IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
I don't want to subsidise them out of some big love of higher earners (I am not one) but because my (admittedly untested) belief is that the country will be better off if we can get higher earners earning (and paying tax). I would expect the benefit to cost ratio of paying for childcare for higher earners to be greater than 1 (indeed, it probably has a higher BCR than for medium earners).
At over £100k a year they can afford child care out of their taxed income. Just as I did when paying private school fees. There are some who cannot earn because the absurd cost of child care in this country is higher than what they can hope to receive. People earning over £100k are not in that category and we need to focus the limited funds available to those who are.
Again, all you end up doing is creating a disincentive for the highest earners to work full time. You can call them as many names as you like, think of them as unpatriotic, call them tax dodgers or whatever but they are rational. Someone earning £100k getting a £10k payrise gets to keep £3.8k or just over £300 quid a month, a marginal rate of 62%, if they have kids under 5 the marginal rate goes up over 80% and sometimes over 100%.
On the flip side, the same person can choose to work a 4 day week and drop down to £88k per year, they lose £500 quid a month in net salary but they gain 52 days off per year for it and 3 day weekends. The day rate for that additional day per week is just under £200, which for someone in that position just isn't worth it. I think the specific maths for someone without kids is a ~40% drop in the day rate for that additional day worked when looking at the marginal gain.
Faced with those numbers, the possibility of spending more time with the family, being able to take them to zoo, park, long weekends away with the wife and daughter vs grinding out an additional day so the government can claim over 60% of it.
No, it's completely idiotic to have these marginal rates and this was the budget to get rid of them, a proper Tory government would have done so already because it is a barrier to growth.
Sorry but this running theme through this thread and others is just bollocks of the highest order. Someone on a £100k has one vague inconvenience? I earn £70k and I know I don’t get to complain about it EVER.
Cry me a f*cking river! They can reduce their hours if they like, and give up on ever being on £200k, or back here on planet Earth they’ll suck it up for a bit and be quiet.
Which part of people working part time reduces total productivity do people not quite grasp.
There is a barrier at £100,000 that is currently encouraging people to do less work than they otherwise could and that is impacting total productivity.
It could be fixed for little real effort but instead this budget has made it worse rather than better..
What part of “that’s politically too difficult, suck it up rich boy” do you not understand?
Honestly, do you lot not grasp that spending a single penny of discretionary spend on people with that salary (or even mine) is unacceptable when some people are really struggling.
Let’s highlight my career plan for the next 2 years.
22/23 earn £50,000 by working 3 or so months. 23/24 earn £50,000 ish and throw the rest into my pension pot (it’s going to be a lot), 24/25 earn £50,000 throw rest into pension pot.
October 24 - take the rest of the tax year off and possibly a lot longer..
Without the ability to throw a lot into the pension (and an interesting project) I would be working 5-6 months max a year.
You are irrelevant. We all are. At a macro level this will have a very marginal impact.
Also if they need a thing doing and you don’t, then someone else will. Someone more junior and for less.
If Nick's post above is right (I assume it is), Sunak has managed to make an already absurd cliff edge at £100k even worse – how?
There is now an even stronger direct perverse incentive to earn less.
Bonkers.
We discussed this at 7am this morning.
Pick the worst possible way to implement things and they’ve done so.
The tax rate at £100,000 if you have children is now something like 650,000% or 1,300,000% assuming £6,500 in child care costs (probably way too low). The £13,000 is if you have 2 children at nursery age.
But surely with one person earning 100 grand the wife can afford to stay at home and look after the kids. Sympathy for this privileged group will be limited.
If 1 person is earning £100k it’s likely that their partner is also well paid and in a career where x years off is career suicide.
But surely isnt it more equitable that that highly paid job goes to someone else who can then themselves support a family. Greed is never a good look.
It’s not greed.
Fancy a 3 bed ex council tax in the Home Counties - that could be £750,000 which means you need a shared income of £175,000 or so to buy it…
Even a very cursory examination of a property website shows this is nonsense.
There are plenty of 3 bed houses in Beds or Bucks or Herts that are way, way less
But there are also areas where it is true.
There is a distribution of prices of three bedroom houses in the Home Counties. I can characterise the distribution in a number of ways.
I don't just take a 3 σ outlier to describe the distribution.
If Nick's post above is right (I assume it is), Sunak has managed to make an already absurd cliff edge at £100k even worse – how?
There is now an even stronger direct perverse incentive to earn less.
Bonkers.
We discussed this at 7am this morning.
Pick the worst possible way to implement things and they’ve done so.
The tax rate at £100,000 if you have children is now something like 650,000% or 1,300,000% assuming £6,500 in child care costs (probably way too low). The £13,000 is if you have 2 children at nursery age.
But surely with one person earning 100 grand the wife can afford to stay at home and look after the kids. Sympathy for this privileged group will be limited.
If 1 person is earning £100k it’s likely that their partner is also well paid and in a career where x years off is career suicide.
But surely isnt it more equitable that that highly paid job goes to someone else who can then themselves support a family. Greed is never a good look.
It’s not greed.
Fancy a 3 bed ex council tax in the Home Counties - that could be £750,000 which means you need a shared income of £175,000 or so to buy it…
Even a very cursory examination of a property website shows this is nonsense.
There are plenty of 3 bed houses in Beds or Bucks or Herts that are way, way less
But there are also areas where it is true.
Yes so you dont live in those areas and cut your cloth accordingly. No need to live in weybridge when you could live in Stevenage or Luton.
Again, all you end up doing is creating a disincentive for the highest earners to work full time. You can call them as many names as you like, think of them as unpatriotic, call them tax dodgers or whatever but they are rational. Someone earning £100k getting a £10k payrise gets to keep £3.8k or just over £300 quid a month, a marginal rate of 62%, if they have kids under 5 the marginal rate goes up over 80% and sometimes over 100%.
On the flip side, the same person can choose to work a 4 day week and drop down to £88k per year, they lose £500 quid a month in net salary but they gain 52 days off per year for it and 3 day weekends. The day rate for that additional day per week is just under £200, which for someone in that position just isn't worth it. I think the specific maths for someone without kids is a ~40% drop in the day rate for that additional day worked when looking at the marginal gain.
Faced with those numbers, the possibility of spending more time with the family, being able to take them to zoo, park, long weekends away with the wife and daughter vs grinding out an additional day so the government can claim over 60% of it.
No, it's completely idiotic to have these marginal rates and this was the budget to get rid of them, a proper Tory government would have done so already because it is a barrier to growth.
So some well-off people do less work, but if there is still work to be done maybe some people who are freed up by affordable childcare can now pursue that work? It's certain more complex than just considering the downside for the few, the upside for the many will likely be much larger.
That's not how it works, almost all of the time people working these roles are highly skilled and if they don't work it just doesn't get done the NHS waiting list is the best example of this, or consultancies who take on fewer clients because they have fewer available workdays and collectively there's just less work being done. It is one of the reasons we have such poor productivity.
The demand for skilled IT staff is insane. A contractor we used to use, whose work I'm still correcting, was recruited even after the interviewer googled the question he'd just asked and could read the exact answer the contractor was giving on the call. They weren't great, but they were better than nothing, and I've come across worse.
Are there a lot of training opportunities for people to get IT skills?
Yes and no.
Yes. Every company that is trying to sell software to other companies to solve their IT problems - e.g. such as Microsoft with Azure - has an interest in creating a wide pool of IT professionals who know how to use their software, so it's easier for companies paying for that software to find people who can set it up for them. So there's loads of free training.
No. My experience is that there are certain important skills that are hard to teach, at least to adults, just in terms of having the right mental framework to understand programming at a conceptual level. I once worked briefly with an IT consultant who had managed to get the job despite having a poor understanding of the concept of variable assignment.
Also, in order to debug complicated code you basically need someone capable of nitpicking at a very pedantic level. One of the ways in which pb.com is not representative of the wider public is that many of us are irredeemable pedants.
If you have no mortgage or kids you can live comfortably on 30 grand in a low cost part of the country.
For comparison: Universal Credit...
"How much you’ll get Monthly standard allowance If you’re single and under 25 £265.31 If you’re single and 25 or over £334.91 If you live with your partner and you’re both under 25 £416.45 (for you both) If you live with your partner and either of you are 25 or over £525.72 (for you both)"
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
I don't want to subsidise them out of some big love of higher earners (I am not one) but because my (admittedly untested) belief is that the country will be better off if we can get higher earners earning (and paying tax). I would expect the benefit to cost ratio of paying for childcare for higher earners to be greater than 1 (indeed, it probably has a higher BCR than for medium earners).
At over £100k a year they can afford child care out of their taxed income. Just as I did when paying private school fees. There are some who cannot earn because the absurd cost of child care in this country is higher than what they can hope to receive. People earning over £100k are not in that category and we need to focus the limited funds available to those who are.
Again, all you end up doing is creating a disincentive for the highest earners to work full time. You can call them as many names as you like, think of them as unpatriotic, call them tax dodgers or whatever but they are rational. Someone earning £100k getting a £10k payrise gets to keep £3.8k or just over £300 quid a month, a marginal rate of 62%, if they have kids under 5 the marginal rate goes up over 80% and sometimes over 100%.
On the flip side, the same person can choose to work a 4 day week and drop down to £88k per year, they lose £500 quid a month in net salary but they gain 52 days off per year for it and 3 day weekends. The day rate for that additional day per week is just under £200, which for someone in that position just isn't worth it. I think the specific maths for someone without kids is a ~40% drop in the day rate for that additional day worked when looking at the marginal gain.
Faced with those numbers, the possibility of spending more time with the family, being able to take them to zoo, park, long weekends away with the wife and daughter vs grinding out an additional day so the government can claim over 60% of it.
No, it's completely idiotic to have these marginal rates and this was the budget to get rid of them, a proper Tory government would have done so already because it is a barrier to growth.
Sorry but this running theme through this thread and others is just bollocks of the highest order. Someone on a £100k has one vague inconvenience? I earn £70k and I know I don’t get to complain about it EVER.
Cry me a f*cking river! They can reduce their hours if they like, and give up on ever being on £200k, or back here on planet Earth they’ll suck it up for a bit and be quiet.
Which part of people working part time reduces total productivity do people not quite grasp.
There is a barrier at £100,000 that is currently encouraging people to do less work than they otherwise could and that is impacting total productivity.
It could be fixed for little real effort but instead this budget has made it worse rather than better..
What part of “that’s politically too difficult, suck it up rich boy” do you not understand?
Honestly, do you lot not grasp that spending a single penny of discretionary spend on people with that salary (or even mine) is unacceptable when some people are really struggling.
Let’s highlight my career plan for the next 2 years.
22/23 earn £50,000 by working 3 or so months. 23/24 earn £50,000 ish and throw the rest into my pension pot (it’s going to be a lot), 24/25 earn £50,000 throw rest into pension pot.
October 24 - take the rest of the tax year off and possibly a lot longer..
Without the ability to throw a lot into the pension (and an interesting project) I would be working 5-6 months max a year.
You are irrelevant. We all are. At a macro level this will have a very marginal impact.
Also if they need a thing doing and you don’t, then someone else will. Someone more junior and for less.
Looks at how much end client has wasted on work that needs to be redone - pay peanuts and you are likely paying 2 or 3 times to fix the messes you created - software is complex especially when it needs to interact with other systems.
And my point was more an example, a lot of experienced people no longer need the money that working full time offers and since Covid may have decided that time off is better than the extra money.
And for youngsters the opposite is try their costs are so high (thanks mainly to house prices) that both people need to work to get a house far worse than their parents bought on a (often far lower) single income.
If you have no mortgage or kids you can live comfortably on 30 grand in a low cost part of the country.
For comparison: Universal Credit...
"How much you’ll get Monthly standard allowance If you’re single and under 25 £265.31 If you’re single and 25 or over £334.91 If you live with your partner and you’re both under 25 £416.45 (for you both) If you live with your partner and either of you are 25 or over £525.72 (for you both)"
So £4,018 pa plus 90% reduction in Council Tax (plus most of your rent if you rent) for a single person with no kids.
Yes not liveable is it. I dont know where these myths about benefits been so attractive come from...the daily mail perhaps.
It's survivable but very grim from what I see at Citizens Advice.
However, you still hear people say 'but they've all got Sky and the latest iPhone, and drive around in a new car' or similar.
If they do that will be from cash in hand work on the side. You cannot afford to even lease a new car on benefits.
It's largely an urban myth, plus there are a small number of fraudulent claimants no doubt but they invariably get grassed on (and why not).
The one other situation that can lead to this is someone suffering a catastrophic change in circs (illness, job loss, bereavement etc.) while still being tied into contracts that are impossible to exit.
Smoking related diseases/cessation services cost the NHS £2.6bn/year.
Following todays budget, the treasury rakes in over £10bn/year in tobacco tax.
Whether you take the left wing position that smokers are victims of the tobacco industry and the government should ban the sale of tobacco products and/or have an obligation to use all the tax duties to provide effective cessation services - or the conservative/libertarian position that stresses free agency and that the government shouldn’t tax above the cost of providing health services to smokers (preferably no tax at all - and health would be privatised) - surely we can all agree that government using smokers - who cluster around the lowest socioeconomic groups - as a cash cow - is utterly immoral?
Paying, on average, £1666 in tax, per smoker, per year - and getting £433 per person, per year back in nhs/cessation services? Smokers are getting a shit deal.
The tories moral compass needs recalibrating.
(apologies for the possibly the longest sentence ever written, btw)
No, legal but very highly taxed and alarming photos on the packets feels a good policy balance for me. Sorry smokers!
Why should the missing £7.4bn go into the general treasury pot instead of being spent on nhs/cessation services?
These are some of the very poorest and most vulnerable members of our society. Hunt has chosen to tax them to the eyeballs to subsidise tax cuts for - already very wealthy - senior doctors.
How is that moral?
Hm. Did you include
(a) disability costs, to central and local government? (b) illnesses to close relatives (passive smoking, effect on unborn children, chioldhood asthma, etc.)?
a) will be huge.
Smokers die younger - as smokers are reliably informed on the packet - saving the taxpayer huge amounts of money.
They’re an easy target for the tories.
Go after the vulnerable. That is their ideology.
Sickening.
But they are also disabled for longer. So they don't save in that sense.
If you have no mortgage or kids you can live comfortably on 30 grand in a low cost part of the country.
For comparison: Universal Credit...
"How much you’ll get Monthly standard allowance If you’re single and under 25 £265.31 If you’re single and 25 or over £334.91 If you live with your partner and you’re both under 25 £416.45 (for you both) If you live with your partner and either of you are 25 or over £525.72 (for you both)"
So £4,018 pa plus 90% reduction in Council Tax (plus most of your rent if you rent) for a single person with no kids.
Yes not liveable is it. I dont know where these myths about benefits been so attractive come from...the daily mail perhaps.
It's survivable but very grim from what I see at Citizens Advice.
However, you still hear people say 'but they've all got Sky and the latest iPhone, and drive around in a new car' or similar.
If they do that will be from cash in hand work on the side. You cannot afford to even lease a new car on benefits.
It's largely an urban myth, plus there are a small number of fraudulent claimants, no doubt, but they invariably get grassed on (and why not).
The one other situation that can lead to this is someone suffering a catastrophic change in circs (illness, job loss, bereavement etc.) while still being tied into contracts that are impossible to exit.
Yes car leases are 3 to 4 years generally so that could well happen. But newspapers like the daily mail are happy to encourage mean spiritedness.
"with one person earning 100 grand the wife can afford to stay at home and look after the kids." Aka, why does pb comments repel women.
The assumption that every woman wants a high powered career is indelibly sexist.
It doesn’t even need to be high powered for a women’s career to disappear. The Mrs only returned to her old career because she encountered an old colleague in town 1 day who said they had been hunting for someone for over a year so she decided there was no harm in applying… she hadnt even thought it was a possibility until she discovered how desperate they were..
What % of people earning in the £100k to £125k bracket have kids aged between 1 and 5?
I suspect very, very few - which is why the Govt hasn't "sorted" the issue - because if they did sort it they'll lose money from everyone else in the bracket who doesn't have kids between 1 and 5.
The fundamental problem causing all these traps is that you get the same salary for doing a job whether or not you have kids. But looking after kids costs a fortune - especially if they are between 1 and 5. Hence the Govt has to pay these people colossal subsidies.
But you can't wreck the tax system for everyone else just to tidy up some distortions affecting tiny numbers of people.
What % of people earning in the £100k to £125k bracket have kids aged between 1 and 5?
I suspect very, very few - which is why the Govt hasn't "sorted" the issue - because if they did sort it they'll lose money from everyone else in the bracket who doesn't have kids between 1 and 5.
The fundamental problem causing all these traps is that you get the same salary for doing a job whether or not you have kids. But looking after kids costs a fortune - especially if they are between 1 and 5. Hence the Govt has to pay these people colossal subsidies.
But you can't wreck the tax system for everyone else just to tidy up some distortions affecting tiny numbers of people.
Ignoring the children issue 0- just the way the £100,000 to £125,000 band works is discouraging people from working full time.
That is an issue we’ve highlighted here for ages and reverse how it works (so the 45% band kicks in earlier with allowances removed at a higher point) would solve a lot of problems…
Just seen that the childcare package won’t actually kick in until TY 24/25. a) it’s been ramped but many with young children now won’t actually benefit b) the Tories might not be in government by then.
If you have no mortgage or kids you can live comfortably on 30 grand in a low cost part of the country.
For comparison: Universal Credit...
"How much you’ll get Monthly standard allowance If you’re single and under 25 £265.31 If you’re single and 25 or over £334.91 If you live with your partner and you’re both under 25 £416.45 (for you both) If you live with your partner and either of you are 25 or over £525.72 (for you both)"
Just seen that the childcare package won’t actually kick in until TY 24/25. a) it’s been ramped but many with young children now won’t actually benefit b) the Tories might not be in government by then.
Kicks in just before the next election - which means we will have a number o stories about people not able to find nursery places because they are already fully taken.
As although the money is there the logistics and cash to provide the places simply aren’t and the amounts the government currently pays isn’t enough to really find a nursery so they need to play tricks to generate enough income to make up the shortfalls.
A slight feeling that for he first time in several years there are a couple of grown ups in government but it's much too late.
The Tories reputation is shot and Brexit is still hanging round our necks like Like an Albatross.
After several excuses for our bad performance the interviewer on Newsnight asked the Chief Secretary to the Treasury "But what about the 4% lost revenue Brexit is costing us each year?"
"Well that's what the country voted for". Was his pusillanimous answer
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
I don't want to subsidise them out of some big love of higher earners (I am not one) but because my (admittedly untested) belief is that the country will be better off if we can get higher earners earning (and paying tax). I would expect the benefit to cost ratio of paying for childcare for higher earners to be greater than 1 (indeed, it probably has a higher BCR than for medium earners).
At over £100k a year they can afford child care out of their taxed income. Just as I did when paying private school fees. There are some who cannot earn because the absurd cost of child care in this country is higher than what they can hope to receive. People earning over £100k are not in that category and we need to focus the limited funds available to those who are.
Again, all you end up doing is creating a disincentive for the highest earners to work full time. You can call them as many names as you like, think of them as unpatriotic, call them tax dodgers or whatever but they are rational. Someone earning £100k getting a £10k payrise gets to keep £3.8k or just over £300 quid a month, a marginal rate of 62%, if they have kids under 5 the marginal rate goes up over 80% and sometimes over 100%.
On the flip side, the same person can choose to work a 4 day week and drop down to £88k per year, they lose £500 quid a month in net salary but they gain 52 days off per year for it and 3 day weekends. The day rate for that additional day per week is just under £200, which for someone in that position just isn't worth it. I think the specific maths for someone without kids is a ~40% drop in the day rate for that additional day worked when looking at the marginal gain.
Faced with those numbers, the possibility of spending more time with the family, being able to take them to zoo, park, long weekends away with the wife and daughter vs grinding out an additional day so the government can claim over 60% of it.
No, it's completely idiotic to have these marginal rates and this was the budget to get rid of them, a proper Tory government would have done so already because it is a barrier to growth.
Sorry but this running theme through this thread and others is just bollocks of the highest order. Someone on a £100k has one vague inconvenience? I earn £70k and I know I don’t get to complain about it EVER.
Cry me a f*cking river! They can reduce their hours if they like, and give up on ever being on £200k, or back here on planet Earth they’ll suck it up for a bit and be quiet.
Which part of people working part time reduces total productivity do people not quite grasp.
There is a barrier at £100,000 that is currently encouraging people to do less work than they otherwise could and that is impacting total productivity.
It could be fixed for little real effort but instead this budget has made it worse rather than better..
What part of “that’s politically too difficult, suck it up rich boy” do you not understand?
Honestly, do you lot not grasp that spending a single penny of discretionary spend on people with that salary (or even mine) is unacceptable when some people are really struggling.
Let’s highlight my career plan for the next 2 years.
22/23 earn £50,000 by working 3 or so months. 23/24 earn £50,000 ish and throw the rest into my pension pot (it’s going to be a lot), 24/25 earn £50,000 throw rest into pension pot.
October 24 - take the rest of the tax year off and possibly a lot longer..
Without the ability to throw a lot into the pension (and an interesting project) I would be working 5-6 months max a year.
You are irrelevant. We all are. At a macro level this will have a very marginal impact.
Also if they need a thing doing and you don’t, then someone else will. Someone more junior and for less.
Looks at how much end client has wasted on work that needs to be redone - pay peanuts and you are likely paying 2 or 3 times to fix the messes you created - software is complex especially when it needs to interact with other systems.
And my point was more an example, a lot of experienced people no longer need the money that working full time offers and since Covid may have decided that time off is better than the extra money.
And for youngsters the opposite is try their costs are so high (thanks mainly to house prices) that both people need to work to get a house far worse than their parents bought on a (often far lower) single income.
Learn humility. None of us really matter all that much. If we’re lucky we do two or three things in our whole lives that wouldn’t have happened anyway.
If you have no mortgage or kids you can live comfortably on 30 grand in a low cost part of the country.
For comparison: Universal Credit...
"How much you’ll get Monthly standard allowance If you’re single and under 25 £265.31 If you’re single and 25 or over £334.91 If you live with your partner and you’re both under 25 £416.45 (for you both) If you live with your partner and either of you are 25 or over £525.72 (for you both)"
If you have no mortgage or kids you can live comfortably on 30 grand in a low cost part of the country.
For comparison: Universal Credit...
"How much you’ll get Monthly standard allowance If you’re single and under 25 £265.31 If you’re single and 25 or over £334.91 If you live with your partner and you’re both under 25 £416.45 (for you both) If you live with your partner and either of you are 25 or over £525.72 (for you both)"
So £4,018 pa plus 90% reduction in Council Tax (plus most of your rent if you rent) for a single person with no kids.
Yes not liveable is it. I dont know where these myths about benefits been so attractive come from...the daily mail perhaps.
It's survivable but very grim from what I see at Citizens Advice.
However, you still hear people say 'but they've all got Sky and the latest iPhone, and drive around in a new car' or similar.
Think the minimum monthly income you need to barely survive in this country is 800 to 900 pounds in a low cost area with no mortgage.
Checks outgoings...
Nope, barely surviving is less than that.
If you can cook, then you can live relatively well on a low income. It's lack of culinary skills that really hammer people.
Risotto, spanish omelette, baked pasta with tuna: there are a lot of meals that you can make for less than £2/person.
Dinner tonight, for example, is going to be baked rice with the leftover vegetables from the bottom of the fridge.
Dice the remaining half of an onion chuck it in a frying pan with a spoonful of olive oil. Add those slightly soft cherry tomatoes and the wilting greens. Let it soften.
Chuck it in the bottom of a casserole dish. Add spices. Pour two cupfulls of rice and then slightly more water. Cover. Bake.
The front pages tomorrow are far from sensational for the government. Even the Mail is rather sniffy about the budget.
Could be a good thing - overegging budgets leads to avalanche of stories then pointing out its not that great, so maybe they will be lucky and even the counter reaction is lukewarm.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
I don't want to subsidise them out of some big love of higher earners (I am not one) but because my (admittedly untested) belief is that the country will be better off if we can get higher earners earning (and paying tax). I would expect the benefit to cost ratio of paying for childcare for higher earners to be greater than 1 (indeed, it probably has a higher BCR than for medium earners).
At over £100k a year they can afford child care out of their taxed income. Just as I did when paying private school fees. There are some who cannot earn because the absurd cost of child care in this country is higher than what they can hope to receive. People earning over £100k are not in that category and we need to focus the limited funds available to those who are.
Again, all you end up doing is creating a disincentive for the highest earners to work full time. You can call them as many names as you like, think of them as unpatriotic, call them tax dodgers or whatever but they are rational. Someone earning £100k getting a £10k payrise gets to keep £3.8k or just over £300 quid a month, a marginal rate of 62%, if they have kids under 5 the marginal rate goes up over 80% and sometimes over 100%.
On the flip side, the same person can choose to work a 4 day week and drop down to £88k per year, they lose £500 quid a month in net salary but they gain 52 days off per year for it and 3 day weekends. The day rate for that additional day per week is just under £200, which for someone in that position just isn't worth it. I think the specific maths for someone without kids is a ~40% drop in the day rate for that additional day worked when looking at the marginal gain.
Faced with those numbers, the possibility of spending more time with the family, being able to take them to zoo, park, long weekends away with the wife and daughter vs grinding out an additional day so the government can claim over 60% of it.
No, it's completely idiotic to have these marginal rates and this was the budget to get rid of them, a proper Tory government would have done so already because it is a barrier to growth.
Sorry but this running theme through this thread and others is just bollocks of the highest order. Someone on a £100k has one vague inconvenience? I earn £70k and I know I don’t get to complain about it EVER.
Cry me a f*cking river! They can reduce their hours if they like, and give up on ever being on £200k, or back here on planet Earth they’ll suck it up for a bit and be quiet.
Which part of people working part time reduces total productivity do people not quite grasp.
There is a barrier at £100,000 that is currently encouraging people to do less work than they otherwise could and that is impacting total productivity.
It could be fixed for little real effort but instead this budget has made it worse rather than better..
What part of “that’s politically too difficult, suck it up rich boy” do you not understand?
Honestly, do you lot not grasp that spending a single penny of discretionary spend on people with that salary (or even mine) is unacceptable when some people are really struggling.
Let’s highlight my career plan for the next 2 years.
22/23 earn £50,000 by working 3 or so months. 23/24 earn £50,000 ish and throw the rest into my pension pot (it’s going to be a lot), 24/25 earn £50,000 throw rest into pension pot.
October 24 - take the rest of the tax year off and possibly a lot longer..
Without the ability to throw a lot into the pension (and an interesting project) I would be working 5-6 months max a year.
You are irrelevant. We all are. At a macro level this will have a very marginal impact.
Also if they need a thing doing and you don’t, then someone else will. Someone more junior and for less.
Looks at how much end client has wasted on work that needs to be redone - pay peanuts and you are likely paying 2 or 3 times to fix the messes you created - software is complex especially when it needs to interact with other systems.
And my point was more an example, a lot of experienced people no longer need the money that working full time offers and since Covid may have decided that time off is better than the extra money.
And for youngsters the opposite is try their costs are so high (thanks mainly to house prices) that both people need to work to get a house far worse than their parents bought on a (often far lower) single income.
Learn humility. None of us really matter all that much. If we’re lucky we do two or three things in our whole lives that wouldn’t have happened anyway.
Again you miss the point - for complex systems you need the world weary experts who have done it before and know what needs to be put in place for things to work as expected. Those people don’t come cheap
And given how much my current client has paid a large consultancy (£Xm) I shouldn’t be needing to do half the things I’m currently done to to get this project back to a sane position.
If you have no mortgage or kids you can live comfortably on 30 grand in a low cost part of the country.
For comparison: Universal Credit...
"How much you’ll get Monthly standard allowance If you’re single and under 25 £265.31 If you’re single and 25 or over £334.91 If you live with your partner and you’re both under 25 £416.45 (for you both) If you live with your partner and either of you are 25 or over £525.72 (for you both)"
If you have no mortgage or kids you can live comfortably on 30 grand in a low cost part of the country.
For comparison: Universal Credit...
"How much you’ll get Monthly standard allowance If you’re single and under 25 £265.31 If you’re single and 25 or over £334.91 If you live with your partner and you’re both under 25 £416.45 (for you both) If you live with your partner and either of you are 25 or over £525.72 (for you both)"
If you have no mortgage or kids you can live comfortably on 30 grand in a low cost part of the country.
For comparison: Universal Credit...
"How much you’ll get Monthly standard allowance If you’re single and under 25 £265.31 If you’re single and 25 or over £334.91 If you live with your partner and you’re both under 25 £416.45 (for you both) If you live with your partner and either of you are 25 or over £525.72 (for you both)"
So £4,018 pa plus 90% reduction in Council Tax (plus most of your rent if you rent) for a single person with no kids.
Yes not liveable is it. I dont know where these myths about benefits been so attractive come from...the daily mail perhaps.
It's survivable but very grim from what I see at Citizens Advice.
However, you still hear people say 'but they've all got Sky and the latest iPhone, and drive around in a new car' or similar.
Think the minimum monthly income you need to barely survive in this country is 800 to 900 pounds in a low cost area with no mortgage.
Checks outgoings...
Nope, barely surviving is less than that.
If you can cook, then you can live relatively well on a low income. It's lack of culinary skills that really hammer people.
Risotto, spanish omelette, baked pasta with tuna: there are a lot of meals that you can make for less than £2/person.
You don't need any culinary skill to manage that level - pasta is king on that front.
Sure, but that's a very boring and restrictive diet.
With just a teensy bit of knowledge, you can make pretty decent (and have a pretty decent variety of) meals.
Making bread, for example. I make foccacia - it's literally just flour, water, yeast and olive oil. (Plus a teaspoon of salt and sugar.) The raw material cost is negligible - the biggest cost is probably the flour itself, and you can get six or seven (family sized) portions from a £2/1.5kg bag. And making hummus to go with it is a 49p can of chickpeas.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
I don't want to subsidise them out of some big love of higher earners (I am not one) but because my (admittedly untested) belief is that the country will be better off if we can get higher earners earning (and paying tax). I would expect the benefit to cost ratio of paying for childcare for higher earners to be greater than 1 (indeed, it probably has a higher BCR than for medium earners).
At over £100k a year they can afford child care out of their taxed income. Just as I did when paying private school fees. There are some who cannot earn because the absurd cost of child care in this country is higher than what they can hope to receive. People earning over £100k are not in that category and we need to focus the limited funds available to those who are.
Again, all you end up doing is creating a disincentive for the highest earners to work full time. You can call them as many names as you like, think of them as unpatriotic, call them tax dodgers or whatever but they are rational. Someone earning £100k getting a £10k payrise gets to keep £3.8k or just over £300 quid a month, a marginal rate of 62%, if they have kids under 5 the marginal rate goes up over 80% and sometimes over 100%.
On the flip side, the same person can choose to work a 4 day week and drop down to £88k per year, they lose £500 quid a month in net salary but they gain 52 days off per year for it and 3 day weekends. The day rate for that additional day per week is just under £200, which for someone in that position just isn't worth it. I think the specific maths for someone without kids is a ~40% drop in the day rate for that additional day worked when looking at the marginal gain.
Faced with those numbers, the possibility of spending more time with the family, being able to take them to zoo, park, long weekends away with the wife and daughter vs grinding out an additional day so the government can claim over 60% of it.
No, it's completely idiotic to have these marginal rates and this was the budget to get rid of them, a proper Tory government would have done so already because it is a barrier to growth.
Sorry but this running theme through this thread and others is just bollocks of the highest order. Someone on a £100k has one vague inconvenience? I earn £70k and I know I don’t get to complain about it EVER.
Cry me a f*cking river! They can reduce their hours if they like, and give up on ever being on £200k, or back here on planet Earth they’ll suck it up for a bit and be quiet.
Which part of people working part time reduces total productivity do people not quite grasp.
There is a barrier at £100,000 that is currently encouraging people to do less work than they otherwise could and that is impacting total productivity.
It could be fixed for little real effort but instead this budget has made it worse rather than better..
What part of “that’s politically too difficult, suck it up rich boy” do you not understand?
Honestly, do you lot not grasp that spending a single penny of discretionary spend on people with that salary (or even mine) is unacceptable when some people are really struggling.
Let’s highlight my career plan for the next 2 years.
22/23 earn £50,000 by working 3 or so months. 23/24 earn £50,000 ish and throw the rest into my pension pot (it’s going to be a lot), 24/25 earn £50,000 throw rest into pension pot.
October 24 - take the rest of the tax year off and possibly a lot longer..
Without the ability to throw a lot into the pension (and an interesting project) I would be working 5-6 months max a year.
You are irrelevant. We all are. At a macro level this will have a very marginal impact.
Also if they need a thing doing and you don’t, then someone else will. Someone more junior and for less.
Looks at how much end client has wasted on work that needs to be redone - pay peanuts and you are likely paying 2 or 3 times to fix the messes you created - software is complex especially when it needs to interact with other systems.
And my point was more an example, a lot of experienced people no longer need the money that working full time offers and since Covid may have decided that time off is better than the extra money.
And for youngsters the opposite is try their costs are so high (thanks mainly to house prices) that both people need to work to get a house far worse than their parents bought on a (often far lower) single income.
Learn humility. None of us really matter all that much. If we’re lucky we do two or three things in our whole lives that wouldn’t have happened anyway.
Again you miss the point - for complex systems you need the world weary experts who have done it before and know what needs to be put in place for things to work as expected. Those people don’t come cheap
And given how much my current client has paid a large consultancy (£Xm) I shouldn’t be needing to do half the things I’m currently done to to get this project back to a sane position.
I understand why you think that. I am a “world weary expert”. Unlike you, I also realise that we are none of us that special, even if it’s tempting to think we are. There’s always someone else, except for those two or three unique things you might do in a lifetime.
If you have no mortgage or kids you can live comfortably on 30 grand in a low cost part of the country.
For comparison: Universal Credit...
"How much you’ll get Monthly standard allowance If you’re single and under 25 £265.31 If you’re single and 25 or over £334.91 If you live with your partner and you’re both under 25 £416.45 (for you both) If you live with your partner and either of you are 25 or over £525.72 (for you both)"
If you have no mortgage or kids you can live comfortably on 30 grand in a low cost part of the country.
For comparison: Universal Credit...
"How much you’ll get Monthly standard allowance If you’re single and under 25 £265.31 If you’re single and 25 or over £334.91 If you live with your partner and you’re both under 25 £416.45 (for you both) If you live with your partner and either of you are 25 or over £525.72 (for you both)"
So £4,018 pa plus 90% reduction in Council Tax (plus most of your rent if you rent) for a single person with no kids.
Yes not liveable is it. I dont know where these myths about benefits been so attractive come from...the daily mail perhaps.
It's survivable but very grim from what I see at Citizens Advice.
However, you still hear people say 'but they've all got Sky and the latest iPhone, and drive around in a new car' or similar.
Think the minimum monthly income you need to barely survive in this country is 800 to 900 pounds in a low cost area with no mortgage.
Checks outgoings...
Nope, barely surviving is less than that.
If you can cook, then you can live relatively well on a low income. It's lack of culinary skills that really hammer people.
Risotto, spanish omelette, baked pasta with tuna: there are a lot of meals that you can make for less than £2/person.
Dinner tonight, for example, is going to be baked rice with the leftover vegetables from the bottom of the fridge.
Dice the remaining half of an onion chuck it in a frying pan with a spoonful of olive oil. Add those slightly soft cherry tomatoes and the wilting greens. Let it soften.
Chuck it in the bottom of a casserole dish. Add spices. Pour two cupfulls of rice and then slightly more water. Cover. Bake.
Delicious meal for four at a cost of maybe $5.
It sounds really awful -- rice, plus a lot of mushy & soggy vegetables, past the sell by from the recesses of the fridge.
Go to Llandanwg beach. Gather musssels & winkles, poach in a little white wine over a driftwood fire. Eat with fresh bread. Total cost for four, maybe £1. Also, the fuel is free.
If you have no mortgage or kids you can live comfortably on 30 grand in a low cost part of the country.
For comparison: Universal Credit...
"How much you’ll get Monthly standard allowance If you’re single and under 25 £265.31 If you’re single and 25 or over £334.91 If you live with your partner and you’re both under 25 £416.45 (for you both) If you live with your partner and either of you are 25 or over £525.72 (for you both)"
So £4,018 pa plus 90% reduction in Council Tax (plus most of your rent if you rent) for a single person with no kids.
Yes not liveable is it. I dont know where these myths about benefits been so attractive come from...the daily mail perhaps.
It's survivable but very grim from what I see at Citizens Advice.
However, you still hear people say 'but they've all got Sky and the latest iPhone, and drive around in a new car' or similar.
Think the minimum monthly income you need to barely survive in this country is 800 to 900 pounds in a low cost area with no mortgage.
Checks outgoings...
Nope, barely surviving is less than that.
If you can cook, then you can live relatively well on a low income. It's lack of culinary skills that really hammer people.
Risotto, spanish omelette, baked pasta with tuna: there are a lot of meals that you can make for less than £2/person.
Dinner tonight, for example, is going to be baked rice with the leftover vegetables from the bottom of the fridge.
Dice the remaining half of an onion chuck it in a frying pan with a spoonful of olive oil. Add those slightly soft cherry tomatoes and the wilting greens. Let it soften.
Chuck it in the bottom of a casserole dish. Add spices. Pour two cupfulls of rice and then slightly more water. Cover. Bake.
Delicious meal for four at a cost of maybe $5.
It sounds really awful -- rice, plus a lot of mushy & soggy vegetables, past the sell by from the recesses of the fridge.
Go to Llandanwg beach. Gather musssels & winkles, poach in a little white wine over a driftwood fire. Eat with fresh bread. Total cost for four, maybe £1. Also, the fuel is free.
Again, all you end up doing is creating a disincentive for the highest earners to work full time. You can call them as many names as you like, think of them as unpatriotic, call them tax dodgers or whatever but they are rational. Someone earning £100k getting a £10k payrise gets to keep £3.8k or just over £300 quid a month, a marginal rate of 62%, if they have kids under 5 the marginal rate goes up over 80% and sometimes over 100%.
On the flip side, the same person can choose to work a 4 day week and drop down to £88k per year, they lose £500 quid a month in net salary but they gain 52 days off per year for it and 3 day weekends. The day rate for that additional day per week is just under £200, which for someone in that position just isn't worth it. I think the specific maths for someone without kids is a ~40% drop in the day rate for that additional day worked when looking at the marginal gain.
Faced with those numbers, the possibility of spending more time with the family, being able to take them to zoo, park, long weekends away with the wife and daughter vs grinding out an additional day so the government can claim over 60% of it.
No, it's completely idiotic to have these marginal rates and this was the budget to get rid of them, a proper Tory government would have done so already because it is a barrier to growth.
So some well-off people do less work, but if there is still work to be done maybe some people who are freed up by affordable childcare can now pursue that work? It's certain more complex than just considering the downside for the few, the upside for the many will likely be much larger.
That's not how it works, almost all of the time people working these roles are highly skilled and if they don't work it just doesn't get done the NHS waiting list is the best example of this, or consultancies who take on fewer clients because they have fewer available workdays and collectively there's just less work being done. It is one of the reasons we have such poor productivity.
The demand for skilled IT staff is insane. A contractor we used to use, whose work I'm still correcting, was recruited even after the interviewer googled the question he'd just asked and could read the exact answer the contractor was giving on the call. They weren't great, but they were better than nothing, and I've come across worse.
Are there a lot of training opportunities for people to get IT skills?
Yes and no.
Yes. Every company that is trying to sell software to other companies to solve their IT problems - e.g. such as Microsoft with Azure - has an interest in creating a wide pool of IT professionals who know how to use their software, so it's easier for companies paying for that software to find people who can set it up for them. So there's loads of free training.
No. My experience is that there are certain important skills that are hard to teach, at least to adults, just in terms of having the right mental framework to understand programming at a conceptual level. I once worked briefly with an IT consultant who had managed to get the job despite having a poor understanding of the concept of variable assignment.
Also, in order to debug complicated code you basically need someone capable of nitpicking at a very pedantic level. One of the ways in which pb.com is not representative of the wider public is that many of us are irredeemable pedants.
WHAT???
True story.
The overtime I was given to catch up on his work and try to upskill him was lucrative, but ultimately that was a situation where two people on the team would have got more work done if there hadn't been a third person on the team.
I think he'd been working as an IT support person before and fancied doing something a bit more interesting.
If you have no mortgage or kids you can live comfortably on 30 grand in a low cost part of the country.
For comparison: Universal Credit...
"How much you’ll get Monthly standard allowance If you’re single and under 25 £265.31 If you’re single and 25 or over £334.91 If you live with your partner and you’re both under 25 £416.45 (for you both) If you live with your partner and either of you are 25 or over £525.72 (for you both)"
So £4,018 pa plus 90% reduction in Council Tax (plus most of your rent if you rent) for a single person with no kids.
Yes not liveable is it. I dont know where these myths about benefits been so attractive come from...the daily mail perhaps.
It's survivable but very grim from what I see at Citizens Advice.
However, you still hear people say 'but they've all got Sky and the latest iPhone, and drive around in a new car' or similar.
Think the minimum monthly income you need to barely survive in this country is 800 to 900 pounds in a low cost area with no mortgage.
Checks outgoings...
Nope, barely surviving is less than that.
If you can cook, then you can live relatively well on a low income. It's lack of culinary skills that really hammer people.
Risotto, spanish omelette, baked pasta with tuna: there are a lot of means that you can make for less than £2/person.
Rice 48p kg Porridge 55p kg Bread 39p 800g Beans 27p 420g Tomatoes 28p 400g Pasta 28p 500g Potatoes £1.25 2.5kg Carrots 50p kg
Grim but very cheap.
For 4 people: Boil 28p pasta with plenty of salt. Fry 4 slices streaky bacon £1 and chop. Four egg yolks and two whites £1. Combine in the bacon fat pan. 50g fancy parmesan @ £20/kg £1. Banging carbonara for 80p a person. Add green vegetables on the side if you really must.
LostPassword - Years ago I suggested a corollary to Brook's Law: Sometimes subtracting a programmer could speed the completion of a project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks's_law
You seem to have an example suggesting that my corollary is, at least occasionally, true.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
I don't want to subsidise them out of some big love of higher earners (I am not one) but because my (admittedly untested) belief is that the country will be better off if we can get higher earners earning (and paying tax). I would expect the benefit to cost ratio of paying for childcare for higher earners to be greater than 1 (indeed, it probably has a higher BCR than for medium earners).
At over £100k a year they can afford child care out of their taxed income. Just as I did when paying private school fees. There are some who cannot earn because the absurd cost of child care in this country is higher than what they can hope to receive. People earning over £100k are not in that category and we need to focus the limited funds available to those who are.
Again, all you end up doing is creating a disincentive for the highest earners to work full time. You can call them as many names as you like, think of them as unpatriotic, call them tax dodgers or whatever but they are rational. Someone earning £100k getting a £10k payrise gets to keep £3.8k or just over £300 quid a month, a marginal rate of 62%, if they have kids under 5 the marginal rate goes up over 80% and sometimes over 100%.
On the flip side, the same person can choose to work a 4 day week and drop down to £88k per year, they lose £500 quid a month in net salary but they gain 52 days off per year for it and 3 day weekends. The day rate for that additional day per week is just under £200, which for someone in that position just isn't worth it. I think the specific maths for someone without kids is a ~40% drop in the day rate for that additional day worked when looking at the marginal gain.
Faced with those numbers, the possibility of spending more time with the family, being able to take them to zoo, park, long weekends away with the wife and daughter vs grinding out an additional day so the government can claim over 60% of it.
No, it's completely idiotic to have these marginal rates and this was the budget to get rid of them, a proper Tory government would have done so already because it is a barrier to growth.
Sorry but this running theme through this thread and others is just bollocks of the highest order. Someone on a £100k has one vague inconvenience? I earn £70k and I know I don’t get to complain about it EVER.
Cry me a f*cking river! They can reduce their hours if they like, and give up on ever being on £200k, or back here on planet Earth they’ll suck it up for a bit and be quiet.
Which part of people working part time reduces total productivity do people not quite grasp.
There is a barrier at £100,000 that is currently encouraging people to do less work than they otherwise could and that is impacting total productivity.
It could be fixed for little real effort but instead this budget has made it worse rather than better..
What part of “that’s politically too difficult, suck it up rich boy” do you not understand?
Honestly, do you lot not grasp that spending a single penny of discretionary spend on people with that salary (or even mine) is unacceptable when some people are really struggling.
Let’s highlight my career plan for the next 2 years.
22/23 earn £50,000 by working 3 or so months. 23/24 earn £50,000 ish and throw the rest into my pension pot (it’s going to be a lot), 24/25 earn £50,000 throw rest into pension pot.
October 24 - take the rest of the tax year off and possibly a lot longer..
Without the ability to throw a lot into the pension (and an interesting project) I would be working 5-6 months max a year.
You are irrelevant. We all are. At a macro level this will have a very marginal impact.
Also if they need a thing doing and you don’t, then someone else will. Someone more junior and for less.
Looks at how much end client has wasted on work that needs to be redone - pay peanuts and you are likely paying 2 or 3 times to fix the messes you created - software is complex especially when it needs to interact with other systems.
And my point was more an example, a lot of experienced people no longer need the money that working full time offers and since Covid may have decided that time off is better than the extra money.
And for youngsters the opposite is try their costs are so high (thanks mainly to house prices) that both people need to work to get a house far worse than their parents bought on a (often far lower) single income.
Learn humility. None of us really matter all that much. If we’re lucky we do two or three things in our whole lives that wouldn’t have happened anyway.
Again you miss the point - for complex systems you need the world weary experts who have done it before and know what needs to be put in place for things to work as expected. Those people don’t come cheap
And given how much my current client has paid a large consultancy (£Xm) I shouldn’t be needing to do half the things I’m currently done to to get this project back to a sane position.
I understand why you think that. I am a “world weary expert”. Unlike you, I also realise that we are none of us that special, even if it’s tempting to think we are. There’s always someone else, except for those two or three unique things you might do in a lifetime.
IFS notices that the budget has actually made the £100,000 tax trap that @Casino and other have mentioned much worse:
The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the childcare proposals announced today will create “one of the most severe distortions you are ever likely to see within a tax and benefit system”...
A parent with a 1 year-old and a 3-year old whose childcare provider charges England’s average hourly rate for 40 hours per week would, after these reforms, find that their disposable income (i.e. earnings net of tax and childcare outgoings) falls by £14,500 if their pre-tax pay crosses £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £134,500, meaning a parent earning £130,000 would be worse off than one earning £99,000.
For those with higher childcare costs the distortions are even more absurd. A similar parent paying average London rates for childcare, using 50 hours per week, would see a £20,000 fall in disposable income when their pre-tax earnings cross £100,000. Disposable income would not recover its previous level until pre-tax pay reached £144,500.
I applauded the childcare for 1- and 2- year olds, but I hadn't realised it didn't apply to high earners. That's pretty stupid. Not only for the reasons Nick points out, but also because the proportion of £100k plus earners with one and two year old children must be a) tiny and b) disproportionately able to scale back under the ceiling and precisely the sort of people the economy would benefit from getting back to work.
I'm sorry but at the risk of sounding like an old socialist (again) people earning over £100k a year do not need taxpayers money to subsidise their child care. Where do you think the bulk of that money comes from? People earning a whole lot less.
There is a lot of real hardship in this country right now. The lifting of the life time limit for pension contributions was, to me, a fairly obscene bung to the wealthiest in our society at the cost of those with so much less. Paying their childcare too would have been repulsive.
I don't want to subsidise them out of some big love of higher earners (I am not one) but because my (admittedly untested) belief is that the country will be better off if we can get higher earners earning (and paying tax). I would expect the benefit to cost ratio of paying for childcare for higher earners to be greater than 1 (indeed, it probably has a higher BCR than for medium earners).
At over £100k a year they can afford child care out of their taxed income. Just as I did when paying private school fees. There are some who cannot earn because the absurd cost of child care in this country is higher than what they can hope to receive. People earning over £100k are not in that category and we need to focus the limited funds available to those who are.
Again, all you end up doing is creating a disincentive for the highest earners to work full time. You can call them as many names as you like, think of them as unpatriotic, call them tax dodgers or whatever but they are rational. Someone earning £100k getting a £10k payrise gets to keep £3.8k or just over £300 quid a month, a marginal rate of 62%, if they have kids under 5 the marginal rate goes up over 80% and sometimes over 100%.
On the flip side, the same person can choose to work a 4 day week and drop down to £88k per year, they lose £500 quid a month in net salary but they gain 52 days off per year for it and 3 day weekends. The day rate for that additional day per week is just under £200, which for someone in that position just isn't worth it. I think the specific maths for someone without kids is a ~40% drop in the day rate for that additional day worked when looking at the marginal gain.
Faced with those numbers, the possibility of spending more time with the family, being able to take them to zoo, park, long weekends away with the wife and daughter vs grinding out an additional day so the government can claim over 60% of it.
No, it's completely idiotic to have these marginal rates and this was the budget to get rid of them, a proper Tory government would have done so already because it is a barrier to growth.
Sorry but this running theme through this thread and others is just bollocks of the highest order. Someone on a £100k has one vague inconvenience? I earn £70k and I know I don’t get to complain about it EVER.
Cry me a f*cking river! They can reduce their hours if they like, and give up on ever being on £200k, or back here on planet Earth they’ll suck it up for a bit and be quiet.
Which part of people working part time reduces total productivity do people not quite grasp.
There is a barrier at £100,000 that is currently encouraging people to do less work than they otherwise could and that is impacting total productivity.
It could be fixed for little real effort but instead this budget has made it worse rather than better..
What part of “that’s politically too difficult, suck it up rich boy” do you not understand?
Honestly, do you lot not grasp that spending a single penny of discretionary spend on people with that salary (or even mine) is unacceptable when some people are really struggling.
Let’s highlight my career plan for the next 2 years.
22/23 earn £50,000 by working 3 or so months. 23/24 earn £50,000 ish and throw the rest into my pension pot (it’s going to be a lot), 24/25 earn £50,000 throw rest into pension pot.
October 24 - take the rest of the tax year off and possibly a lot longer..
Without the ability to throw a lot into the pension (and an interesting project) I would be working 5-6 months max a year.
You are irrelevant. We all are. At a macro level this will have a very marginal impact.
Also if they need a thing doing and you don’t, then someone else will. Someone more junior and for less.
Looks at how much end client has wasted on work that needs to be redone - pay peanuts and you are likely paying 2 or 3 times to fix the messes you created - software is complex especially when it needs to interact with other systems.
And my point was more an example, a lot of experienced people no longer need the money that working full time offers and since Covid may have decided that time off is better than the extra money.
And for youngsters the opposite is try their costs are so high (thanks mainly to house prices) that both people need to work to get a house far worse than their parents bought on a (often far lower) single income.
Learn humility. None of us really matter all that much. If we’re lucky we do two or three things in our whole lives that wouldn’t have happened anyway.
Again you miss the point - for complex systems you need the world weary experts who have done it before and know what needs to be put in place for things to work as expected. Those people don’t come cheap
And given how much my current client has paid a large consultancy (£Xm) I shouldn’t be needing to do half the things I’m currently done to to get this project back to a sane position.
I understand why you think that. I am a “world weary expert”. Unlike you, I also realise that we are none of us that special, even if it’s tempting to think we are. There’s always someone else, except for those two or three unique things you might do in a lifetime.
I'm special!
My mummy says I'm the most handsomest boy in all of Carnforth.
If you have no mortgage or kids you can live comfortably on 30 grand in a low cost part of the country.
For comparison: Universal Credit...
"How much you’ll get Monthly standard allowance If you’re single and under 25 £265.31 If you’re single and 25 or over £334.91 If you live with your partner and you’re both under 25 £416.45 (for you both) If you live with your partner and either of you are 25 or over £525.72 (for you both)"
So £4,018 pa plus 90% reduction in Council Tax (plus most of your rent if you rent) for a single person with no kids.
Yes not liveable is it. I dont know where these myths about benefits been so attractive come from...the daily mail perhaps.
It's survivable but very grim from what I see at Citizens Advice.
However, you still hear people say 'but they've all got Sky and the latest iPhone, and drive around in a new car' or similar.
Think the minimum monthly income you need to barely survive in this country is 800 to 900 pounds in a low cost area with no mortgage.
Checks outgoings...
Nope, barely surviving is less than that.
If you can cook, then you can live relatively well on a low income. It's lack of culinary skills that really hammer people.
Risotto, spanish omelette, baked pasta with tuna: there are a lot of meals that you can make for less than £2/person.
Dinner tonight, for example, is going to be baked rice with the leftover vegetables from the bottom of the fridge.
Dice the remaining half of an onion chuck it in a frying pan with a spoonful of olive oil. Add those slightly soft cherry tomatoes and the wilting greens. Let it soften.
Chuck it in the bottom of a casserole dish. Add spices. Pour two cupfulls of rice and then slightly more water. Cover. Bake.
Delicious meal for four at a cost of maybe $5.
It sounds really awful -- rice, plus a lot of mushy & soggy vegetables, past the sell by from the recesses of the fridge.
Go to Llandanwg beach. Gather musssels & winkles, poach in a little white wine over a driftwood fire. Eat with fresh bread. Total cost for four, maybe £1. Also, the fuel is free.
If you have no mortgage or kids you can live comfortably on 30 grand in a low cost part of the country.
For comparison: Universal Credit...
"How much you’ll get Monthly standard allowance If you’re single and under 25 £265.31 If you’re single and 25 or over £334.91 If you live with your partner and you’re both under 25 £416.45 (for you both) If you live with your partner and either of you are 25 or over £525.72 (for you both)"
So £4,018 pa plus 90% reduction in Council Tax (plus most of your rent if you rent) for a single person with no kids.
Yes not liveable is it. I dont know where these myths about benefits been so attractive come from...the daily mail perhaps.
It's survivable but very grim from what I see at Citizens Advice.
However, you still hear people say 'but they've all got Sky and the latest iPhone, and drive around in a new car' or similar.
Think the minimum monthly income you need to barely survive in this country is 800 to 900 pounds in a low cost area with no mortgage.
Checks outgoings...
Nope, barely surviving is less than that.
If you can cook, then you can live relatively well on a low income. It's lack of culinary skills that really hammer people.
Risotto, spanish omelette, baked pasta with tuna: there are a lot of meals that you can make for less than £2/person.
Dinner tonight, for example, is going to be baked rice with the leftover vegetables from the bottom of the fridge.
Dice the remaining half of an onion chuck it in a frying pan with a spoonful of olive oil. Add those slightly soft cherry tomatoes and the wilting greens. Let it soften.
Chuck it in the bottom of a casserole dish. Add spices. Pour two cupfulls of rice and then slightly more water. Cover. Bake.
Delicious meal for four at a cost of maybe $5.
It sounds really awful -- rice, plus a lot of mushy & soggy vegetables, past the sell by from the recesses of the fridge.
Go to Llandanwg beach. Gather musssels & winkles, poach in a little white wine over a driftwood fire. Eat with fresh bread. Total cost for four, maybe £1. Also, the fuel is free.
Which gets 5/5 on NYT Cooking, and not a lot of recipes get that.
Don't you need protein of some form?
I usually toss some prawns or salmon on top. But I've had a glass of wine and can't be arsed to leave the house, so the kids are just getting the rice and veg.
If you have no mortgage or kids you can live comfortably on 30 grand in a low cost part of the country.
For comparison: Universal Credit...
"How much you’ll get Monthly standard allowance If you’re single and under 25 £265.31 If you’re single and 25 or over £334.91 If you live with your partner and you’re both under 25 £416.45 (for you both) If you live with your partner and either of you are 25 or over £525.72 (for you both)"
So £4,018 pa plus 90% reduction in Council Tax (plus most of your rent if you rent) for a single person with no kids.
Yes not liveable is it. I dont know where these myths about benefits been so attractive come from...the daily mail perhaps.
It's survivable but very grim from what I see at Citizens Advice.
However, you still hear people say 'but they've all got Sky and the latest iPhone, and drive around in a new car' or similar.
Think the minimum monthly income you need to barely survive in this country is 800 to 900 pounds in a low cost area with no mortgage.
Checks outgoings...
Nope, barely surviving is less than that.
If you can cook, then you can live relatively well on a low income. It's lack of culinary skills that really hammer people.
Risotto, spanish omelette, baked pasta with tuna: there are a lot of meals that you can make for less than £2/person.
Dinner tonight, for example, is going to be baked rice with the leftover vegetables from the bottom of the fridge.
Dice the remaining half of an onion chuck it in a frying pan with a spoonful of olive oil. Add those slightly soft cherry tomatoes and the wilting greens. Let it soften.
Chuck it in the bottom of a casserole dish. Add spices. Pour two cupfulls of rice and then slightly more water. Cover. Bake.
Delicious meal for four at a cost of maybe $5.
It sounds really awful -- rice, plus a lot of mushy & soggy vegetables, past the sell by from the recesses of the fridge.
Go to Llandanwg beach. Gather musssels & winkles, poach in a little white wine over a driftwood fire. Eat with fresh bread. Total cost for four, maybe £1. Also, the fuel is free.
Which gets 5/5 on NYT Cooking, and not a lot of recipes get that.
Don't you need protein of some form?
I usually toss some prawns or salmon on top. But I've had a glass of wine and can't be arsed to leave the house, so the kids are just getting the rice and veg.
I imagine a couple of eggs cracked into the rice would do well enough for protein. Canned beans (not in tomato sauce!) would be another option.
Completely random, but there was a Supreme Court judgement released today in a case involving Ukraine, and irrespective of the issues at hand, and as I have thought vaguely before, but the Supreme Court website really is top notice. It's very easy to find cases, the press notices are thorough but concise on the issues and facts, the decision pages easily link to judgements and hearing videos. So many public institutions could learn a thing or two from them.
If you have no mortgage or kids you can live comfortably on 30 grand in a low cost part of the country.
For comparison: Universal Credit...
"How much you’ll get Monthly standard allowance If you’re single and under 25 £265.31 If you’re single and 25 or over £334.91 If you live with your partner and you’re both under 25 £416.45 (for you both) If you live with your partner and either of you are 25 or over £525.72 (for you both)"
So £4,018 pa plus 90% reduction in Council Tax (plus most of your rent if you rent) for a single person with no kids.
Yes not liveable is it. I dont know where these myths about benefits been so attractive come from...the daily mail perhaps.
It's survivable but very grim from what I see at Citizens Advice.
However, you still hear people say 'but they've all got Sky and the latest iPhone, and drive around in a new car' or similar.
Think the minimum monthly income you need to barely survive in this country is 800 to 900 pounds in a low cost area with no mortgage.
Checks outgoings...
Nope, barely surviving is less than that.
If you can cook, then you can live relatively well on a low income. It's lack of culinary skills that really hammer people.
Risotto, spanish omelette, baked pasta with tuna: there are a lot of meals that you can make for less than £2/person.
Dinner tonight, for example, is going to be baked rice with the leftover vegetables from the bottom of the fridge.
Dice the remaining half of an onion chuck it in a frying pan with a spoonful of olive oil. Add those slightly soft cherry tomatoes and the wilting greens. Let it soften.
Chuck it in the bottom of a casserole dish. Add spices. Pour two cupfulls of rice and then slightly more water. Cover. Bake.
Delicious meal for four at a cost of maybe $5.
It sounds really awful -- rice, plus a lot of mushy & soggy vegetables, past the sell by from the recesses of the fridge.
Go to Llandanwg beach. Gather musssels & winkles, poach in a little white wine over a driftwood fire. Eat with fresh bread. Total cost for four, maybe £1. Also, the fuel is free.
If you have no mortgage or kids you can live comfortably on 30 grand in a low cost part of the country.
For comparison: Universal Credit...
"How much you’ll get Monthly standard allowance If you’re single and under 25 £265.31 If you’re single and 25 or over £334.91 If you live with your partner and you’re both under 25 £416.45 (for you both) If you live with your partner and either of you are 25 or over £525.72 (for you both)"
So £4,018 pa plus 90% reduction in Council Tax (plus most of your rent if you rent) for a single person with no kids.
Yes not liveable is it. I dont know where these myths about benefits been so attractive come from...the daily mail perhaps.
It's survivable but very grim from what I see at Citizens Advice.
However, you still hear people say 'but they've all got Sky and the latest iPhone, and drive around in a new car' or similar.
Think the minimum monthly income you need to barely survive in this country is 800 to 900 pounds in a low cost area with no mortgage.
Checks outgoings...
Nope, barely surviving is less than that.
If you can cook, then you can live relatively well on a low income. It's lack of culinary skills that really hammer people.
Risotto, spanish omelette, baked pasta with tuna: there are a lot of meals that you can make for less than £2/person.
Dinner tonight, for example, is going to be baked rice with the leftover vegetables from the bottom of the fridge.
Dice the remaining half of an onion chuck it in a frying pan with a spoonful of olive oil. Add those slightly soft cherry tomatoes and the wilting greens. Let it soften.
Chuck it in the bottom of a casserole dish. Add spices. Pour two cupfulls of rice and then slightly more water. Cover. Bake.
Delicious meal for four at a cost of maybe $5.
It sounds really awful -- rice, plus a lot of mushy & soggy vegetables, past the sell by from the recesses of the fridge.
Go to Llandanwg beach. Gather musssels & winkles, poach in a little white wine over a driftwood fire. Eat with fresh bread. Total cost for four, maybe £1. Also, the fuel is free.
If you have no mortgage or kids you can live comfortably on 30 grand in a low cost part of the country.
For comparison: Universal Credit...
"How much you’ll get Monthly standard allowance If you’re single and under 25 £265.31 If you’re single and 25 or over £334.91 If you live with your partner and you’re both under 25 £416.45 (for you both) If you live with your partner and either of you are 25 or over £525.72 (for you both)"
So £4,018 pa plus 90% reduction in Council Tax (plus most of your rent if you rent) for a single person with no kids.
Yes not liveable is it. I dont know where these myths about benefits been so attractive come from...the daily mail perhaps.
It's survivable but very grim from what I see at Citizens Advice.
However, you still hear people say 'but they've all got Sky and the latest iPhone, and drive around in a new car' or similar.
Think the minimum monthly income you need to barely survive in this country is 800 to 900 pounds in a low cost area with no mortgage.
Checks outgoings...
Nope, barely surviving is less than that.
If you can cook, then you can live relatively well on a low income. It's lack of culinary skills that really hammer people.
Risotto, spanish omelette, baked pasta with tuna: there are a lot of meals that you can make for less than £2/person.
I think poor people eat cheaply. Knowing how to cook just makes what they eat a bit better.
It's the lack of resilience that does for you. Money buys you resilience. You can afford to be ill for a couple of days, deal with an unplanned event or additional expense, have proper childcare.
Comments
Also if they need a thing doing and you don’t, then someone else will. Someone more junior and for less.
I don't just take a 3 σ outlier to describe the distribution.
Nope, barely surviving is less than that.
And my point was more an example, a lot of experienced people no longer need the money that working full time offers and since Covid may have decided that time off is better than the extra money.
And for youngsters the opposite is try their costs are so high (thanks mainly to house prices) that both people need to work to get a house far worse than their parents bought on a (often far lower) single income.
The one other situation that can lead to this is someone suffering a catastrophic change in circs (illness, job loss, bereavement etc.) while still being tied into contracts that are impossible to exit.
I suspect very, very few - which is why the Govt hasn't "sorted" the issue - because if they did sort it they'll lose money from everyone else in the bracket who doesn't have kids between 1 and 5.
The fundamental problem causing all these traps is that you get the same salary for doing a job whether or not you have kids. But looking after kids costs a fortune - especially if they are between 1 and 5. Hence the Govt has to pay these people colossal subsidies.
But you can't wreck the tax system for everyone else just to tidy up some distortions affecting tiny numbers of people.
That is an issue we’ve highlighted here for ages and reverse how it works (so the 45% band kicks in earlier with allowances removed at a higher point) would solve a lot of problems…
NO!
As although the money is there the logistics and cash to provide the places simply aren’t and the amounts the government currently pays isn’t enough to really find a nursery so they need to play tricks to generate enough income to make up the shortfalls.
The Tories reputation is shot and Brexit is still hanging round our necks like Like an Albatross.
After several excuses for our bad performance the interviewer on Newsnight asked the Chief Secretary to the Treasury "But what about the 4% lost revenue Brexit is costing us each year?"
"Well that's what the country voted for". Was his pusillanimous answer
Risotto, spanish omelette, baked pasta with tuna: there are a lot of meals that you can make for less than £2/person.
Dice the remaining half of an onion chuck it in a frying pan with a spoonful of olive oil. Add those slightly soft cherry tomatoes and the wilting greens. Let it soften.
Chuck it in the bottom of a casserole dish. Add spices. Pour two cupfulls of rice and then slightly more water. Cover. Bake.
Delicious meal for four at a cost of maybe $5.
And given how much my current client has paid a large consultancy (£Xm) I shouldn’t be needing to do half the things I’m currently done to to get this project back to a sane position.
Porridge 55p kg
Bread 39p 800g
Beans 27p 420g
Tomatoes 28p 400g
Pasta 28p 500g
Potatoes £1.25 2.5kg
Carrots 50p kg
Grim but very cheap.
With just a teensy bit of knowledge, you can make pretty decent (and have a pretty decent variety of) meals.
Making bread, for example. I make foccacia - it's literally just flour, water, yeast and olive oil. (Plus a teaspoon of salt and sugar.) The raw material cost is negligible - the biggest cost is probably the flour itself, and you can get six or seven (family sized) portions from a £2/1.5kg bag. And making hummus to go with it is a 49p can of chickpeas.
Go to Llandanwg beach. Gather musssels & winkles, poach in a little white wine over a driftwood fire. Eat with fresh bread. Total cost for four, maybe £1. Also, the fuel is free.
Which gets 5/5 on NYT Cooking, and not a lot of recipes get that.
The overtime I was given to catch up on his work and try to upskill him was lucrative, but ultimately that was a situation where two people on the team would have got more work done if there hadn't been a third person on the team.
I think he'd been working as an IT support person before and fancied doing something a bit more interesting.
And I think that they should be treated better.
(In some ways, US law treats women better than men. For example, men are still required to register for the draft, but women aren't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_the_United_States
There are probably examples of US laws in which the reverse is true, but off hand I can't think of one.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks's_law
You seem to have an example suggesting that my corollary is, at least occasionally, true.
And people on here are complaining bitterly about £100K cliff edges!
https://mobile.twitter.com/itvpeston/status/1636136618292572162
It's the lack of resilience that does for you. Money buys you resilience. You can afford to be ill for a couple of days, deal with an unplanned event or additional expense, have proper childcare.