying it until they were 55 (or whatever the current end date is).
Tbf, I went when fees were just £1k per year so my repayment was tiny compared to what we have today. I think the earnings for net repayment is something stupid like £60k for three year course and £70k for four year courses like mine.
Which is why Boris and co are talking about bring the repayment point lower because it seems the financial tricks that were used to justify loans have finally fallen apart in ways that are too obvious to ignore.
If it needs £60k a year to repay your loan, who really is paying the university fees of those who don't earn £60k a year. It can only be the tiller assistant who never went to Uni.
If you have a Plan 1 student loan You’ll only repay when your income is over £382 a week, £1,657 a month or £19,895 a year (before tax and other deductions).
If you have a Plan 2 student loan You’ll only repay when your income is over £524 a week, £2,274 a month or £27,295 a year (before tax and other deductions).
Plan 2 was always a bit high at £27,295 I thought... But it was sold as such, with the higher repayment threshold - and unlike Plan 1 far more likely to have continuing payments in your late 30s onward. Changes should be for new loans, if the Gov't wants to move the threshold back to plan 1 levels.
Labour pledging to scrap business tax? A couple of weeks ago the Tories invented a new tax?
Anyway, another policy reason to keep Labour out of power, they shouldn’t promise what they can’t deliver. This policy promise is undeliverable. Miles behind the Tories on economic credibility because of big brush strokes fantasy policy like this.
Labour are focussing on old battles relating to high business rates on the high street.
In reality it means they now need to find another £15bn to fill alongside the existing holes. Which shows how stupid they are as they are re-opening new battle fronts without paying attention to the existing battle fronts where they could easily win votes.
I'm getting less and less impressed with the Labour party leadership ever single day.
I don't agree with you. The aim of Labour's proposals today is to shift the burden of taxation from SMEs that occupy the nation's high streets to digital companies that occupy the nation's phones and computers. One of the major problems in the Red Wall, and elsewhere, is that town centres are dying on their feet, making towns less appealing to live in, and destroying the sense of community. If getting rid of business rates can reverse this trend, this would be 'levelling-up' in action. The playing field between Amazon and high-street retailers needs to be levelled. It's a good policy.
OK, so where is the £15bn as it won't be coming from Amazon and co as Labour hasn't yet devised a means of collecting £15bn in tax from them.
I'm sure you and others will be listening to Rachel Reeves shortly. At this stage of the electoral cycle, it wouldn't be sensible to say precisely where the money's coming from, because things change. It will be in the manifesto in time for the next GE campaign.
I listened to Rachel a couple of times this weekend and her interview with Nick Robinson is worth watching on catch up
At school she won a British under 14 girls chess championship and her cv dwarfs the shadow cabinet with time at the Bank of England, British Embassy in Washington and HBOS
Labour should be falling over backwards to promote her to leader, she may even attract me to her policies but labour have to divest themselves of a lot of nonsense first
I haven't listened, but will - thank you.
Did she spend a lot of time going on about how awful the Tories are or did she set out the problems facing the country and broad ideas on how to address them and/or a vision for where to get to? If it's worth listening to, then I suspect the latter.
She's incredibly boring and lacks revolutionary zeal. She's exactly the type of person a never-labour voter would think would make a good leader of the Labour Party.
Sounds much like Starmer!
I must admit I can't remember ever having heard her, although I suspect I must have done.
Edit: And BigG has in fact voted Labour in the past, hasn't he? Or doesn't Blair count?
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
For all of the flap, the change in tuition fees was a positive step in allowing poorer students access. Instead of fees up front it was hypothecated fees when earning.
The issue was funding for universities. With the government contribution to uni teaching cut by 78%, we've seen institutions both get it in the neck for charging the "maximum" £9k a year and offering poor tuition due to a lack of money.
Anyway, think what these £9k fees are. Instead of the government handing money to the universities, it hands it to student loans who pay it to universities. We know that in this era of bankism debt is an asset. How much "asset" was added to bank balance sheets in this way? a very quiet way to keep injecting cash into a broken banking system.
And the funding comes down to the idea that 50% of kids need to go to university. IMV that was always an insane target, and has massively skewed expectations, education and the jobs market.
IMV everything else leads on from that.
Except that sort of figure for Tertiary education is the norm in nearly all competitor economies. It reaches 69% in South Korea. Italy and Germany are the exceptions in the developed world.
Maybe Britons are thicker than other nations, but that doesn't bode well for the future.
The problem perhaps is more the poor quality of many courses, particularly in terms of contact time with students, so little value added.
I think that the cost of Tertiary education is quite inflated in Britain by two factors: Universities use undergraduate fees to subsidise other things, and second that British students want to live a good lifestyle away from home. Few go to nearby Universities. The student loan system barely covers rent, and not even close to that in London and a number of other cities.
Except tertiary education != universities. From your link;
" The World Bank, for example, defines tertiary education as including universities as well as institutions that teach specific capacities of higher learning such as colleges, technical training institutes, community colleges, nursing schools, research laboratories, centers of excellence, and distance learning centers."
That's where we're going wrong. Universities are just one strand of tertiary education, and yet they've grown to dominate. We'd be much better sorted with other types as well, in particular on-job training.
That is pretty much what I said. The problem is not the numbers going, but rather the poor quality of much British Tertiary education, and the emphasis on a partying life away from home.
I'm unsure it is. I talked about he goal of 50% to university, and you talked about tertiary education. These are not, and should not be, the same.
We need plumbers. I see no need for plumbers to go to university; they'd be much better served with an apprenticeship and then a C&G. We have too much university, and not enough apprenticeships and other further education.
One of my brother-in-laws did a three-year technical course in welding at an Irish Institute of Technology. He has plenty of work and a big new house.
My impression is that apprenticeships and C&G in Britain simply aren't working as well as the Irish system. Maybe it's a prestige/class thing? In the same family they have a physics PhD, a music Masters and an MBA - there's no sense that the welder has fallen short as there might be with a British middle class family.
This is another area where the UK's insistence of a uni degree is wrong. If you don't get one, you have somehow failed. And our ability to look down our noses at people based not on their value, but on whether or not they hold a certain piece of paper.
But in the meantime, the increased numbers going to uni have devalued that piece of paper.
So apprentices can cope with the snobbery given their higher bank balances and the fact many can buy a property in their 20s or early 30s (certainly outside London and the South East) unlike most students
Indeed. So why drive kids down the uni route when it won't gain them much? Why 50%? why not 40%? 30%? 20%?
It's a random figure plucked out of Blair's backside because it sounds good. Yet even if it was based on evidence, then there should have been another policy about further education opportunities for those who did not go.
My nephew got the grades to go into uni, but chose to get a job. He's worked hard, and is on a salary much greater than his friends who went. He's probably worked harder than them, and has no student debts. Yet if he was in certain industries, there would be a barrier - a paper ceiling - through which he could not burst. Sometimes that ceiling may be necessary - science, for instance. In most it is not.
Fortunately he's chosen an industry where that is less likely.
Much of the public sector, including local government, seems to require degrees that are unnecessary for the job.
What happened with degrees - from the perspective of a graduate and hirer of staff.
When Blair talked of expanding degree jobs, he was thinking of the type of jobs that Russell Group (and up) are the feeders for.
The massive expansion with the polys was not done in concert with increasing standards. This created a large number of second class (ha) degrees.
Employers did indeed find that they needed more people with high quality degrees - So the Russell Group grew and large numbers of graduates were recruited from overseas.
In the high end jobs, a 2.1 or above from a Russell Group (or overseas equivalent) became mandated by HR. So if you are hiring, you don't get to see other CVs
So, given the volume of graduates, lower skilled jobs, began demanding degrees. Since they could get them. So, people, who in the past wouldn't have had to have a degree had to get one to get the same quality of job they would have got anyway....
So we now have a situation where there are two glass ceilings
Russell Group Degree ________
Former Poly Degree ________
No degree
The irony was, that back in the day when degrees were much rarer, there was at least some possibility of making it to the top without a degree. Now, it is explicitly forbidden.
In one job, we were doing work for a bank. The bank (well their HR) tried to stop one of the team coming in, since their background checks showed no degree....
We have created an absolute caste system.
I can only speak from personal experience; but I don't think that what degree you have is a serious factor, outside of a small amount of companies who do a lot of graduate recruitment. I've worked in Council's, high level private sector companies and the civil service at a senior level: I found a massive mix of routes in; there were oxbridge types alongside people who had done day release at the local poly and just put the time in, following a steady path. There were also quite a few PHD's who had gone in as a career change. No one really cared after the first few years and what uni you went to never came up, apart from a few occasional in jokes between the oxbridge types.
Still got this really bad cold after about a week. It might be because people didn't get the usual immunity to colds last year because they were not mixing with others in the usual way.
Yeah, same for me. The strange thing is that I can't imagine where I caught it. We were on holiday in the Lake District at the time I caught it, walking the fells during the day without meeting anyone at all other than a brief greeting to the small number of other walkers we met. The only indoor contact we had was at breakfast and dinner in the small hotel where we were staying, where everything was well socially-distanced, staff all wearing masks, and no-one coughing, sneezing or even sniffling.
Makes me think all the performative covid theatre is in fact pretty useless at stopping transmission of respiratory viruses, and has been all along...
As I commented, when in full lockdown, the the family got colds on a moderately regular cycle. With enough gaps, that no, it wasn't just circulating in the house.
And this was with no outside contact, all packages quarantined etc etc.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
No it doesn't, that's the whole point of tuition fees. We are talking about the difference between the current situation, and one where tuition fees are abolished. In the latter, the checkout lady would certainly notice it in her pay packet.
No she wouldn't. Not with my proposal, indeed her taxes could go down.
The people who benefit from the current system aren't checkout ladies, they're landlords and elderly lawyers and pensioners etc who can earn lots of income without seeing that income taxed at the same rates that others get taxed at.
We're talking about two separate things. Regardless of whether we are using the current tax system, or your tax system, abolishing tuition fees would result in a net cost to the taxpayer of around £8bn a year.
Which is absolutely a rounding error compared to the cost to the exchequer of ensuring the retired, landlords, inheritees etc don't pay the same rate of income tax as those actually working for their income pay.
Just to give a sense of scale, that "rounding error" is about the same as the revenue from the new NI tax hike.
Which again wouldn't have been needed if everyone paid the same share.
Tax everyone on the same income the same rate, regardless of how its earned. Don't punish people for being workers, or punish them even more for being young workers.
Yes, but regardless of what tax system you use, abolishing tuition fees will result in a net cost of £8bn, which will be a noticeable tax increase, at least based on the reaction to the NI one.
It will only be a tax increase for those who aren't paying their share. For those who are paying their share it will be a tax cut.
If you're going to charge for education then charge for education, but if you're going to charge based on earnings then that's income tax. Charging some different rates of income tax than others is not equitable.
Again you are conflating your proposed tax reforms with the narrow point regarding whether or not taxpayers should pay for tuition. If taxpayers are paying for it, regardless of the system, you will be in the situation Charles described right back at the start of this thread.
Taxpayers are already paying for it.
Its just the taxpayers are simply only some of the taxpayers paying a tax surcharge.
Come off it. Only graduates are paying for it, not all taxpayers.
Come off it. Via PAYE some taxpayers are paying for it, not all graduates.
Not all taxpayers are repaying student loans, maybe something like 20-25%? Many more taxpayers would have to foot the bill if tuition fees were abolished, including the checkout lady mentioned at the start.
Not all graduates are paying the graduate tax.
Taxpayers would have a fairer bill if all taxpayers were taxed the same rather than being taxed differently based upon age etc.
Its not a tax. Its repayment of a loan.
It is a tax.
If I am making a loan repayment then I have a fixed amount I repay each month. If I increase my earnings, I don't suddenly start having to pay more out of PAYE as a result.
This is a PAYE tax levied on certain people but not others. If it walks like a tax, and quacks like a tax ...
As a graduate who did not have to have a loan (from the days when IIRC only 9% of the population did degrees) I have some sympathy, but in the days when many more people go into higher education, do you think it appropriate that a plumber who did not go should help to pay for your choice to go to university?
Yes, for the same reason that a childless plumber has to pay for children to go to school too.
If that plumber is earning enough to be paying high taxes then yes their income should be taxed, just as a graduates income should be taxed.
Unless you're going to properly privatise education, rather than have HMRC do it via income taxes, then all income taxes should be applied equitably and consistently.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
No it doesn't, that's the whole point of tuition fees. We are talking about the difference between the current situation, and one where tuition fees are abolished. In the latter, the checkout lady would certainly notice it in her pay packet.
No she wouldn't. Not with my proposal, indeed her taxes could go down.
The people who benefit from the current system aren't checkout ladies, they're landlords and elderly lawyers and pensioners etc who can earn lots of income without seeing that income taxed at the same rates that others get taxed at.
We're talking about two separate things. Regardless of whether we are using the current tax system, or your tax system, abolishing tuition fees would result in a net cost to the taxpayer of around £8bn a year.
Which is absolutely a rounding error compared to the cost to the exchequer of ensuring the retired, landlords, inheritees etc don't pay the same rate of income tax as those actually working for their income pay.
Just to give a sense of scale, that "rounding error" is about the same as the revenue from the new NI tax hike.
Which again wouldn't have been needed if everyone paid the same share.
Tax everyone on the same income the same rate, regardless of how its earned. Don't punish people for being workers, or punish them even more for being young workers.
Yes, but regardless of what tax system you use, abolishing tuition fees will result in a net cost of £8bn, which will be a noticeable tax increase, at least based on the reaction to the NI one.
It will only be a tax increase for those who aren't paying their share. For those who are paying their share it will be a tax cut.
If you're going to charge for education then charge for education, but if you're going to charge based on earnings then that's income tax. Charging some different rates of income tax than others is not equitable.
Again you are conflating your proposed tax reforms with the narrow point regarding whether or not taxpayers should pay for tuition. If taxpayers are paying for it, regardless of the system, you will be in the situation Charles described right back at the start of this thread.
Taxpayers are already paying for it.
Its just the taxpayers are simply only some of the taxpayers paying a tax surcharge.
Come off it. Only graduates are paying for it, not all taxpayers.
Come off it. Via PAYE some taxpayers are paying for it, not all graduates.
Not all taxpayers are repaying student loans, maybe something like 20-25%? Many more taxpayers would have to foot the bill if tuition fees were abolished, including the checkout lady mentioned at the start.
Not all graduates are paying the graduate tax.
Taxpayers would have a fairer bill if all taxpayers were taxed the same rather than being taxed differently based upon age etc.
Its not a tax. Its repayment of a loan.
It is a tax.
If I am making a loan repayment then I have a fixed amount I repay each month. If I increase my earnings, I don't suddenly start having to pay more out of PAYE as a result.
This is a PAYE tax levied on certain people but not others. If it walks like a tax, and quacks like a tax ...
No. Its a variable loan repayment. Its not a tax, it never was a tax.
The student loan system is a graduate tax that is structured legally as a loan for political reasons.
But if it walks like a tax, talks like a tax & quacks like a tax then we should call it what it is - a tax on graduates.
It's not a tax on graduates because people like @MaxPB have earnt enough to pay it off. That wouldn't be the case were it a tax, they would need to continue paying it until they were 55 (or whatever the current end date is).
Tbf, I went when fees were just £1k per year so my repayment was tiny compared to what we have today. I think the earnings for net repayment is something stupid like £60k for three year course and £70k for four year courses like mine.
Which is why Boris and co are talking about bring the repayment point lower because it seems the financial tricks that were used to justify loans have finally fallen apart in ways that are too obvious to ignore.
If it needs £60k a year to repay your loan, who really is paying the university fees of those who don't earn £60k a year. It can only be the tiller assistant who never went to Uni.
If you have a Plan 1 student loan You’ll only repay when your income is over £382 a week, £1,657 a month or £19,895 a year (before tax and other deductions).
If you have a Plan 2 student loan You’ll only repay when your income is over £524 a week, £2,274 a month or £27,295 a year (before tax and other deductions).
Plan 2 was always a bit high at £27,295 I thought... But it was sold as such, with the higher repayment threshold - and unlike Plan 1 far more likely to have continuing payments in your late 30s onward. Changes should be for new loans, if the Gov't wants to move the threshold back to plan 1 levels.
The trouble is the government has precendent on their side. The threshold was raised in 2018 from £21k without anyone complaining.
Passed three petrol station on way to the gym - all out of fuel. I hear that the closest motorway (M1) service station is out too.
My in-laws have their 50th Anniversary Party this Saturday, with people travelling by car 100 miles each way from London, similar from Bath and 50 miles from Cambridge.
PB brains trust: What are the chances of the Party having to be cancelled?
Seems to me that the tankers will be in demand everywhere - who knows when the petrol stations will be replenished with fuel? I think there are many like me who haven't panic-bought fuel but will be quick off the mark should fuel become available so I can see this dragging on for weeks.
Many in the countryside live 15 miles + from nearest petrol station - do they risk a journey on spec for fuel? I think not. Quasi-lockdown I guess.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
No it doesn't, that's the whole point of tuition fees. We are talking about the difference between the current situation, and one where tuition fees are abolished. In the latter, the checkout lady would certainly notice it in her pay packet.
No she wouldn't. Not with my proposal, indeed her taxes could go down.
The people who benefit from the current system aren't checkout ladies, they're landlords and elderly lawyers and pensioners etc who can earn lots of income without seeing that income taxed at the same rates that others get taxed at.
We're talking about two separate things. Regardless of whether we are using the current tax system, or your tax system, abolishing tuition fees would result in a net cost to the taxpayer of around £8bn a year.
Which is absolutely a rounding error compared to the cost to the exchequer of ensuring the retired, landlords, inheritees etc don't pay the same rate of income tax as those actually working for their income pay.
Just to give a sense of scale, that "rounding error" is about the same as the revenue from the new NI tax hike.
Which again wouldn't have been needed if everyone paid the same share.
Tax everyone on the same income the same rate, regardless of how its earned. Don't punish people for being workers, or punish them even more for being young workers.
Yes, but regardless of what tax system you use, abolishing tuition fees will result in a net cost of £8bn, which will be a noticeable tax increase, at least based on the reaction to the NI one.
It will only be a tax increase for those who aren't paying their share. For those who are paying their share it will be a tax cut.
If you're going to charge for education then charge for education, but if you're going to charge based on earnings then that's income tax. Charging some different rates of income tax than others is not equitable.
Again you are conflating your proposed tax reforms with the narrow point regarding whether or not taxpayers should pay for tuition. If taxpayers are paying for it, regardless of the system, you will be in the situation Charles described right back at the start of this thread.
Taxpayers are already paying for it.
Its just the taxpayers are simply only some of the taxpayers paying a tax surcharge.
Come off it. Only graduates are paying for it, not all taxpayers.
Come off it. Via PAYE some taxpayers are paying for it, not all graduates.
Not all taxpayers are repaying student loans, maybe something like 20-25%? Many more taxpayers would have to foot the bill if tuition fees were abolished, including the checkout lady mentioned at the start.
Not all graduates are paying the graduate tax.
Taxpayers would have a fairer bill if all taxpayers were taxed the same rather than being taxed differently based upon age etc.
Its not a tax. Its repayment of a loan.
It is a tax.
If I am making a loan repayment then I have a fixed amount I repay each month. If I increase my earnings, I don't suddenly start having to pay more out of PAYE as a result.
This is a PAYE tax levied on certain people but not others. If it walks like a tax, and quacks like a tax ...
And Vince Cable was forever insisting that it WAS a tax.
Passed three petrol station on way to the gym - all out of fuel. I hear that the closest motorway (M1) service station is out too.
My in-laws have their 50th Anniversary Party this Saturday, with people travelling by car 100 miles each way from London, similar from Bath and 50 miles from Cambridge.
PB brains trust: What are the chances of the Party having to be cancelled?
Seems to me that the tankers will be in demand everywhere - who knows when the petrol stations will be replenished with fuel? I think there are many like me who haven't panic-bought fuel but will be quick off the mark should fuel become available so I can see this dragging on for weeks.
Many in the countryside live 15 miles + from nearest petrol station - do they risk a journey on spec for fuel? I think not. Quasi-lockdown I guess.
The problem is that the wrong kind of people are buying petrol.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
No it doesn't, that's the whole point of tuition fees. We are talking about the difference between the current situation, and one where tuition fees are abolished. In the latter, the checkout lady would certainly notice it in her pay packet.
No she wouldn't. Not with my proposal, indeed her taxes could go down.
The people who benefit from the current system aren't checkout ladies, they're landlords and elderly lawyers and pensioners etc who can earn lots of income without seeing that income taxed at the same rates that others get taxed at.
We're talking about two separate things. Regardless of whether we are using the current tax system, or your tax system, abolishing tuition fees would result in a net cost to the taxpayer of around £8bn a year.
Which is absolutely a rounding error compared to the cost to the exchequer of ensuring the retired, landlords, inheritees etc don't pay the same rate of income tax as those actually working for their income pay.
Just to give a sense of scale, that "rounding error" is about the same as the revenue from the new NI tax hike.
Which again wouldn't have been needed if everyone paid the same share.
Tax everyone on the same income the same rate, regardless of how its earned. Don't punish people for being workers, or punish them even more for being young workers.
Yes, but regardless of what tax system you use, abolishing tuition fees will result in a net cost of £8bn, which will be a noticeable tax increase, at least based on the reaction to the NI one.
It will only be a tax increase for those who aren't paying their share. For those who are paying their share it will be a tax cut.
If you're going to charge for education then charge for education, but if you're going to charge based on earnings then that's income tax. Charging some different rates of income tax than others is not equitable.
Again you are conflating your proposed tax reforms with the narrow point regarding whether or not taxpayers should pay for tuition. If taxpayers are paying for it, regardless of the system, you will be in the situation Charles described right back at the start of this thread.
Taxpayers are already paying for it.
Its just the taxpayers are simply only some of the taxpayers paying a tax surcharge.
Come off it. Only graduates are paying for it, not all taxpayers.
Come off it. Via PAYE some taxpayers are paying for it, not all graduates.
Not all taxpayers are repaying student loans, maybe something like 20-25%? Many more taxpayers would have to foot the bill if tuition fees were abolished, including the checkout lady mentioned at the start.
Not all graduates are paying the graduate tax.
Taxpayers would have a fairer bill if all taxpayers were taxed the same rather than being taxed differently based upon age etc.
Its not a tax. Its repayment of a loan.
It is a tax.
If I am making a loan repayment then I have a fixed amount I repay each month. If I increase my earnings, I don't suddenly start having to pay more out of PAYE as a result.
This is a PAYE tax levied on certain people but not others. If it walks like a tax, and quacks like a tax ...
No. Its a variable loan repayment. Its not a tax, it never was a tax.
The student loan system is a graduate tax that is structured legally as a loan for political reasons.
But if it walks like a tax, talks like a tax & quacks like a tax then we should call it what it is - a tax on graduates.
It's not a tax on graduates because people like @MaxPB have earnt enough to pay it off. That wouldn't be the case were it a tax, they would need to continue paying it until they were 55 (or whatever the current end date is).
Tbf, I went when fees were just £1k per year so my repayment was tiny compared to what we have today. I think the earnings for net repayment is something stupid like £60k for three year course and £70k for four year courses like mine.
Which is why Boris and co are talking about bring the repayment point lower because it seems the financial tricks that were used to justify loans have finally fallen apart in ways that are too obvious to ignore.
If it needs £60k a year to repay your loan, who really is paying the university fees of those who don't earn £60k a year. It can only be the tiller assistant who never went to Uni.
If you have a Plan 1 student loan You’ll only repay when your income is over £382 a week, £1,657 a month or £19,895 a year (before tax and other deductions).
If you have a Plan 2 student loan You’ll only repay when your income is over £524 a week, £2,274 a month or £27,295 a year (before tax and other deductions).
Plan 2 was always a bit high at £27,295 I thought... But it was sold as such, with the higher repayment threshold - and unlike Plan 1 far more likely to have continuing payments in your late 30s onward. Changes should be for new loans, if the Gov't wants to move the threshold back to plan 1 levels.
The trouble is the government has precedent on their side. The threshold was raised in 2018 from £21k without anyone complaining.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
No it doesn't, that's the whole point of tuition fees. We are talking about the difference between the current situation, and one where tuition fees are abolished. In the latter, the checkout lady would certainly notice it in her pay packet.
No she wouldn't. Not with my proposal, indeed her taxes could go down.
The people who benefit from the current system aren't checkout ladies, they're landlords and elderly lawyers and pensioners etc who can earn lots of income without seeing that income taxed at the same rates that others get taxed at.
We're talking about two separate things. Regardless of whether we are using the current tax system, or your tax system, abolishing tuition fees would result in a net cost to the taxpayer of around £8bn a year.
Which is absolutely a rounding error compared to the cost to the exchequer of ensuring the retired, landlords, inheritees etc don't pay the same rate of income tax as those actually working for their income pay.
Just to give a sense of scale, that "rounding error" is about the same as the revenue from the new NI tax hike.
Which again wouldn't have been needed if everyone paid the same share.
Tax everyone on the same income the same rate, regardless of how its earned. Don't punish people for being workers, or punish them even more for being young workers.
Yes, but regardless of what tax system you use, abolishing tuition fees will result in a net cost of £8bn, which will be a noticeable tax increase, at least based on the reaction to the NI one.
It will only be a tax increase for those who aren't paying their share. For those who are paying their share it will be a tax cut.
If you're going to charge for education then charge for education, but if you're going to charge based on earnings then that's income tax. Charging some different rates of income tax than others is not equitable.
Again you are conflating your proposed tax reforms with the narrow point regarding whether or not taxpayers should pay for tuition. If taxpayers are paying for it, regardless of the system, you will be in the situation Charles described right back at the start of this thread.
Taxpayers are already paying for it.
Its just the taxpayers are simply only some of the taxpayers paying a tax surcharge.
Come off it. Only graduates are paying for it, not all taxpayers.
Come off it. Via PAYE some taxpayers are paying for it, not all graduates.
Not all taxpayers are repaying student loans, maybe something like 20-25%? Many more taxpayers would have to foot the bill if tuition fees were abolished, including the checkout lady mentioned at the start.
Not all graduates are paying the graduate tax.
Taxpayers would have a fairer bill if all taxpayers were taxed the same rather than being taxed differently based upon age etc.
Its not a tax. Its repayment of a loan.
It is a tax.
If I am making a loan repayment then I have a fixed amount I repay each month. If I increase my earnings, I don't suddenly start having to pay more out of PAYE as a result.
This is a PAYE tax levied on certain people but not others. If it walks like a tax, and quacks like a tax ...
No. Its a variable loan repayment. Its not a tax, it never was a tax.
The student loan system is a graduate tax that is structured legally as a loan for political reasons.
But if it walks like a tax, talks like a tax & quacks like a tax then we should call it what it is - a tax on graduates.
It's not a tax on graduates because people like @MaxPB have earnt enough to pay it off. That wouldn't be the case were it a tax, they would need to continue paying it until they were 55 (or whatever the current end date is).
Tbf, I went when fees were just £1k per year so my repayment was tiny compared to what we have today. I think the earnings for net repayment is something stupid like £60k for three year course and £70k for four year courses like mine.
Which is why Boris and co are talking about bring the repayment point lower because it seems the financial tricks that were used to justify loans have finally fallen apart in ways that are too obvious to ignore.
If it needs £60k a year to repay your loan, who really is paying the university fees of those who don't earn £60k a year. It can only be the tiller assistant who never went to Uni.
If you have a Plan 1 student loan You’ll only repay when your income is over £382 a week, £1,657 a month or £19,895 a year (before tax and other deductions).
If you have a Plan 2 student loan You’ll only repay when your income is over £524 a week, £2,274 a month or £27,295 a year (before tax and other deductions).
Plan 2 was always a bit high at £27,295 I thought... But it was sold as such, with the higher repayment threshold - and unlike Plan 1 far more likely to have continuing payments in your late 30s onward. Changes should be for new loans, if the Gov't wants to move the threshold back to plan 1 levels.
The trouble is the government has precedent on their side. The threshold was raised in 2018 from £21k without anyone complaining.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
No it doesn't, that's the whole point of tuition fees. We are talking about the difference between the current situation, and one where tuition fees are abolished. In the latter, the checkout lady would certainly notice it in her pay packet.
No she wouldn't. Not with my proposal, indeed her taxes could go down.
The people who benefit from the current system aren't checkout ladies, they're landlords and elderly lawyers and pensioners etc who can earn lots of income without seeing that income taxed at the same rates that others get taxed at.
We're talking about two separate things. Regardless of whether we are using the current tax system, or your tax system, abolishing tuition fees would result in a net cost to the taxpayer of around £8bn a year.
Which is absolutely a rounding error compared to the cost to the exchequer of ensuring the retired, landlords, inheritees etc don't pay the same rate of income tax as those actually working for their income pay.
Just to give a sense of scale, that "rounding error" is about the same as the revenue from the new NI tax hike.
Which again wouldn't have been needed if everyone paid the same share.
Tax everyone on the same income the same rate, regardless of how its earned. Don't punish people for being workers, or punish them even more for being young workers.
Yes, but regardless of what tax system you use, abolishing tuition fees will result in a net cost of £8bn, which will be a noticeable tax increase, at least based on the reaction to the NI one.
It will only be a tax increase for those who aren't paying their share. For those who are paying their share it will be a tax cut.
If you're going to charge for education then charge for education, but if you're going to charge based on earnings then that's income tax. Charging some different rates of income tax than others is not equitable.
Again you are conflating your proposed tax reforms with the narrow point regarding whether or not taxpayers should pay for tuition. If taxpayers are paying for it, regardless of the system, you will be in the situation Charles described right back at the start of this thread.
Taxpayers are already paying for it.
Its just the taxpayers are simply only some of the taxpayers paying a tax surcharge.
Come off it. Only graduates are paying for it, not all taxpayers.
Come off it. Via PAYE some taxpayers are paying for it, not all graduates.
Not all taxpayers are repaying student loans, maybe something like 20-25%? Many more taxpayers would have to foot the bill if tuition fees were abolished, including the checkout lady mentioned at the start.
Not all graduates are paying the graduate tax.
Taxpayers would have a fairer bill if all taxpayers were taxed the same rather than being taxed differently based upon age etc.
Its not a tax. Its repayment of a loan.
It is a tax.
If I am making a loan repayment then I have a fixed amount I repay each month. If I increase my earnings, I don't suddenly start having to pay more out of PAYE as a result.
This is a PAYE tax levied on certain people but not others. If it walks like a tax, and quacks like a tax ...
No. Its a variable loan repayment. Its not a tax, it never was a tax.
The student loan system is a graduate tax that is structured legally as a loan for political reasons.
But if it walks like a tax, talks like a tax & quacks like a tax then we should call it what it is - a tax on graduates.
It's not a tax on graduates because people like @MaxPB have earnt enough to pay it off. That wouldn't be the case were it a tax, they would need to continue paying it until they were 55 (or whatever the current end date is).
It's also collected via tax code and PAYE because that is the easiest way to ensure it's collected.
An alternative way of doing it (that would probably be an administrative nightmare) would be to give graduates their own tax code, with an additional tax rate to pay for their tuition. You'd raise more from high earners because they couldn't repay it, so you could probably get away with a lower rate overall.
Balanced by the fact high earners abroad have to pay it these days ? That wouldn't be the case with a tax code.
Considering this country has much more immigration than emigration that strikes me as a really weird reason it needs to be done this way. If it were a 1% tax paid by everyone, instead of a 9% tax paid by a few, then graduates who go abroad wouldn't pay true - but surely many more graduates who come from abroad would pay which more than makes up for it?
Hypothecated taxes are a poor idea. They might sound good to voters but in general they are inefficient and we saw that with the idiotic 0.7% aid target. All that happened is aid money got pissed away because they had to spend it.
I'm all for funding tertiary education properly and funding high value degrees out of general taxation, a hypothecated fund will just result in university fat cats getting rich.
Completely agreed.
There shouldn't be any hypothecated taxes, I was just trying to address the issue of there 'having to be a tax rise' if the graduate tax were to be abolished. That tax rise could just be set at the current threshold, if so.
The current graduate tax system has completely screwed young graduates and warped the university sector. Its a failure, like everything else Gordon Brown ever touched it seems.
I didn't realise that student loan interest rates were 6%. That's actually daylight robbery.
Someone said earlier that early repayment was penalised - I forget whom. Is this literally true, or just the nature of the thing whereby debts are written off after n years of time or age?
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
For all of the flap, the change in tuition fees was a positive step in allowing poorer students access. Instead of fees up front it was hypothecated fees when earning.
The issue was funding for universities. With the government contribution to uni teaching cut by 78%, we've seen institutions both get it in the neck for charging the "maximum" £9k a year and offering poor tuition due to a lack of money.
Anyway, think what these £9k fees are. Instead of the government handing money to the universities, it hands it to student loans who pay it to universities. We know that in this era of bankism debt is an asset. How much "asset" was added to bank balance sheets in this way? a very quiet way to keep injecting cash into a broken banking system.
And the funding comes down to the idea that 50% of kids need to go to university. IMV that was always an insane target, and has massively skewed expectations, education and the jobs market.
IMV everything else leads on from that.
Except that sort of figure for Tertiary education is the norm in nearly all competitor economies. It reaches 69% in South Korea. Italy and Germany are the exceptions in the developed world.
Maybe Britons are thicker than other nations, but that doesn't bode well for the future.
The problem perhaps is more the poor quality of many courses, particularly in terms of contact time with students, so little value added.
I think that the cost of Tertiary education is quite inflated in Britain by two factors: Universities use undergraduate fees to subsidise other things, and second that British students want to live a good lifestyle away from home. Few go to nearby Universities. The student loan system barely covers rent, and not even close to that in London and a number of other cities.
Except tertiary education != universities. From your link;
" The World Bank, for example, defines tertiary education as including universities as well as institutions that teach specific capacities of higher learning such as colleges, technical training institutes, community colleges, nursing schools, research laboratories, centers of excellence, and distance learning centers."
That's where we're going wrong. Universities are just one strand of tertiary education, and yet they've grown to dominate. We'd be much better sorted with other types as well, in particular on-job training.
That is pretty much what I said. The problem is not the numbers going, but rather the poor quality of much British Tertiary education, and the emphasis on a partying life away from home.
I'm unsure it is. I talked about he goal of 50% to university, and you talked about tertiary education. These are not, and should not be, the same.
We need plumbers. I see no need for plumbers to go to university; they'd be much better served with an apprenticeship and then a C&G. We have too much university, and not enough apprenticeships and other further education.
One of my brother-in-laws did a three-year technical course in welding at an Irish Institute of Technology. He has plenty of work and a big new house.
My impression is that apprenticeships and C&G in Britain simply aren't working as well as the Irish system. Maybe it's a prestige/class thing? In the same family they have a physics PhD, a music Masters and an MBA - there's no sense that the welder has fallen short as there might be with a British middle class family.
This is another area where the UK's insistence of a uni degree is wrong. If you don't get one, you have somehow failed. And our ability to look down our noses at people based not on their value, but on whether or not they hold a certain piece of paper.
But in the meantime, the increased numbers going to uni have devalued that piece of paper.
So apprentices can cope with the snobbery given their higher bank balances and the fact many can buy a property in their 20s or early 30s (certainly outside London and the South East) unlike most students
Indeed. So why drive kids down the uni route when it won't gain them much? Why 50%? why not 40%? 30%? 20%?
It's a random figure plucked out of Blair's backside because it sounds good. Yet even if it was based on evidence, then there should have been another policy about further education opportunities for those who did not go.
My nephew got the grades to go into uni, but chose to get a job. He's worked hard, and is on a salary much greater than his friends who went. He's probably worked harder than them, and has no student debts. Yet if he was in certain industries, there would be a barrier - a paper ceiling - through which he could not burst. Sometimes that ceiling may be necessary - science, for instance. In most it is not.
Fortunately he's chosen an industry where that is less likely.
Much of the public sector, including local government, seems to require degrees that are unnecessary for the job.
What happened with degrees - from the perspective of a graduate and hirer of staff.
When Blair talked of expanding degree jobs, he was thinking of the type of jobs that Russell Group (and up) are the feeders for.
The massive expansion with the polys was not done in concert with increasing standards. This created a large number of second class (ha) degrees.
Employers did indeed find that they needed more people with high quality degrees - So the Russell Group grew and large numbers of graduates were recruited from overseas.
In the high end jobs, a 2.1 or above from a Russell Group (or overseas equivalent) became mandated by HR. So if you are hiring, you don't get to see other CVs
So, given the volume of graduates, lower skilled jobs, began demanding degrees. Since they could get them. So, people, who in the past wouldn't have had to have a degree had to get one to get the same quality of job they would have got anyway....
So we now have a situation where there are two glass ceilings
Russell Group Degree ________
Former Poly Degree ________
No degree
The irony was, that back in the day when degrees were much rarer, there was at least some possibility of making it to the top without a degree. Now, it is explicitly forbidden.
In one job, we were doing work for a bank. The bank (well their HR) tried to stop one of the team coming in, since their background checks showed no degree....
We have created an absolute caste system.
I can only speak from personal experience; but I don't think that what degree you have is a serious factor, outside of a small amount of companies who do a lot of graduate recruitment. I've worked in Council's, high level private sector companies and the civil service at a senior level: I found a massive mix of routes in; there were oxbridge types alongside people who had done day release at the local poly and just put the time in, following a steady path. There were also quite a few PHD's who had gone in as a career change. No one really cared after the first few years and what uni you went to never came up, apart from a few occasional in jokes between the oxbridge types.
Oh, the degree is a fairly useless filter. Nearly never comes up, except in personal conversation about which places you got drunk in at Uni.
Just that it is very common to use it like this now. Reduces the volume of applications.
As an extra piece of gallows humour - in many HR departments the job of filtering the CVs is so lowly that it goes to the one of the few jobs where HR hires school leavers. So, the person throwing all the non-Russell Group CVs in the bin doesn't have a degree. If they do, it is a Poly degree.
Taking the piss out of people who attended Fenland Polytechnic is important, of course. Particularly asking them which branch of the KGB they report to.
I didn't realise that student loan interest rates were 6%. That's actually daylight robbery.
Someone said earlier that early repayment was penalised - I forget whom. Is this literally true, or just the nature of the thing whereby debts are written off after n years of time or age?
There is no penalty for early repayment like you might have for a mortgage.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
No it doesn't, that's the whole point of tuition fees. We are talking about the difference between the current situation, and one where tuition fees are abolished. In the latter, the checkout lady would certainly notice it in her pay packet.
No she wouldn't. Not with my proposal, indeed her taxes could go down.
The people who benefit from the current system aren't checkout ladies, they're landlords and elderly lawyers and pensioners etc who can earn lots of income without seeing that income taxed at the same rates that others get taxed at.
We're talking about two separate things. Regardless of whether we are using the current tax system, or your tax system, abolishing tuition fees would result in a net cost to the taxpayer of around £8bn a year.
Which is absolutely a rounding error compared to the cost to the exchequer of ensuring the retired, landlords, inheritees etc don't pay the same rate of income tax as those actually working for their income pay.
Just to give a sense of scale, that "rounding error" is about the same as the revenue from the new NI tax hike.
Which again wouldn't have been needed if everyone paid the same share.
Tax everyone on the same income the same rate, regardless of how its earned. Don't punish people for being workers, or punish them even more for being young workers.
Yes, but regardless of what tax system you use, abolishing tuition fees will result in a net cost of £8bn, which will be a noticeable tax increase, at least based on the reaction to the NI one.
It will only be a tax increase for those who aren't paying their share. For those who are paying their share it will be a tax cut.
If you're going to charge for education then charge for education, but if you're going to charge based on earnings then that's income tax. Charging some different rates of income tax than others is not equitable.
Again you are conflating your proposed tax reforms with the narrow point regarding whether or not taxpayers should pay for tuition. If taxpayers are paying for it, regardless of the system, you will be in the situation Charles described right back at the start of this thread.
Taxpayers are already paying for it.
Its just the taxpayers are simply only some of the taxpayers paying a tax surcharge.
Come off it. Only graduates are paying for it, not all taxpayers.
Come off it. Via PAYE some taxpayers are paying for it, not all graduates.
Not all taxpayers are repaying student loans, maybe something like 20-25%? Many more taxpayers would have to foot the bill if tuition fees were abolished, including the checkout lady mentioned at the start.
Not all graduates are paying the graduate tax.
Taxpayers would have a fairer bill if all taxpayers were taxed the same rather than being taxed differently based upon age etc.
Its not a tax. Its repayment of a loan.
It is a tax.
If I am making a loan repayment then I have a fixed amount I repay each month. If I increase my earnings, I don't suddenly start having to pay more out of PAYE as a result.
This is a PAYE tax levied on certain people but not others. If it walks like a tax, and quacks like a tax ...
As a graduate who did not have to have a loan (from the days when IIRC only 9% of the population did degrees) I have some sympathy, but in the days when many more people go into higher education, do you think it appropriate that a plumber who did not go should help to pay for your choice to go to university?
Yes, for the same reason that a childless plumber has to pay for children to go to school too.
If that plumber is earning enough to be paying high taxes then yes their income should be taxed, just as a graduates income should be taxed.
Unless you're going to properly privatise education, rather than have HMRC do it via income taxes, then all income taxes should be applied equitably and consistently.
You make a fair point. I am neutral on the subject as I see it from both sides. I had my higher education paid for by the state, whereas my two kids will have a big loan to pay off. I personally think that perhaps the fairest way would be to have a genuine grad tax, where all of us who are graduates, regardless of when, pay a slightly higher rate of income tax if we earn above a certain level.
I didn't realise that student loan interest rates were 6%. That's actually daylight robbery.
Someone said earlier that early repayment was penalised - I forget whom. Is this literally true, or just the nature of the thing whereby debts are written off after n years of time or age?
It must be the latter. An early repayment penalty just sounds mental, though the Lib Dems really did try their hardest to fuck students for good so nothing would surprise me about this.
I didn't realise that student loan interest rates were 6%. That's actually daylight robbery.
Someone said earlier that early repayment was penalised - I forget whom. Is this literally true, or just the nature of the thing whereby debts are written off after n years of time or age?
It must be the latter. An early repayment penalty just sounds mental, though the Lib Dems really did try their hardest to fuck students for good so nothing would surprise me about this.
Yeah, no penalty
There’s no penalty if you make extra repayments but they are not refundable.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
No it doesn't, that's the whole point of tuition fees. We are talking about the difference between the current situation, and one where tuition fees are abolished. In the latter, the checkout lady would certainly notice it in her pay packet.
No she wouldn't. Not with my proposal, indeed her taxes could go down.
The people who benefit from the current system aren't checkout ladies, they're landlords and elderly lawyers and pensioners etc who can earn lots of income without seeing that income taxed at the same rates that others get taxed at.
We're talking about two separate things. Regardless of whether we are using the current tax system, or your tax system, abolishing tuition fees would result in a net cost to the taxpayer of around £8bn a year.
Which is absolutely a rounding error compared to the cost to the exchequer of ensuring the retired, landlords, inheritees etc don't pay the same rate of income tax as those actually working for their income pay.
Just to give a sense of scale, that "rounding error" is about the same as the revenue from the new NI tax hike.
Which again wouldn't have been needed if everyone paid the same share.
Tax everyone on the same income the same rate, regardless of how its earned. Don't punish people for being workers, or punish them even more for being young workers.
Yes, but regardless of what tax system you use, abolishing tuition fees will result in a net cost of £8bn, which will be a noticeable tax increase, at least based on the reaction to the NI one.
It will only be a tax increase for those who aren't paying their share. For those who are paying their share it will be a tax cut.
If you're going to charge for education then charge for education, but if you're going to charge based on earnings then that's income tax. Charging some different rates of income tax than others is not equitable.
Again you are conflating your proposed tax reforms with the narrow point regarding whether or not taxpayers should pay for tuition. If taxpayers are paying for it, regardless of the system, you will be in the situation Charles described right back at the start of this thread.
Taxpayers are already paying for it.
Its just the taxpayers are simply only some of the taxpayers paying a tax surcharge.
Come off it. Only graduates are paying for it, not all taxpayers.
Come off it. Via PAYE some taxpayers are paying for it, not all graduates.
Not all taxpayers are repaying student loans, maybe something like 20-25%? Many more taxpayers would have to foot the bill if tuition fees were abolished, including the checkout lady mentioned at the start.
Not all graduates are paying the graduate tax.
Taxpayers would have a fairer bill if all taxpayers were taxed the same rather than being taxed differently based upon age etc.
Its not a tax. Its repayment of a loan.
It is a tax.
If I am making a loan repayment then I have a fixed amount I repay each month. If I increase my earnings, I don't suddenly start having to pay more out of PAYE as a result.
This is a PAYE tax levied on certain people but not others. If it walks like a tax, and quacks like a tax ...
No. Its a variable loan repayment. Its not a tax, it never was a tax.
The student loan system is a graduate tax that is structured legally as a loan for political reasons.
But if it walks like a tax, talks like a tax & quacks like a tax then we should call it what it is - a tax on graduates.
It's not a tax on graduates because people like @MaxPB have earnt enough to pay it off. That wouldn't be the case were it a tax, they would need to continue paying it until they were 55 (or whatever the current end date is).
It's also collected via tax code and PAYE because that is the easiest way to ensure it's collected.
An alternative way of doing it (that would probably be an administrative nightmare) would be to give graduates their own tax code, with an additional tax rate to pay for their tuition. You'd raise more from high earners because they couldn't repay it, so you could probably get away with a lower rate overall.
Balanced by the fact high earners abroad have to pay it these days ? That wouldn't be the case with a tax code.
Considering this country has much more immigration than emigration that strikes me as a really weird reason it needs to be done this way. If it were a 1% tax paid by everyone, instead of a 9% tax paid by a few, then graduates who go abroad wouldn't pay true - but surely many more graduates who come from abroad would pay which more than makes up for it?
Hypothecated taxes are a poor idea. They might sound good to voters but in general they are inefficient and we saw that with the idiotic 0.7% aid target. All that happened is aid money got pissed away because they had to spend it.
I'm all for funding tertiary education properly and funding high value degrees out of general taxation, a hypothecated fund will just result in university fat cats getting rich.
Completely agreed.
There shouldn't be any hypothecated taxes, I was just trying to address the issue of there 'having to be a tax rise' if the graduate tax were to be abolished. That tax rise could just be set at the current threshold, if so.
The current graduate tax system has completely screwed young graduates and warped the university sector. Its a failure, like everything else Gordon Brown ever touched it seems.
I would add that there should be a sliding scale of state funding based on the *quality* of the degree - and find some way to assess that independent of the rest of the University sector.
Flog crap degrees if you want. If you want me to pay for them, they better be fucking awesome.
Passed three petrol station on way to the gym - all out of fuel. I hear that the closest motorway (M1) service station is out too.
My in-laws have their 50th Anniversary Party this Saturday, with people travelling by car 100 miles each way from London, similar from Bath and 50 miles from Cambridge.
PB brains trust: What are the chances of the Party having to be cancelled?
Seems to me that the tankers will be in demand everywhere - who knows when the petrol stations will be replenished with fuel? I think there are many like me who haven't panic-bought fuel but will be quick off the mark should fuel become available so I can see this dragging on for weeks.
Many in the countryside live 15 miles + from nearest petrol station - do they risk a journey on spec for fuel? I think not. Quasi-lockdown I guess.
The problem is that the wrong kind of people are buying petrol.
The wrong kind of people will soon have nowhere left to store it.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
For all of the flap, the change in tuition fees was a positive step in allowing poorer students access. Instead of fees up front it was hypothecated fees when earning.
The issue was funding for universities. With the government contribution to uni teaching cut by 78%, we've seen institutions both get it in the neck for charging the "maximum" £9k a year and offering poor tuition due to a lack of money.
Anyway, think what these £9k fees are. Instead of the government handing money to the universities, it hands it to student loans who pay it to universities. We know that in this era of bankism debt is an asset. How much "asset" was added to bank balance sheets in this way? a very quiet way to keep injecting cash into a broken banking system.
And the funding comes down to the idea that 50% of kids need to go to university. IMV that was always an insane target, and has massively skewed expectations, education and the jobs market.
IMV everything else leads on from that.
Except that sort of figure for Tertiary education is the norm in nearly all competitor economies. It reaches 69% in South Korea. Italy and Germany are the exceptions in the developed world.
Maybe Britons are thicker than other nations, but that doesn't bode well for the future.
The problem perhaps is more the poor quality of many courses, particularly in terms of contact time with students, so little value added.
I think that the cost of Tertiary education is quite inflated in Britain by two factors: Universities use undergraduate fees to subsidise other things, and second that British students want to live a good lifestyle away from home. Few go to nearby Universities. The student loan system barely covers rent, and not even close to that in London and a number of other cities.
Except tertiary education != universities. From your link;
" The World Bank, for example, defines tertiary education as including universities as well as institutions that teach specific capacities of higher learning such as colleges, technical training institutes, community colleges, nursing schools, research laboratories, centers of excellence, and distance learning centers."
That's where we're going wrong. Universities are just one strand of tertiary education, and yet they've grown to dominate. We'd be much better sorted with other types as well, in particular on-job training.
That is pretty much what I said. The problem is not the numbers going, but rather the poor quality of much British Tertiary education, and the emphasis on a partying life away from home.
I'm unsure it is. I talked about he goal of 50% to university, and you talked about tertiary education. These are not, and should not be, the same.
We need plumbers. I see no need for plumbers to go to university; they'd be much better served with an apprenticeship and then a C&G. We have too much university, and not enough apprenticeships and other further education.
One of my brother-in-laws did a three-year technical course in welding at an Irish Institute of Technology. He has plenty of work and a big new house.
My impression is that apprenticeships and C&G in Britain simply aren't working as well as the Irish system. Maybe it's a prestige/class thing? In the same family they have a physics PhD, a music Masters and an MBA - there's no sense that the welder has fallen short as there might be with a British middle class family.
This is another area where the UK's insistence of a uni degree is wrong. If you don't get one, you have somehow failed. And our ability to look down our noses at people based not on their value, but on whether or not they hold a certain piece of paper.
But in the meantime, the increased numbers going to uni have devalued that piece of paper.
So apprentices can cope with the snobbery given their higher bank balances and the fact many can buy a property in their 20s or early 30s (certainly outside London and the South East) unlike most students
Indeed. So why drive kids down the uni route when it won't gain them much? Why 50%? why not 40%? 30%? 20%?
It's a random figure plucked out of Blair's backside because it sounds good. Yet even if it was based on evidence, then there should have been another policy about further education opportunities for those who did not go.
My nephew got the grades to go into uni, but chose to get a job. He's worked hard, and is on a salary much greater than his friends who went. He's probably worked harder than them, and has no student debts. Yet if he was in certain industries, there would be a barrier - a paper ceiling - through which he could not burst. Sometimes that ceiling may be necessary - science, for instance. In most it is not.
Fortunately he's chosen an industry where that is less likely.
Much of the public sector, including local government, seems to require degrees that are unnecessary for the job.
What happened with degrees - from the perspective of a graduate and hirer of staff.
When Blair talked of expanding degree jobs, he was thinking of the type of jobs that Russell Group (and up) are the feeders for.
The massive expansion with the polys was not done in concert with increasing standards. This created a large number of second class (ha) degrees.
Employers did indeed find that they needed more people with high quality degrees - So the Russell Group grew and large numbers of graduates were recruited from overseas.
In the high end jobs, a 2.1 or above from a Russell Group (or overseas equivalent) became mandated by HR. So if you are hiring, you don't get to see other CVs
So, given the volume of graduates, lower skilled jobs, began demanding degrees. Since they could get them. So, people, who in the past wouldn't have had to have a degree had to get one to get the same quality of job they would have got anyway....
So we now have a situation where there are two glass ceilings
Russell Group Degree ________
Former Poly Degree ________
No degree
The irony was, that back in the day when degrees were much rarer, there was at least some possibility of making it to the top without a degree. Now, it is explicitly forbidden.
In one job, we were doing work for a bank. The bank (well their HR) tried to stop one of the team coming in, since their background checks showed no degree....
We have created an absolute caste system.
I can only speak from personal experience; but I don't think that what degree you have is a serious factor, outside of a small amount of companies who do a lot of graduate recruitment. I've worked in Council's, high level private sector companies and the civil service at a senior level: I found a massive mix of routes in; there were oxbridge types alongside people who had done day release at the local poly and just put the time in, following a steady path. There were also quite a few PHD's who had gone in as a career change. No one really cared after the first few years and what uni you went to never came up, apart from a few occasional in jokes between the oxbridge types.
Oh, the degree is a fairly useless filter. Nearly never comes up, except in personal conversation about which places you got drunk in at Uni.
Just that it is very common to use it like this now. Reduces the volume of applications.
As an extra piece of gallows humour - in many HR departments the job of filtering the CVs is so lowly that it goes to the one of the few jobs where HR hires school leavers. So, the person throwing all the non-Russell Group CVs in the bin doesn't have a degree. If they do, it is a Poly degree.
Taking the piss out of people who attended Fenland Polytechnic is important, of course. Particularly asking them which branch of the KGB they report to.
Passed three petrol station on way to the gym - all out of fuel. I hear that the closest motorway (M1) service station is out too.
My in-laws have their 50th Anniversary Party this Saturday, with people travelling by car 100 miles each way from London, similar from Bath and 50 miles from Cambridge.
PB brains trust: What are the chances of the Party having to be cancelled?
Seems to me that the tankers will be in demand everywhere - who knows when the petrol stations will be replenished with fuel? I think there are many like me who haven't panic-bought fuel but will be quick off the mark should fuel become available so I can see this dragging on for weeks.
Many in the countryside live 15 miles + from nearest petrol station - do they risk a journey on spec for fuel? I think not. Quasi-lockdown I guess.
The problem is that the wrong kind of people are buying petrol.
The wrong kind of people will soon have nowhere left to store it.
Labour pledging to scrap business tax? A couple of weeks ago the Tories invented a new tax?
Anyway, another policy reason to keep Labour out of power, they shouldn’t promise what they can’t deliver. This policy promise is undeliverable. Miles behind the Tories on economic credibility because of big brush strokes fantasy policy like this.
Labour are focussing on old battles relating to high business rates on the high street.
In reality it means they now need to find another £15bn to fill alongside the existing holes. Which shows how stupid they are as they are re-opening new battle fronts without paying attention to the existing battle fronts where they could easily win votes.
I'm getting less and less impressed with the Labour party leadership ever single day.
I don't agree with you. The aim of Labour's proposals today is to shift the burden of taxation from SMEs that occupy the nation's high streets to digital companies that occupy the nation's phones and computers. One of the major problems in the Red Wall, and elsewhere, is that town centres are dying on their feet, making towns less appealing to live in, and destroying the sense of community. If getting rid of business rates can reverse this trend, this would be 'levelling-up' in action. The playing field between Amazon and high-street retailers needs to be levelled. It's a good policy.
I agree with you that its a good idea, except they've got no clue it seems as to how they would do so. So they're saying it will be done but we're to take it on faith that they'll have a way to do it.
As it happens I agree that its the beginnings of a good policy, they're at least on the right path! That's something at least and I'll give them credit for that, first time in many years as either in Shadow or in office that Labour's Chancellor spokesperson seems to understand something about the issues in economy.
But I'll wait before saying its a good policy until the policy is actually formulated and not just "this sounds good" but without details. To be fair though years before the election "this sounds good" but without details is an OK starting point and better than what Labour have had for many years!
Thanks. As you're broadly sympathetic to the aims, I expect the Tories (yes, I know you're not one) to nick it any time soon.
I seem to remember when I was drafting a possible policy agenda for SKS that this was one of my suggestions. I think that there is quite a compelling case to try and rebalance the tax demands between bricks and clicks. Shops are not only a good source of employment, they keep our city centres vibrant and are more accessible to the elderly etc.
But you cannot simply abolish £15bn of tax revenues without having an alternative when we already have an unsustainable deficit. That is just lazy.
This is the issue here - you need to understand what you plan to tax, why you plan to do so and how you plan to do so.
You also when talking about retail need to understand why people purchase stuff online and it's usually for reasons where the high street could never compete.
Only after that can you start talking about how you will give people tax breaks as otherwise it's a question of where are you going to get that £xbn from.
And there are serious amount of structural issues within our tax system but there isn't any easy solutions as all changes will impact people's behaviour and that might have unintended consequences.
But the first part of the policy ought to make it easier to repurpose high street properties large numbers of which are just sitting vacant.
The easiest shift would be to add 2.5% to VAT (raising £16.5m based on 19/20 total VAT receipts of £130bn)
Spend £15bn of that to reduce business rates. In theory that should keep the ultimate payer (the retail customer) the same while giving the high street store more flexibility to cut their prices if they want
(And it includes a crafty £1bn tax increase)
The Tories love increasing VAT.
I thought you’d be a fan of reducing unnecessary consumption
But VAT is applied to necessary consumption. And is regressive.
However, you are correct to think that I would like to see a reduction in consumption for consumption's sake. We had a glimpse of that thanks to Covid, but now society is fretting about the availability of Christmas tat and ridiculous quantities of food that is way beyond what anyone needs to eat.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
No it doesn't, that's the whole point of tuition fees. We are talking about the difference between the current situation, and one where tuition fees are abolished. In the latter, the checkout lady would certainly notice it in her pay packet.
No she wouldn't. Not with my proposal, indeed her taxes could go down.
The people who benefit from the current system aren't checkout ladies, they're landlords and elderly lawyers and pensioners etc who can earn lots of income without seeing that income taxed at the same rates that others get taxed at.
We're talking about two separate things. Regardless of whether we are using the current tax system, or your tax system, abolishing tuition fees would result in a net cost to the taxpayer of around £8bn a year.
Which is absolutely a rounding error compared to the cost to the exchequer of ensuring the retired, landlords, inheritees etc don't pay the same rate of income tax as those actually working for their income pay.
Just to give a sense of scale, that "rounding error" is about the same as the revenue from the new NI tax hike.
Which again wouldn't have been needed if everyone paid the same share.
Tax everyone on the same income the same rate, regardless of how its earned. Don't punish people for being workers, or punish them even more for being young workers.
Yes, but regardless of what tax system you use, abolishing tuition fees will result in a net cost of £8bn, which will be a noticeable tax increase, at least based on the reaction to the NI one.
It will only be a tax increase for those who aren't paying their share. For those who are paying their share it will be a tax cut.
If you're going to charge for education then charge for education, but if you're going to charge based on earnings then that's income tax. Charging some different rates of income tax than others is not equitable.
Again you are conflating your proposed tax reforms with the narrow point regarding whether or not taxpayers should pay for tuition. If taxpayers are paying for it, regardless of the system, you will be in the situation Charles described right back at the start of this thread.
Taxpayers are already paying for it.
Its just the taxpayers are simply only some of the taxpayers paying a tax surcharge.
Come off it. Only graduates are paying for it, not all taxpayers.
Come off it. Via PAYE some taxpayers are paying for it, not all graduates.
Not all taxpayers are repaying student loans, maybe something like 20-25%? Many more taxpayers would have to foot the bill if tuition fees were abolished, including the checkout lady mentioned at the start.
Not all graduates are paying the graduate tax.
Taxpayers would have a fairer bill if all taxpayers were taxed the same rather than being taxed differently based upon age etc.
Its not a tax. Its repayment of a loan.
It is a tax.
If I am making a loan repayment then I have a fixed amount I repay each month. If I increase my earnings, I don't suddenly start having to pay more out of PAYE as a result.
This is a PAYE tax levied on certain people but not others. If it walks like a tax, and quacks like a tax ...
No. Its a variable loan repayment. Its not a tax, it never was a tax.
The student loan system is a graduate tax that is structured legally as a loan for political reasons.
But if it walks like a tax, talks like a tax & quacks like a tax then we should call it what it is - a tax on graduates.
It's not a tax on graduates because people like @MaxPB have earnt enough to pay it off. That wouldn't be the case were it a tax, they would need to continue paying it until they were 55 (or whatever the current end date is).
It's also collected via tax code and PAYE because that is the easiest way to ensure it's collected.
An alternative way of doing it (that would probably be an administrative nightmare) would be to give graduates their own tax code, with an additional tax rate to pay for their tuition. You'd raise more from high earners because they couldn't repay it, so you could probably get away with a lower rate overall.
Balanced by the fact high earners abroad have to pay it these days ? That wouldn't be the case with a tax code.
Considering this country has much more immigration than emigration that strikes me as a really weird reason it needs to be done this way. If it were a 1% tax paid by everyone, instead of a 9% tax paid by a few, then graduates who go abroad wouldn't pay true - but surely many more graduates who come from abroad would pay which more than makes up for it?
Hypothecated taxes are a poor idea. They might sound good to voters but in general they are inefficient and we saw that with the idiotic 0.7% aid target. All that happened is aid money got pissed away because they had to spend it.
I'm all for funding tertiary education properly and funding high value degrees out of general taxation, a hypothecated fund will just result in university fat cats getting rich.
Completely agreed.
There shouldn't be any hypothecated taxes, I was just trying to address the issue of there 'having to be a tax rise' if the graduate tax were to be abolished. That tax rise could just be set at the current threshold, if so.
The current graduate tax system has completely screwed young graduates and warped the university sector. Its a failure, like everything else Gordon Brown ever touched it seems.
I would add that there should be a sliding scale of state funding based on the *quality* of the degree - and find some way to assess that independent of the rest of the University sector.
Flog crap degrees if you want. If you want me to pay for them, they better be fucking awesome.
Which is fine to a point because eventually you have some state/public advisory body picking winners. Would anyone have picked AI as a funded degree 20 years ago? Yet here we are, a nation at the forefront of AI because loads of students studied AI 20 years ago for £1k per year under the old system at UMIST and Imperial who offered courses.
Still got this really bad cold after about a week. It might be because people didn't get the usual immunity to colds last year because they were not mixing with others in the usual way.
Yeah, same for me. The strange thing is that I can't imagine where I caught it. We were on holiday in the Lake District at the time I caught it, walking the fells during the day without meeting anyone at all other than a brief greeting to the small number of other walkers we met. The only indoor contact we had was at breakfast and dinner in the small hotel where we were staying, where everything was well socially-distanced, staff all wearing masks, and no-one coughing, sneezing or even sniffling.
Makes me think all the performative covid theatre is in fact pretty useless at stopping transmission of respiratory viruses, and has been all along...
On the discussion of fees one of the lesser talked about but just as malign effects of the £9k per year is that universities treat students like customers and students themselves have become customers and the dynamic has become "the customer is always right" and student power has now become overwhelming when most of the time they need to be told to get back in their box.
My wife did some tutorials for undergraduates when she was doing her PhD and she remarked on a change in attitude from students - an expectation that they've paid for a good degree and they expected the staff to provide a good degree, but they shouldn't have to do the reading and thinking necessary to achieve it.
You see this attitude everywhere. It's a clear sign of how completely Thatcherism was victorious. So, on the current series of "Married At First Sight UK" several of the wives have complained that the husbands chosen for them, "aren't what I ordered." You see it in how quickly fans turn against the manager of their team when there are a few bad results. It's there in the panic-buying and the outrage at a lack of chicken at KFC.
We even see it with membership of political parties, which are rapidly becoming fan clubs of the current leader, rather than associations of members united by a broad common ideology. When a member receives a leader or policy that they don't support they ask for a refund and walk away, instead of staying to argue their position.
This is why I've come to think that Cameron's Big Society was a once-in-a-generation missed opportunity for Labour. Here we had a policy that would encourage people to work together, to have practical experience of the value of cooperating with others, that would bring people from different social bubbles into contact, so that they would find they had more in common than they thought.
This sort of experience would encourage people to think, act - and vote! - in a more cooperative and collective way. It had the potential to turn the tide on Thatcherism and rampant consumerism.
Labour were so short sighted that they could only see a fig leaf for austerity and they missed out on a chance to shift the centre of political gravity in a more collective direction. Imagine how things might be different if they'd embraced the idea and made it their own.
A strong society that trusts each other would be less prone to rush to panic buy. The individualists who blame everyone else for every ill will rush to panic buy in the sure knowledge that if they don't do so first others will.
This is why I think Labour's problems are so serious and go far beyond the identity of their leader, or the weakness of the shadow cabinet. It's also why Blair's victories were ultimately pyrrhic. His leadership undermined the philosophical basis of the party he lead. And it also means the resurgence of the SPD in Germany is unlikely to herald a renaissance for the Left in Britain.
I didn't realise that student loan interest rates were 6%. That's actually daylight robbery.
Someone said earlier that early repayment was penalised - I forget whom. Is this literally true, or just the nature of the thing whereby debts are written off after n years of time or age?
It must be the latter. An early repayment penalty just sounds mental, though the Lib Dems really did try their hardest to fuck students for good so nothing would surprise me about this.
Yeah, no penalty
There’s no penalty if you make extra repayments but they are not refundable.
That does presumably assume that one is confident of maintaining one's income abovce a certain level for a certain number of years. Also that there are no better or more urgent investment opportunities (deposit for house, first baby etc.)
Passed three petrol station on way to the gym - all out of fuel. I hear that the closest motorway (M1) service station is out too.
My in-laws have their 50th Anniversary Party this Saturday, with people travelling by car 100 miles each way from London, similar from Bath and 50 miles from Cambridge.
PB brains trust: What are the chances of the Party having to be cancelled?
Seems to me that the tankers will be in demand everywhere - who knows when the petrol stations will be replenished with fuel? I think there are many like me who haven't panic-bought fuel but will be quick off the mark should fuel become available so I can see this dragging on for weeks.
Many in the countryside live 15 miles + from nearest petrol station - do they risk a journey on spec for fuel? I think not. Quasi-lockdown I guess.
The problem is that the wrong kind of people are buying petrol.
The wrong kind of people will soon have nowhere left to store it.
In the bath, maybe.....
The govt says that if everyone just bought £20 of petrol every week as per usual we'd be fine.
I didn't realise that student loan interest rates were 6%. That's actually daylight robbery.
Someone said earlier that early repayment was penalised - I forget whom. Is this literally true, or just the nature of the thing whereby debts are written off after n years of time or age?
It's the latter. For most graduates, if they pay back a small proportion early, that repayment will get swallowed up in the 6% interest on the remainder and they'll have wasted it. Conversely, if you're a young lawyer earning £120K+ a year, you can pay the whole thing off early and save yourself loads in the longer term. But you need to pay it all, or substantially all, off.
It is a tax/loan (a bit of both, really) with the most perverse attributes, and very few graduates understand it. For example, changing the interest rate would make very little difference for the vast majority of graduates, who will never pay it off anyway; for them, the interest rate only affects the notional remaining value which gets written off at the end. Reducing the interest rate would only benefit the small number of very high earners who have a sporting chance of eventually paying it off.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
No it doesn't, that's the whole point of tuition fees. We are talking about the difference between the current situation, and one where tuition fees are abolished. In the latter, the checkout lady would certainly notice it in her pay packet.
No she wouldn't. Not with my proposal, indeed her taxes could go down.
The people who benefit from the current system aren't checkout ladies, they're landlords and elderly lawyers and pensioners etc who can earn lots of income without seeing that income taxed at the same rates that others get taxed at.
We're talking about two separate things. Regardless of whether we are using the current tax system, or your tax system, abolishing tuition fees would result in a net cost to the taxpayer of around £8bn a year.
Which is absolutely a rounding error compared to the cost to the exchequer of ensuring the retired, landlords, inheritees etc don't pay the same rate of income tax as those actually working for their income pay.
Just to give a sense of scale, that "rounding error" is about the same as the revenue from the new NI tax hike.
Which again wouldn't have been needed if everyone paid the same share.
Tax everyone on the same income the same rate, regardless of how its earned. Don't punish people for being workers, or punish them even more for being young workers.
Yes, but regardless of what tax system you use, abolishing tuition fees will result in a net cost of £8bn, which will be a noticeable tax increase, at least based on the reaction to the NI one.
It will only be a tax increase for those who aren't paying their share. For those who are paying their share it will be a tax cut.
If you're going to charge for education then charge for education, but if you're going to charge based on earnings then that's income tax. Charging some different rates of income tax than others is not equitable.
Again you are conflating your proposed tax reforms with the narrow point regarding whether or not taxpayers should pay for tuition. If taxpayers are paying for it, regardless of the system, you will be in the situation Charles described right back at the start of this thread.
Taxpayers are already paying for it.
Its just the taxpayers are simply only some of the taxpayers paying a tax surcharge.
Come off it. Only graduates are paying for it, not all taxpayers.
Come off it. Via PAYE some taxpayers are paying for it, not all graduates.
Not all taxpayers are repaying student loans, maybe something like 20-25%? Many more taxpayers would have to foot the bill if tuition fees were abolished, including the checkout lady mentioned at the start.
Not all graduates are paying the graduate tax.
Taxpayers would have a fairer bill if all taxpayers were taxed the same rather than being taxed differently based upon age etc.
Its not a tax. Its repayment of a loan.
It is a tax.
If I am making a loan repayment then I have a fixed amount I repay each month. If I increase my earnings, I don't suddenly start having to pay more out of PAYE as a result.
This is a PAYE tax levied on certain people but not others. If it walks like a tax, and quacks like a tax ...
No. Its a variable loan repayment. Its not a tax, it never was a tax.
Its charged by HMRC via PAYE and is paid in the same lump of money to HMRC as all other income taxes. Its a tax every bit as much as National Insurance and Income Tax is a tax.
Its a hypothecated and limited tax, but it absolutely 100% is a tax.
The clue is in the title ... Student Loan.....
You must be a marketeers delight if you believe what something is called is what it actually is.
Petrol anecdote. My Bucks village has a small petrol station with 4 pumps. It is located on a main route through it with an infant school at one end and the juniors at the other. This route has cars parked along it for people who live on the road making it often 1-way only at a time which normally is no problem as traffic is quite light. At the end by the junior school is a mini-roundabout which has had a water leak for the last week and traffic lights were put in whilst they fixed it.
This morning at school drop-off time we had:
Torrential rain causing more people to drive who would otherwise walk to do the school run
Bin collection day as the rubbish lorry slowly makes its way along the streets
Drivers coming from outside of our village to get fuel as they had heard it still had supplies
Temporary traffic lights on the roundabout not working
Queues forming outside the petrol station going in both directions, blocking traffic trying to get from one school to the other (due to cars parked on the road)
It was absolute mayhem. Traffic snarled up everywhere. Even though I was getting drenched in the downpour on my walking school run I felt quietly smug. Then I remembered that both our cars have tanks only 1/4 full of petrol and we will at some point need to drive. I refuse to become someone who panic buys when I have no immediate need. I will need some petrol in the next few days. I am still expecting in 2 days time that everyone will have filled up and the panic will cease.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
For all of the flap, the change in tuition fees was a positive step in allowing poorer students access. Instead of fees up front it was hypothecated fees when earning.
The issue was funding for universities. With the government contribution to uni teaching cut by 78%, we've seen institutions both get it in the neck for charging the "maximum" £9k a year and offering poor tuition due to a lack of money.
Anyway, think what these £9k fees are. Instead of the government handing money to the universities, it hands it to student loans who pay it to universities. We know that in this era of bankism debt is an asset. How much "asset" was added to bank balance sheets in this way? a very quiet way to keep injecting cash into a broken banking system.
And the funding comes down to the idea that 50% of kids need to go to university. IMV that was always an insane target, and has massively skewed expectations, education and the jobs market.
IMV everything else leads on from that.
Except that sort of figure for Tertiary education is the norm in nearly all competitor economies. It reaches 69% in South Korea. Italy and Germany are the exceptions in the developed world.
Maybe Britons are thicker than other nations, but that doesn't bode well for the future.
The problem perhaps is more the poor quality of many courses, particularly in terms of contact time with students, so little value added.
I think that the cost of Tertiary education is quite inflated in Britain by two factors: Universities use undergraduate fees to subsidise other things, and second that British students want to live a good lifestyle away from home. Few go to nearby Universities. The student loan system barely covers rent, and not even close to that in London and a number of other cities.
Except tertiary education != universities. From your link;
" The World Bank, for example, defines tertiary education as including universities as well as institutions that teach specific capacities of higher learning such as colleges, technical training institutes, community colleges, nursing schools, research laboratories, centers of excellence, and distance learning centers."
That's where we're going wrong. Universities are just one strand of tertiary education, and yet they've grown to dominate. We'd be much better sorted with other types as well, in particular on-job training.
That is pretty much what I said. The problem is not the numbers going, but rather the poor quality of much British Tertiary education, and the emphasis on a partying life away from home.
I'm unsure it is. I talked about he goal of 50% to university, and you talked about tertiary education. These are not, and should not be, the same.
We need plumbers. I see no need for plumbers to go to university; they'd be much better served with an apprenticeship and then a C&G. We have too much university, and not enough apprenticeships and other further education.
One of my brother-in-laws did a three-year technical course in welding at an Irish Institute of Technology. He has plenty of work and a big new house.
My impression is that apprenticeships and C&G in Britain simply aren't working as well as the Irish system. Maybe it's a prestige/class thing? In the same family they have a physics PhD, a music Masters and an MBA - there's no sense that the welder has fallen short as there might be with a British middle class family.
This is another area where the UK's insistence of a uni degree is wrong. If you don't get one, you have somehow failed. And our ability to look down our noses at people based not on their value, but on whether or not they hold a certain piece of paper.
But in the meantime, the increased numbers going to uni have devalued that piece of paper.
So apprentices can cope with the snobbery given their higher bank balances and the fact many can buy a property in their 20s or early 30s (certainly outside London and the South East) unlike most students
Indeed. So why drive kids down the uni route when it won't gain them much? Why 50%? why not 40%? 30%? 20%?
It's a random figure plucked out of Blair's backside because it sounds good. Yet even if it was based on evidence, then there should have been another policy about further education opportunities for those who did not go.
My nephew got the grades to go into uni, but chose to get a job. He's worked hard, and is on a salary much greater than his friends who went. He's probably worked harder than them, and has no student debts. Yet if he was in certain industries, there would be a barrier - a paper ceiling - through which he could not burst. Sometimes that ceiling may be necessary - science, for instance. In most it is not.
Fortunately he's chosen an industry where that is less likely.
Much of the public sector, including local government, seems to require degrees that are unnecessary for the job.
What happened with degrees - from the perspective of a graduate and hirer of staff.
When Blair talked of expanding degree jobs, he was thinking of the type of jobs that Russell Group (and up) are the feeders for.
The massive expansion with the polys was not done in concert with increasing standards. This created a large number of second class (ha) degrees.
Employers did indeed find that they needed more people with high quality degrees - So the Russell Group grew and large numbers of graduates were recruited from overseas.
In the high end jobs, a 2.1 or above from a Russell Group (or overseas equivalent) became mandated by HR. So if you are hiring, you don't get to see other CVs
So, given the volume of graduates, lower skilled jobs, began demanding degrees. Since they could get them. So, people, who in the past wouldn't have had to have a degree had to get one to get the same quality of job they would have got anyway....
So we now have a situation where there are two glass ceilings
Russell Group Degree ________
Former Poly Degree ________
No degree
The irony was, that back in the day when degrees were much rarer, there was at least some possibility of making it to the top without a degree. Now, it is explicitly forbidden.
In one job, we were doing work for a bank. The bank (well their HR) tried to stop one of the team coming in, since their background checks showed no degree....
We have created an absolute caste system.
I can only speak from personal experience; but I don't think that what degree you have is a serious factor, outside of a small amount of companies who do a lot of graduate recruitment. I've worked in Council's, high level private sector companies and the civil service at a senior level: I found a massive mix of routes in; there were oxbridge types alongside people who had done day release at the local poly and just put the time in, following a steady path. There were also quite a few PHD's who had gone in as a career change. No one really cared after the first few years and what uni you went to never came up, apart from a few occasional in jokes between the oxbridge types.
I know quite a number of people who have had very high powered careers have been to polys., and one multi-millionaire entrepreneur. I also know a few failures that went to Oxbridge. Companies that only hire Russell group grads are extremely foolish. They end up with a severe lack of diversity that results in groupthink and stagnation. Oxbridge may have a high percentage of fine minds, but it doesn't have a monopoly.
Labour pledging to scrap business tax? A couple of weeks ago the Tories invented a new tax?
Anyway, another policy reason to keep Labour out of power, they shouldn’t promise what they can’t deliver. This policy promise is undeliverable. Miles behind the Tories on economic credibility because of big brush strokes fantasy policy like this.
Labour are focussing on old battles relating to high business rates on the high street.
In reality it means they now need to find another £15bn to fill alongside the existing holes. Which shows how stupid they are as they are re-opening new battle fronts without paying attention to the existing battle fronts where they could easily win votes.
I'm getting less and less impressed with the Labour party leadership ever single day.
I don't agree with you. The aim of Labour's proposals today is to shift the burden of taxation from SMEs that occupy the nation's high streets to digital companies that occupy the nation's phones and computers. One of the major problems in the Red Wall, and elsewhere, is that town centres are dying on their feet, making towns less appealing to live in, and destroying the sense of community. If getting rid of business rates can reverse this trend, this would be 'levelling-up' in action. The playing field between Amazon and high-street retailers needs to be levelled. It's a good policy.
I agree with you that its a good idea, except they've got no clue it seems as to how they would do so. So they're saying it will be done but we're to take it on faith that they'll have a way to do it.
As it happens I agree that its the beginnings of a good policy, they're at least on the right path! That's something at least and I'll give them credit for that, first time in many years as either in Shadow or in office that Labour's Chancellor spokesperson seems to understand something about the issues in economy.
But I'll wait before saying its a good policy until the policy is actually formulated and not just "this sounds good" but without details. To be fair though years before the election "this sounds good" but without details is an OK starting point and better than what Labour have had for many years!
Thanks. As you're broadly sympathetic to the aims, I expect the Tories (yes, I know you're not one) to nick it any time soon.
I seem to remember when I was drafting a possible policy agenda for SKS that this was one of my suggestions. I think that there is quite a compelling case to try and rebalance the tax demands between bricks and clicks. Shops are not only a good source of employment, they keep our city centres vibrant and are more accessible to the elderly etc.
But you cannot simply abolish £15bn of tax revenues without having an alternative when we already have an unsustainable deficit. That is just lazy.
This is the issue here - you need to understand what you plan to tax, why you plan to do so and how you plan to do so.
You also when talking about retail need to understand why people purchase stuff online and it's usually for reasons where the high street could never compete.
Only after that can you start talking about how you will give people tax breaks as otherwise it's a question of where are you going to get that £xbn from.
And there are serious amount of structural issues within our tax system but there isn't any easy solutions as all changes will impact people's behaviour and that might have unintended consequences.
But the first part of the policy ought to make it easier to repurpose high street properties large numbers of which are just sitting vacant.
The easiest shift would be to add 2.5% to VAT (raising £16.5m based on 19/20 total VAT receipts of £130bn)
Spend £15bn of that to reduce business rates. In theory that should keep the ultimate payer (the retail customer) the same while giving the high street store more flexibility to cut their prices if they want
(And it includes a crafty £1bn tax increase)
The Tories love increasing VAT.
I thought you’d be a fan of reducing unnecessary consumption
But VAT is applied to necessary consumption. And is regressive.
However, you are correct to think that I would like to see a reduction in consumption for consumption's sake. We had a glimpse of that thanks to Covid, but now society is fretting about the availability of Christmas tat and ridiculous quantities of food that is way beyond what anyone needs to eat.
Ho, hum.
Yes absolutely. And it's almost time for the distribution of the "How You Should Spend Your Christmas" leaflet. What is publication date for this year's edition?
Passed three petrol station on way to the gym - all out of fuel. I hear that the closest motorway (M1) service station is out too.
My in-laws have their 50th Anniversary Party this Saturday, with people travelling by car 100 miles each way from London, similar from Bath and 50 miles from Cambridge.
PB brains trust: What are the chances of the Party having to be cancelled?
Seems to me that the tankers will be in demand everywhere - who knows when the petrol stations will be replenished with fuel? I think there are many like me who haven't panic-bought fuel but will be quick off the mark should fuel become available so I can see this dragging on for weeks.
Many in the countryside live 15 miles + from nearest petrol station - do they risk a journey on spec for fuel? I think not. Quasi-lockdown I guess.
The problem is that the wrong kind of people are buying petrol.
The wrong kind of people will soon have nowhere left to store it.
In the bath, maybe.....
The govt says that if everyone just bought £20 of petrol every week as per usual we'd be fine.
Does anyone do that?
No. Always run to 1/4 of tank to yellow light then fill.
Passed three petrol station on way to the gym - all out of fuel. I hear that the closest motorway (M1) service station is out too.
My in-laws have their 50th Anniversary Party this Saturday, with people travelling by car 100 miles each way from London, similar from Bath and 50 miles from Cambridge.
PB brains trust: What are the chances of the Party having to be cancelled?
Seems to me that the tankers will be in demand everywhere - who knows when the petrol stations will be replenished with fuel? I think there are many like me who haven't panic-bought fuel but will be quick off the mark should fuel become available so I can see this dragging on for weeks.
Many in the countryside live 15 miles + from nearest petrol station - do they risk a journey on spec for fuel? I think not. Quasi-lockdown I guess.
The problem is that the wrong kind of people are buying petrol.
The wrong kind of people will soon have nowhere left to store it.
In the bath, maybe.....
The govt says that if everyone just bought £20 of petrol every week as per usual we'd be fine.
Does anyone do that?
Yes. Last time I saw figures on this, most people do.
I've always filled my tank in full from empty, but most people get £10 or £20 at a time. Though I don't know if cards wiping out cash has changed things.
Its worth noting how often when you go to the pump, that the person before you at the pump stopped it at £20 or so. Its how most people normally use the pumps.
On the discussion of fees one of the lesser talked about but just as malign effects of the £9k per year is that universities treat students like customers and students themselves have become customers and the dynamic has become "the customer is always right" and student power has now become overwhelming when most of the time they need to be told to get back in their box.
My wife did some tutorials for undergraduates when she was doing her PhD and she remarked on a change in attitude from students - an expectation that they've paid for a good degree and they expected the staff to provide a good degree, but they shouldn't have to do the reading and thinking necessary to achieve it.
You see this attitude everywhere. It's a clear sign of how completely Thatcherism was victorious. So, on the current series of "Married At First Sight UK" several of the wives have complained that the husbands chosen for them, "aren't what I ordered." You see it in how quickly fans turn against the manager of their team when there are a few bad results. It's there in the panic-buying and the outrage at a lack of chicken at KFC.
We even see it with membership of political parties, which are rapidly becoming fan clubs of the current leader, rather than associations of members united by a broad common ideology. When a member receives a leader or policy that they don't support they ask for a refund and walk away, instead of staying to argue their position.
This is why I've come to think that Cameron's Big Society was a once-in-a-generation missed opportunity for Labour. Here we had a policy that would encourage people to work together, to have practical experience of the value of cooperating with others, that would bring people from different social bubbles into contact, so that they would find they had more in common than they thought.
This sort of experience would encourage people to think, act - and vote! - in a more cooperative and collective way. It had the potential to turn the tide on Thatcherism and rampant consumerism.
Labour were so short sighted that they could only see a fig leaf for austerity and they missed out on a chance to shift the centre of political gravity in a more collective direction. Imagine how things might be different if they'd embraced the idea and made it their own.
A strong society that trusts each other would be less prone to rush to panic buy. The individualists who blame everyone else for every ill will rush to panic buy in the sure knowledge that if they don't do so first others will.
This is why I think Labour's problems are so serious and go far beyond the identity of their leader, or the weakness of the shadow cabinet. It's also why Blair's victories were ultimately pyrrhic. His leadership undermined the philosophical basis of the party he lead. And it also means the resurgence of the SPD in Germany is unlikely to herald a renaissance for the Left in Britain.
I agree. This is the worst thing about Thatcherism and its legacy.
Passed three petrol station on way to the gym - all out of fuel. I hear that the closest motorway (M1) service station is out too.
My in-laws have their 50th Anniversary Party this Saturday, with people travelling by car 100 miles each way from London, similar from Bath and 50 miles from Cambridge.
PB brains trust: What are the chances of the Party having to be cancelled?
Seems to me that the tankers will be in demand everywhere - who knows when the petrol stations will be replenished with fuel? I think there are many like me who haven't panic-bought fuel but will be quick off the mark should fuel become available so I can see this dragging on for weeks.
Many in the countryside live 15 miles + from nearest petrol station - do they risk a journey on spec for fuel? I think not. Quasi-lockdown I guess.
The problem is that the wrong kind of people are buying petrol.
The wrong kind of people will soon have nowhere left to store it.
In the bath, maybe.....
The govt says that if everyone just bought £20 of petrol every week as per usual we'd be fine.
Does anyone do that?
I heard a petrol station manager a couple of years ago saying the distinctive ways he could spot a recession were, fuel sales in exact multiples of £5 or £10, and sales of scratch cards went up.
Passed three petrol station on way to the gym - all out of fuel. I hear that the closest motorway (M1) service station is out too.
My in-laws have their 50th Anniversary Party this Saturday, with people travelling by car 100 miles each way from London, similar from Bath and 50 miles from Cambridge.
PB brains trust: What are the chances of the Party having to be cancelled?
Seems to me that the tankers will be in demand everywhere - who knows when the petrol stations will be replenished with fuel? I think there are many like me who haven't panic-bought fuel but will be quick off the mark should fuel become available so I can see this dragging on for weeks.
Many in the countryside live 15 miles + from nearest petrol station - do they risk a journey on spec for fuel? I think not. Quasi-lockdown I guess.
Perhaps it's just a cunning plan to get everyone back on public transport? That Boris! He's a 3-D chess genius!
Still got this really bad cold after about a week. It might be because people didn't get the usual immunity to colds last year because they were not mixing with others in the usual way.
One very useful side-effect of mask wearing is you reduce the potential to catch colds and flu quite considerably.
Maybe, but I think those viruses are more effectively spread by fomites than Covid is. So I've managed to catch a cold, despite still having to wear a mask when inside supermarkets, restaurant toilets, etc. My guess is I picked it up via my hands.
Passed three petrol station on way to the gym - all out of fuel. I hear that the closest motorway (M1) service station is out too.
My in-laws have their 50th Anniversary Party this Saturday, with people travelling by car 100 miles each way from London, similar from Bath and 50 miles from Cambridge.
PB brains trust: What are the chances of the Party having to be cancelled?
Seems to me that the tankers will be in demand everywhere - who knows when the petrol stations will be replenished with fuel? I think there are many like me who haven't panic-bought fuel but will be quick off the mark should fuel become available so I can see this dragging on for weeks.
Many in the countryside live 15 miles + from nearest petrol station - do they risk a journey on spec for fuel? I think not. Quasi-lockdown I guess.
The problem is that the wrong kind of people are buying petrol.
The wrong kind of people will soon have nowhere left to store it.
In the bath, maybe.....
The govt says that if everyone just bought £20 of petrol every week as per usual we'd be fine.
Does anyone do that?
Yes. Last time I saw figures on this, most people do.
I've always filled my tank in full from empty, but most people get £10 or £20 at a time. Though I don't know if cards wiping out cash has changed things.
Its worth noting how often when you go to the pump, that the person before you at the pump stopped it at £20 or so. Its how most people normally use the pumps.
When I started driving I did this. £5 at a time, usually. (In the early 90s petrol was less than 50p a litre). Nowadays, on the rare occasions that I try it, I can never stop the dial on a whole number.
I didn't realise that student loan interest rates were 6%. That's actually daylight robbery.
Someone said earlier that early repayment was penalised - I forget whom. Is this literally true, or just the nature of the thing whereby debts are written off after n years of time or age?
It's the latter. For most graduates, if they pay back a small proportion early, that repayment will get swallowed up in the 6% interest on the remainder and they'll have wasted it. Conversely, if you're a young lawyer earning £120K+ a year, you can pay the whole thing off early and save yourself loads in the longer term. But you need to pay it all, or substantially all, off.
It is a tax/loan (a bit of both, really) with the most perverse attributes, and very few graduates understand it. For example, changing the interest rate would make very little difference for the vast majority of graduates, who will never pay it off anyway; for them, the interest rate only affects the notional remaining value which gets written off at the end. Reducing the interest rate would only benefit the small number of very high earners who have a sporting chance of eventually paying it off.
Thanks. So you need a sum of the order of £10K+ to make a decent bite in the loan? - and yet most young professional persons would have much better use for that money right now. Nasty thing. Did the LDs really think that up??
I hadn't paid much attention to it till the subject of a friend's daughter and her windfall of a (somewhat smaller) lump sum from a legacy came up in conversation. I was very surprised when my friend said he'd strongly advise her to put the money aside for a house rather than repay some of the student loan - so contrary to normal good financial advice.
Petrol anecdote. My Bucks village has a small petrol station with 4 pumps. It is located on a main route through it with an infant school at one end and the juniors at the other. This route has cars parked along it for people who live on the road making it often 1-way only at a time which normally is no problem as traffic is quite light. At the end by the junior school is a mini-roundabout which has had a water leak for the last week and traffic lights were put in whilst they fixed it.
This morning at school drop-off time we had:
Torrential rain causing more people to drive who would otherwise walk to do the school run
Bin collection day as the rubbish lorry slowly makes its way along the streets
Drivers coming from outside of our village to get fuel as they had heard it still had supplies
Temporary traffic lights on the roundabout not working
Queues forming outside the petrol station going in both directions, blocking traffic trying to get from one school to the other (due to cars parked on the road)
It was absolute mayhem. Traffic snarled up everywhere. Even though I was getting drenched in the downpour on my walking school run I felt quietly smug. Then I remembered that both our cars have tanks only 1/4 full of petrol and we will at some point need to drive. I refuse to become someone who panic buys when I have no immediate need. I will need some petrol in the next few days. I am still expecting in 2 days time that everyone will have filled up and the panic will cease.
Just like how fusion power is always 10 years away, the end of the distribution crisis is always 2 days hence.
NOTE TO MORRIS DANCER: I AM NOT SAYING THE INTERNAL COMBUSTION ENGINE IS THE SAME AS A FUSION REACTOR.
This will come to an end at some point in not too long unless one of these happens:
Everyone starts driving more than normal and consuming more fuel. I imagine right now people are not making unnecessary journeys just in case
Everyone gets on Amazon and buys jerry cans to fill their garages and sheds with petrol. Is everyone that desperate? Does Amazon have enough? It would also be illegal
Then the only reason for queues will be if everyone decides to fill up with fuel with they are 3/4 full rather than just with 1/4 left. In which case there won't be a shortage of fuel (not that there is now if people bought normally) but instead a shortage of pumps to dispense it.
Passed three petrol station on way to the gym - all out of fuel. I hear that the closest motorway (M1) service station is out too.
My in-laws have their 50th Anniversary Party this Saturday, with people travelling by car 100 miles each way from London, similar from Bath and 50 miles from Cambridge.
PB brains trust: What are the chances of the Party having to be cancelled?
Seems to me that the tankers will be in demand everywhere - who knows when the petrol stations will be replenished with fuel? I think there are many like me who haven't panic-bought fuel but will be quick off the mark should fuel become available so I can see this dragging on for weeks.
Many in the countryside live 15 miles + from nearest petrol station - do they risk a journey on spec for fuel? I think not. Quasi-lockdown I guess.
The problem is that the wrong kind of people are buying petrol.
The wrong kind of people will soon have nowhere left to store it.
In the bath, maybe.....
The govt says that if everyone just bought £20 of petrol every week as per usual we'd be fine.
Does anyone do that?
Our piano teacher does, so it looks like she will be going back to online lessons next week, if she can't get her car filled up in the meantime.
With regard to student loan repayment issue; it is worth reflecting on how we got in to this mess. Many people on here view the coalition years (2010-2015) as a glorious example of strong and mature government. My view to the contrary is that this was the worst government in living history.
The student loans are nothing but a con. The degree courses people were directed in to going on, at £9k per annum to go on were, in a very, very large number of cases, completely and utterly useless and a waste of 3 years of young peoples lives when they could have been doing something economically productive instead. The con gets worse when one looks at the repayment system. The absolute scandal is the interest rates, they are set at RPI, which is 1.5%, not the actual bank of england interest rate which is 0.1%. The interest rate increases to 4.5% when students start earning any significant salary. It is effectively a system of cynical exploitation of young people.
There is a lot of anger about this, it is the one policy area where it is possible to sympathise with people like Andrea Rayner.
So, between 1.5% and 4.5% for unsecured personal debt, where repayments are automatically paused in the event of unemployment, is a bad deal?
And, don't people who choose to do degrees in Film Studies bear some responsibility for their choices? Or do only you get to choose?
Why should eg a successful middle aged lawyer or businessman who owns their own home be on a lower real marginal tax rate than that Film Studies graduate who has a lower income and rent to pay?
Ooo goodie!
Why should a middle aged supermarket check out lady subsidise the teenage son of a QC to spend 3 years drinking his way through a film studies degree?
The middle aged supermarket checkout lady shouldn't have much tax to pay but the QC should so its the QC paying for it not the check out lady ultimately.
I answered your question, now can you answer mine?
I'm sure she'd notice when taxes went up to pay for the £8bn or so needed to fund it.
If my proposal that all income were taxed at the same rate regardless of how it was taxed (so merging NI, Income Tax and graduate tax etc together) then her taxes as a worker ought to be able to go down not up. It would be those living on unearned incomes that see their taxes rise to match those of earned incomes.
Regardless of your tax proposals, she would be paying more tax if the taxpayer had to fund the £8bn a year needed to cover tuition fees.
The taxpayer does have to fund tuition fees as it stands.
However as it stands even relatively low-earning but young graduates have to pay higher taxes, while even high earning older graduates don't have to pay higher taxes.
Its pure age discrimination.
No it doesn't, that's the whole point of tuition fees. We are talking about the difference between the current situation, and one where tuition fees are abolished. In the latter, the checkout lady would certainly notice it in her pay packet.
No she wouldn't. Not with my proposal, indeed her taxes could go down.
The people who benefit from the current system aren't checkout ladies, they're landlords and elderly lawyers and pensioners etc who can earn lots of income without seeing that income taxed at the same rates that others get taxed at.
We're talking about two separate things. Regardless of whether we are using the current tax system, or your tax system, abolishing tuition fees would result in a net cost to the taxpayer of around £8bn a year.
Which is absolutely a rounding error compared to the cost to the exchequer of ensuring the retired, landlords, inheritees etc don't pay the same rate of income tax as those actually working for their income pay.
Just to give a sense of scale, that "rounding error" is about the same as the revenue from the new NI tax hike.
Which again wouldn't have been needed if everyone paid the same share.
Tax everyone on the same income the same rate, regardless of how its earned. Don't punish people for being workers, or punish them even more for being young workers.
Yes, but regardless of what tax system you use, abolishing tuition fees will result in a net cost of £8bn, which will be a noticeable tax increase, at least based on the reaction to the NI one.
It will only be a tax increase for those who aren't paying their share. For those who are paying their share it will be a tax cut.
If you're going to charge for education then charge for education, but if you're going to charge based on earnings then that's income tax. Charging some different rates of income tax than others is not equitable.
Again you are conflating your proposed tax reforms with the narrow point regarding whether or not taxpayers should pay for tuition. If taxpayers are paying for it, regardless of the system, you will be in the situation Charles described right back at the start of this thread.
Taxpayers are already paying for it.
Its just the taxpayers are simply only some of the taxpayers paying a tax surcharge.
Come off it. Only graduates are paying for it, not all taxpayers.
Come off it. Via PAYE some taxpayers are paying for it, not all graduates.
Not all taxpayers are repaying student loans, maybe something like 20-25%? Many more taxpayers would have to foot the bill if tuition fees were abolished, including the checkout lady mentioned at the start.
Not all graduates are paying the graduate tax.
Taxpayers would have a fairer bill if all taxpayers were taxed the same rather than being taxed differently based upon age etc.
Its not a tax. Its repayment of a loan.
It is a tax.
If I am making a loan repayment then I have a fixed amount I repay each month. If I increase my earnings, I don't suddenly start having to pay more out of PAYE as a result.
This is a PAYE tax levied on certain people but not others. If it walks like a tax, and quacks like a tax ...
No. Its a variable loan repayment. Its not a tax, it never was a tax.
The student loan system is a graduate tax that is structured legally as a loan for political reasons.
But if it walks like a tax, talks like a tax & quacks like a tax then we should call it what it is - a tax on graduates.
It's not a tax on graduates because people like @MaxPB have earnt enough to pay it off. That wouldn't be the case were it a tax, they would need to continue paying it until they were 55 (or whatever the current end date is).
It's also collected via tax code and PAYE because that is the easiest way to ensure it's collected.
An alternative way of doing it (that would probably be an administrative nightmare) would be to give graduates their own tax code, with an additional tax rate to pay for their tuition. You'd raise more from high earners because they couldn't repay it, so you could probably get away with a lower rate overall.
Balanced by the fact high earners abroad have to pay it these days ? That wouldn't be the case with a tax code.
Considering this country has much more immigration than emigration that strikes me as a really weird reason it needs to be done this way. If it were a 1% tax paid by everyone, instead of a 9% tax paid by a few, then graduates who go abroad wouldn't pay true - but surely many more graduates who come from abroad would pay which more than makes up for it?
Hypothecated taxes are a poor idea. They might sound good to voters but in general they are inefficient and we saw that with the idiotic 0.7% aid target. All that happened is aid money got pissed away because they had to spend it.
I'm all for funding tertiary education properly and funding high value degrees out of general taxation, a hypothecated fund will just result in university fat cats getting rich.
Completely agreed.
There shouldn't be any hypothecated taxes, I was just trying to address the issue of there 'having to be a tax rise' if the graduate tax were to be abolished. That tax rise could just be set at the current threshold, if so.
The current graduate tax system has completely screwed young graduates and warped the university sector. Its a failure, like everything else Gordon Brown ever touched it seems.
I would add that there should be a sliding scale of state funding based on the *quality* of the degree - and find some way to assess that independent of the rest of the University sector.
Flog crap degrees if you want. If you want me to pay for them, they better be fucking awesome.
Lord save us from those brilliant but narrow minds who think that the only degrees that have value are the ones that are similar to their own.
I didn't realise that student loan interest rates were 6%. That's actually daylight robbery.
Someone said earlier that early repayment was penalised - I forget whom. Is this literally true, or just the nature of the thing whereby debts are written off after n years of time or age?
It's the latter. For most graduates, if they pay back a small proportion early, that repayment will get swallowed up in the 6% interest on the remainder and they'll have wasted it. Conversely, if you're a young lawyer earning £120K+ a year, you can pay the whole thing off early and save yourself loads in the longer term. But you need to pay it all, or substantially all, off.
It is a tax/loan (a bit of both, really) with the most perverse attributes, and very few graduates understand it. For example, changing the interest rate would make very little difference for the vast majority of graduates, who will never pay it off anyway; for them, the interest rate only affects the notional remaining value which gets written off at the end. Reducing the interest rate would only benefit the small number of very high earners who have a sporting chance of eventually paying it off.
Thanks. So you need a sum of the order of £10K+ to make a decent bite in the loan? - and yet most young professional persons would have much better use for that money right now. Nasty thing. Did the LDs really think that up??
I hadn't paid much attention to it till the subject of a friend's daughter and her windfall of a (somewhat smaller) lump sum from a legacy came up in conversation. I was very surprised when my friend said he'd strongly advise her to put the money aside for a house rather than repay some of the student loan - so contrary to normal good financial advice.
Yes, that was almost certainly good advice.
By far the best source for information on Student Loans is Martin Lewis. He writes very clearly on it and the various wrinkles, for example:
Still got this really bad cold after about a week. It might be because people didn't get the usual immunity to colds last year because they were not mixing with others in the usual way.
Yeah, same for me. The strange thing is that I can't imagine where I caught it. We were on holiday in the Lake District at the time I caught it, walking the fells during the day without meeting anyone at all other than a brief greeting to the small number of other walkers we met. The only indoor contact we had was at breakfast and dinner in the small hotel where we were staying, where everything was well socially-distanced, staff all wearing masks, and no-one coughing, sneezing or even sniffling.
Makes me think all the performative covid theatre is in fact pretty useless at stopping transmission of respiratory viruses, and has been all along...
The whole 2m distance thing in indoor settings is pointless. Good ventilation is what matters. Enter an empty room and you can catch a dose from the person who coughed in there 10 minutes earlier.
In a previous job role I used to manage a team based in a distribution centre north of Manchester. Probably what you would classify as Red Wall territory. They were a great bunch, very friendly and down-to-earth but with quite a different background to myself. All except one was female and I considered them great for getting a perspective different from my own. I'm still connected to them on Facebook. In the last few days I have seen them complaining about all the panic buying. Not one word said against Boris or the Tories, they are all blaming the media.
Passed three petrol station on way to the gym - all out of fuel. I hear that the closest motorway (M1) service station is out too.
My in-laws have their 50th Anniversary Party this Saturday, with people travelling by car 100 miles each way from London, similar from Bath and 50 miles from Cambridge.
PB brains trust: What are the chances of the Party having to be cancelled?
Seems to me that the tankers will be in demand everywhere - who knows when the petrol stations will be replenished with fuel? I think there are many like me who haven't panic-bought fuel but will be quick off the mark should fuel become available so I can see this dragging on for weeks.
Many in the countryside live 15 miles + from nearest petrol station - do they risk a journey on spec for fuel? I think not. Quasi-lockdown I guess.
The problem is that the wrong kind of people are buying petrol.
The wrong kind of people will soon have nowhere left to store it.
In the bath, maybe.....
The govt says that if everyone just bought £20 of petrol every week as per usual we'd be fine.
Does anyone do that?
Yes. Last time I saw figures on this, most people do.
I've always filled my tank in full from empty, but most people get £10 or £20 at a time. Though I don't know if cards wiping out cash has changed things.
Its worth noting how often when you go to the pump, that the person before you at the pump stopped it at £20 or so. Its how most people normally use the pumps.
Blimey that's interesting. How do we know this btw?
I didn't realise that student loan interest rates were 6%. That's actually daylight robbery.
Someone said earlier that early repayment was penalised - I forget whom. Is this literally true, or just the nature of the thing whereby debts are written off after n years of time or age?
It's the latter. For most graduates, if they pay back a small proportion early, that repayment will get swallowed up in the 6% interest on the remainder and they'll have wasted it. Conversely, if you're a young lawyer earning £120K+ a year, you can pay the whole thing off early and save yourself loads in the longer term. But you need to pay it all, or substantially all, off.
It is a tax/loan (a bit of both, really) with the most perverse attributes, and very few graduates understand it. For example, changing the interest rate would make very little difference for the vast majority of graduates, who will never pay it off anyway; for them, the interest rate only affects the notional remaining value which gets written off at the end. Reducing the interest rate would only benefit the small number of very high earners who have a sporting chance of eventually paying it off.
Thanks. So you need a sum of the order of £10K+ to make a decent bite in the loan? - and yet most young professional persons would have much better use for that money right now. Nasty thing. Did the LDs really think that up??
I hadn't paid much attention to it till the subject of a friend's daughter and her windfall of a (somewhat smaller) lump sum from a legacy came up in conversation. I was very surprised when my friend said he'd strongly advise her to put the money aside for a house rather than repay some of the student loan - so contrary to normal good financial advice.
Yes, they'd be better off using the money as a deposit for a flat because any reduction in the capital amount will just get eaten up by the ridiculous 6% interest rate for no real gain. In fact the amount of money repaid may actually not go down by as much as £10k if a student were to repay a lump sum given how large loan amounts are and that 6% interest is rolled up and repayments are 9% of earnings above £27k.
Passed three petrol station on way to the gym - all out of fuel. I hear that the closest motorway (M1) service station is out too.
My in-laws have their 50th Anniversary Party this Saturday, with people travelling by car 100 miles each way from London, similar from Bath and 50 miles from Cambridge.
PB brains trust: What are the chances of the Party having to be cancelled?
Seems to me that the tankers will be in demand everywhere - who knows when the petrol stations will be replenished with fuel? I think there are many like me who haven't panic-bought fuel but will be quick off the mark should fuel become available so I can see this dragging on for weeks.
Many in the countryside live 15 miles + from nearest petrol station - do they risk a journey on spec for fuel? I think not. Quasi-lockdown I guess.
The problem is that the wrong kind of people are buying petrol.
The wrong kind of people will soon have nowhere left to store it.
In the bath, maybe.....
The govt says that if everyone just bought £20 of petrol every week as per usual we'd be fine.
Does anyone do that?
Our piano teacher does, so it looks like she will be going back to online lessons next week, if she can't get her car filled up in the meantime.
It'll probably be a relief not to have to put the piano in the back of her mini for a while though eh?
Passed three petrol station on way to the gym - all out of fuel. I hear that the closest motorway (M1) service station is out too.
My in-laws have their 50th Anniversary Party this Saturday, with people travelling by car 100 miles each way from London, similar from Bath and 50 miles from Cambridge.
PB brains trust: What are the chances of the Party having to be cancelled?
Seems to me that the tankers will be in demand everywhere - who knows when the petrol stations will be replenished with fuel? I think there are many like me who haven't panic-bought fuel but will be quick off the mark should fuel become available so I can see this dragging on for weeks.
Many in the countryside live 15 miles + from nearest petrol station - do they risk a journey on spec for fuel? I think not. Quasi-lockdown I guess.
The problem is that the wrong kind of people are buying petrol.
The wrong kind of people will soon have nowhere left to store it.
In the bath, maybe.....
The govt says that if everyone just bought £20 of petrol every week as per usual we'd be fine.
Does anyone do that?
I heard a petrol station manager a couple of years ago saying the distinctive ways he could spot a recession were, fuel sales in exact multiples of £5 or £10, and sales of scratch cards went up.
I was about to respond to PT when he said yes that is how people buy petrol that this is more a comment on the UK's economic circumstances than any fuel shortage.
Comments
Just like National Insurance it was a Gordon Brown Stealth Income Tax rise.
You panic buy
They are numpties.
There were plenty on the hard-Left following Jim Callaghan in 1976 with placards saying, "This man is a Tory!"
They really had no idea what was coming next.
Of course, it also explains why people don't like inheritance tax.
I suspect, however, that "go to Uni and pay 9% more tax for 30+ years" would make selling University to 18 year olds far harder...
And remember this started as Labour needed a means of hiding Youth unemployment and decided to expand university numbers to fix that issue.
It doesn't matte what you call it, HMRC taking a proportion of your income at source via PAYE is income tax whether it be called income tax, national insurance or student loan.
Still got this really bad cold after about a week. It might be because people didn't get the usual immunity to colds last year because they were not mixing with others in the usual way.
1) you are not put on to the higher tax rate until your income* is above a certain figure; 2) the liability to incur the higher tax rate ends at 30 years (or earlier death) and 3) you have the opportunity to buy yourself out of the punitive tax rate early by paying a lump sum (you would be mad to do so).
* note that it is taxable income that counts not earnings. So, for mature student, pensions can be liable and for everyone investment income too.
What appals me about the Chancellor's musing is the retrospective nature of the changes he contemplates. Any changes should apply to new students only, or it is retrospective taxation.
If it needs £60k a year to repay your loan, who really is paying the university fees of those who don't earn £60k a year. It can only be the tiller assistant who never went to Uni.
That way instead of 9% tax for a minority of people, you might instead see a 1% rate for all people above that threshold.
Singapore and Dubai wave hello! In fact, New York probably waves hello too!
Mind you, this is probably because they generally think 1945=NHS. When you show them the cold war stuff they get a bit... less impressed.
https://twitter.com/PoliticsForAlI/status/1442474169355096064?s=20
It isn't a loan because it is not repayable under law unless certain conditions are met (earnings in UK, at a certain level, cancelled at a certain point etc).
It is sui generis, and an abomination by the way, and needs its own silly name.
I'm all for funding tertiary education properly and funding high value degrees out of general taxation, a hypothecated fund will just result in university fat cats getting rich.
You’ll only repay when your income is over £382 a week, £1,657 a month or £19,895 a year (before tax and other deductions).
If you have a Plan 2 student loan
You’ll only repay when your income is over £524 a week, £2,274 a month or £27,295 a year (before tax and other deductions).
Plan 2 was always a bit high at £27,295 I thought...
But it was sold as such, with the higher repayment threshold - and unlike Plan 1 far more likely to have continuing payments in your late 30s onward.
Changes should be for new loans, if the Gov't wants to move the threshold back to plan 1 levels.
And this was with no outside contact, all packages quarantined etc etc.
If that plumber is earning enough to be paying high taxes then yes their income should be taxed, just as a graduates income should be taxed.
Unless you're going to properly privatise education, rather than have HMRC do it via income taxes, then all income taxes should be applied equitably and consistently.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/previous-annual-repayment-thresholds
My in-laws have their 50th Anniversary Party this Saturday, with people travelling by car 100 miles each way from London, similar from Bath and 50 miles from Cambridge.
PB brains trust: What are the chances of the Party having to be cancelled?
Seems to me that the tankers will be in demand everywhere - who knows when the petrol stations will be replenished with fuel? I think there are many like me who haven't panic-bought fuel but will be quick off the mark should fuel become available so I can see this dragging on for weeks.
Many in the countryside live 15 miles + from nearest petrol station - do they risk a journey on spec for fuel? I think not. Quasi-lockdown I guess.
I think some of us remarked at the time how generous May was being to graduates.
There shouldn't be any hypothecated taxes, I was just trying to address the issue of there 'having to be a tax rise' if the graduate tax were to be abolished. That tax rise could just be set at the current threshold, if so.
The current graduate tax system has completely screwed young graduates and warped the university sector. Its a failure, like everything else Gordon Brown ever touched it seems.
Just that it is very common to use it like this now. Reduces the volume of applications.
As an extra piece of gallows humour - in many HR departments the job of filtering the CVs is so lowly that it goes to the one of the few jobs where HR hires school leavers. So, the person throwing all the non-Russell Group CVs in the bin doesn't have a degree. If they do, it is a Poly degree.
Taking the piss out of people who attended Fenland Polytechnic is important, of course. Particularly asking them which branch of the KGB they report to.
There’s no penalty if you make extra repayments but they are not refundable.
https://www.gov.uk/repaying-your-student-loan/make-extra-repayments
Flog crap degrees if you want. If you want me to pay for them, they better be fucking awesome.
In the bath, maybe.....
That'd solve all the problems.
However, you are correct to think that I would like to see a reduction in consumption for consumption's sake. We had a glimpse of that thanks to Covid, but now society is fretting about the availability of Christmas tat and ridiculous quantities of food that is way beyond what anyone needs to eat.
Ho, hum.
You see this attitude everywhere. It's a clear sign of how completely Thatcherism was victorious. So, on the current series of "Married At First Sight UK" several of the wives have complained that the husbands chosen for them, "aren't what I ordered." You see it in how quickly fans turn against the manager of their team when there are a few bad results. It's there in the panic-buying and the outrage at a lack of chicken at KFC.
We even see it with membership of political parties, which are rapidly becoming fan clubs of the current leader, rather than associations of members united by a broad common ideology. When a member receives a leader or policy that they don't support they ask for a refund and walk away, instead of staying to argue their position.
This is why I've come to think that Cameron's Big Society was a once-in-a-generation missed opportunity for Labour. Here we had a policy that would encourage people to work together, to have practical experience of the value of cooperating with others, that would bring people from different social bubbles into contact, so that they would find they had more in common than they thought.
This sort of experience would encourage people to think, act - and vote! - in a more cooperative and collective way. It had the potential to turn the tide on Thatcherism and rampant consumerism.
Labour were so short sighted that they could only see a fig leaf for austerity and they missed out on a chance to shift the centre of political gravity in a more collective direction. Imagine how things might be different if they'd embraced the idea and made it their own.
A strong society that trusts each other would be less prone to rush to panic buy. The individualists who blame everyone else for every ill will rush to panic buy in the sure knowledge that if they don't do so first others will.
This is why I think Labour's problems are so serious and go far beyond the identity of their leader, or the weakness of the shadow cabinet. It's also why Blair's victories were ultimately pyrrhic. His leadership undermined the philosophical basis of the party he lead. And it also means the resurgence of the SPD in Germany is unlikely to herald a renaissance for the Left in Britain.
Does anyone do that?
It is a tax/loan (a bit of both, really) with the most perverse attributes, and very few graduates understand it. For example, changing the interest rate would make very little difference for the vast majority of graduates, who will never pay it off anyway; for them, the interest rate only affects the notional remaining value which gets written off at the end. Reducing the interest rate would only benefit the small number of very high earners who have a sporting chance of eventually paying it off.
This morning at school drop-off time we had:
- Torrential rain causing more people to drive who would otherwise walk to do the school run
- Bin collection day as the rubbish lorry slowly makes its way along the streets
- Drivers coming from outside of our village to get fuel as they had heard it still had supplies
- Temporary traffic lights on the roundabout not working
- Queues forming outside the petrol station going in both directions, blocking traffic trying to get from one school to the other (due to cars parked on the road)
It was absolute mayhem. Traffic snarled up everywhere. Even though I was getting drenched in the downpour on my walking school run I felt quietly smug. Then I remembered that both our cars have tanks only 1/4 full of petrol and we will at some point need to drive. I refuse to become someone who panic buys when I have no immediate need. I will need some petrol in the next few days. I am still expecting in 2 days time that everyone will have filled up and the panic will cease.I've always filled my tank in full from empty, but most people get £10 or £20 at a time. Though I don't know if cards wiping out cash has changed things.
Its worth noting how often when you go to the pump, that the person before you at the pump stopped it at £20 or so. Its how most people normally use the pumps.
That Boris! He's a 3-D chess genius!
I've never seen anyone do this, though.
I hadn't paid much attention to it till the subject of a friend's daughter and her windfall of a (somewhat smaller) lump sum from a legacy came up in conversation. I was very surprised when my friend said he'd strongly advise her to put the money aside for a house rather than repay some of the student loan - so contrary to normal good financial advice.
- Everyone starts driving more than normal and consuming more fuel. I imagine right now people are not making unnecessary journeys just in case
- Everyone gets on Amazon and buys jerry cans to fill their garages and sheds with petrol. Is everyone that desperate? Does Amazon have enough? It would also be illegal
Then the only reason for queues will be if everyone decides to fill up with fuel with they are 3/4 full rather than just with 1/4 left. In which case there won't be a shortage of fuel (not that there is now if people bought normally) but instead a shortage of pumps to dispense it.By far the best source for information on Student Loans is Martin Lewis. He writes very clearly on it and the various wrinkles, for example:
https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/students/student-loans-tuition-fees-changes/
and
https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/students/repay-post-2012-student-loan/
In a previous job role I used to manage a team based in a distribution centre north of Manchester. Probably what you would classify as Red Wall territory. They were a great bunch, very friendly and down-to-earth but with quite a different background to myself. All except one was female and I considered them great for getting a perspective different from my own. I'm still connected to them on Facebook. In the last few days I have seen them complaining about all the panic buying. Not one word said against Boris or the Tories, they are all blaming the media.