Spot the almost subliminal flash of Rachel Reeves towards the end of Clarkson's Farm S4 E8!
I like Clarkson's Farm but that stuff really winds me up. Whatever you think of the IHT change, the motivation for it was to prevent people like Clarkson inflating land prices by using it as a tax dodge. Part of the reason someone like Kaleb struggles to buy a farm is because the agricultural returns are so small, so the breakeven point is sometimes centuries in the future.
I'd forgive him if at the end of the next season he sells the land to Kaleb for a fair price for use as a farm (e.g. something like £0).
All true. That Clarkson emerged as the public face of the farm IHT campaign is ironic.
True but misleading. As Clarkson said, there are other tax shelters available.
The financial reality of the show is that Amazon more than subsidises any losses Clarkson makes on farming. So far as I can make out, everyone watches it, except for me.
It is good TV, and Clarkson manages to put himself across as quite likeable, even though I suspect he actually isn’t. He does concede that he doesn’t need the income from his farm to live on - just as well, as he isn’t making any.
Buying the farm as a tax dodge and then realising the possibility of milking a whole TV series out of it is genius, though. On Amazon it’s right at the top of the most viewed.
Exactly and at going tax rate so 43% in Scotland. People on here live in dreamland thinking pensioners earn gazillions and pay no taxes. FFS they pay the same taxes as any other person once above the paltry 12K allowance.
I mean they objectively don’t. They don’t pay National Insurance for one
And I'm not about shed any tears for pensioners with incomes over £43k per annum, particularly as they are unlikely to have housing costs or dependents.
Deserted yesterday. What we may be seeing is families without children taking their holidays early before the schools break up and prices skyrocket. And in light of recent years, also before August heatwaves make France and points south unbearable. (Or, who knows, they might just be following the Gazette's travel writer.)
All of which means less spending in Blighty and more invisible imports wrecking our balance of trade.
We were out in Newcastle a Couple of Fridays ago. The bars were quiet. The restaurant packed. A sunny Friday in May. Before Covid the bars we went to would have been busy.
I really do not know how anyone can afford to eat and drink out
I cooked haddock, chips and peas for my beloved last night and it cost just over £4
The local chippy is advertising the same on a special offer of £27.50 !!!
The striking thing is just how little alcohol our family drinks and our 22 year old granddaughter is TT
Haddock, chips and mushies for 2??
4 x Birds Eye breaded haddock at £4.28 (on offer) equates to £1 each
My wife is an expert on white fish and her highly successful Scottish skipper father maintained that frozen haddock is as good as fresh and to be fair it tastes wonderful
In general, I'd go with day 1 fresh being better than day 1 frozen, which is itself perhaps better than day 2 fresh. With a bit of give and take.
Yesterday's spending review commits the government to increasing current spending by £190bn a year more over the term of the Parliament. Public spending is committed to growing 2.3% in real terms.
These plans, in my view, condemn the UK to higher taxes and lower growth as well as spiralling ever nearer the plug hole of unsustainable debt. It is indicative of the complacency that is shared across the media and elsewhere, despite the lesson of Truss, that this disastrous course of action seems to engender so little comment with the focus being on the individual elements.
We are in serious trouble and yesterday made it worse.
The alternative is another decade of worsening austerity. Even yesterday's plans are significant cuts for many departments. We can't have both growth and the featherbedding of the Granny State.
I take no particular view on what the percentage of GDP spent by the government should be, just want a balanced budget and for the politicians to be honest about the trade offs. I am not expecting either any time soon.
We can't, so we need to choose growth and not the granny state.
Long past time to cut the NHS, Triple Lock etc and prioritise things other than the grey vote.
Even if you cut spending per old person, the numbers are going up a lot. 11m to 13m over 65s in 10 years. A 20% cut (unthinkable) in pensions would still leave the pension budget increasing.
In real terms its absolutely not unthinkable, just unpopular.
We need to have the same attitude to grey benefits that the older generation had to free tuition ... numbers have gone up so its just not viable
I don’t think any politician would ever stand up and propose a 20% cut in basic State pension. It might be logical or even desirable but it’s not going to happen.
We don’t do that kind of pay cut though I know as some of the post-Communist countries reverted to capitalist systems in the early 90s, they did cut wages and benefits for those in the State sector and even Greece and Spain cut public sector wages during the Eurozone crisis.
The British approach is to freeze wages which translates to a real term cut as you know.
Raising the age at which the State pension can be taken is one option and that will no doubt happen. To be fair, frozen thresholds mean many people are seeing their workplace pensions increasingly taxed (the State pension itself isn’t) so perhaps we need to rethink that to encourage more people to fund their own retirement from workplace schemes which means the private sector stepping up to offer the kind of pensions to their workers other sectors achieve.
Some form of sovereign pension fund into which all private companies would have to pay and increased contributions from workers, he says, thinking aloud.
The logical endpoint becomes the end of the State pension with everyone self financing their retirement (hopefully not via the American style 401 with everyone playing the stock market). Can’t see that happening anytime soon.
The current system is in trouble but the irony is a lot of older people are currently doing very well so it works - to a point.
That was the point, a real terms cut is viable.
Do to pensions the same as was done to many state employees over the past decade and a half "increases will be at 1% per year until the finances are sorted".
That's a nominal increase, but a real terms cut.
In real terms many people's salaries have been cut by over 20%, and that's people working for a living. Those who aren't working for their living deserve no more than those who are.
Wrong. Many pensioners don't have the option of working again to make up the difference. You're comparing apples and oranges.
I'm not wrong and many can.
Many people could work if they wanted to and even if they can't or don't is not an excuse to demand unaffordable money from those who are working.
Indeed pension conditions were changed in the 1980s multiple times, when the current generation of pensioners were working. There's no reason the same can't happen today when they're retired.
What a creep, you would rob poor pensioners and force them into the workhouse just to line your sorry arse. Hopefully you have no parents or grandparents as you will be like a vulture picking their bones.
The SNP are of course delusional fantasists who believe our own politicians would do better despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary but they are surely cold eyed pragmatists compared with Plaid.
I mean, what on earth are they for? Do they really want independence or is it just a Welsh speaking pressure group? I honestly don’t get why they exist.
Plaid have said Independence is not on their agenda in their first term in Office
Even that is a lagging indicator. The real economy is in a hell of a mess.
Who could have ever thought that raising taxes on employment while leaving unearned incomes untaxed might not be the best way to manage an economy?
Savings are taxed. Dividends are taxed. The tax on dividends has been increased. Pensions are taxed. Assets when sold are taxed. Other than houses you live in. Are you suggesting CGT on the sale of houses?
True. but it's bad politics for workers to be taxed more heavily than the retired (like me). And the low tax/untaxed nature of residential property is a disaster distorting the market and giving all the wrong incentives.
Also distorting the market is the ludicrous IHT rules whereby the rate is far too high (40%) and the exemptions capricious (extra if you own a home etc) and the ways of avoiding it a series of open goals, keeping Lincoln's Inn in business.
Low rate (5-10%), no exemptions, CTT at the same rate on inter vivos transactions is the way forward.
What mince are you talking , the only tax (sic ) that can be different is NI for working pensioners. So unless you specifically mean that miniscule point then you are talking absolute bollox.
NI should apply to all pension income itself not just working.
Taxes should be no higher on working for a living than not working.
Don't like it? Get a job.
You halfwitted poltroon I have a job, can you actually read. I bet I pay more tax than you earn on benefits as well.
Even that is a lagging indicator. The real economy is in a hell of a mess.
Who could have ever thought that raising taxes on employment while leaving unearned incomes untaxed might not be the best way to manage an economy?
Savings are taxed. Dividends are taxed. The tax on dividends has been increased. Pensions are taxed. Assets when sold are taxed. Other than houses you live in. Are you suggesting CGT on the sale of houses?
True. but it's bad politics for workers to be taxed more heavily than the retired (like me). And the low tax/untaxed nature of residential property is a disaster distorting the market and giving all the wrong incentives.
Also distorting the market is the ludicrous IHT rules whereby the rate is far too high (40%) and the exemptions capricious (extra if you own a home etc) and the ways of avoiding it a series of open goals, keeping Lincoln's Inn in business.
Low rate (5-10%), no exemptions, CTT at the same rate on inter vivos transactions is the way forward.
What mince are you talking , the only tax (sic ) that can be different is NI for working pensioners. So unless you specifically mean that miniscule point then you are talking absolute bollox.
NI should apply to all pension income itself not just working.
Taxes should be no higher on working for a living than not working.
Don't like it? Get a job.
You halfwitted poltroon I have a job, can you actually read. I bet I pay more tax than you earn on benefits as well.
Yesterday's spending review commits the government to increasing current spending by £190bn a year more over the term of the Parliament. Public spending is committed to growing 2.3% in real terms.
These plans, in my view, condemn the UK to higher taxes and lower growth as well as spiralling ever nearer the plug hole of unsustainable debt. It is indicative of the complacency that is shared across the media and elsewhere, despite the lesson of Truss, that this disastrous course of action seems to engender so little comment with the focus being on the individual elements.
We are in serious trouble and yesterday made it worse.
The alternative is another decade of worsening austerity. Even yesterday's plans are significant cuts for many departments. We can't have both growth and the featherbedding of the Granny State.
I take no particular view on what the percentage of GDP spent by the government should be, just want a balanced budget and for the politicians to be honest about the trade offs. I am not expecting either any time soon.
We can't, so we need to choose growth and not the granny state.
Long past time to cut the NHS, Triple Lock etc and prioritise things other than the grey vote.
Even if you cut spending per old person, the numbers are going up a lot. 11m to 13m over 65s in 10 years. A 20% cut (unthinkable) in pensions would still leave the pension budget increasing.
In real terms its absolutely not unthinkable, just unpopular.
We need to have the same attitude to grey benefits that the older generation had to free tuition ... numbers have gone up so its just not viable
I don’t think any politician would ever stand up and propose a 20% cut in basic State pension. It might be logical or even desirable but it’s not going to happen.
We don’t do that kind of pay cut though I know as some of the post-Communist countries reverted to capitalist systems in the early 90s, they did cut wages and benefits for those in the State sector and even Greece and Spain cut public sector wages during the Eurozone crisis.
The British approach is to freeze wages which translates to a real term cut as you know.
Raising the age at which the State pension can be taken is one option and that will no doubt happen. To be fair, frozen thresholds mean many people are seeing their workplace pensions increasingly taxed (the State pension itself isn’t) so perhaps we need to rethink that to encourage more people to fund their own retirement from workplace schemes which means the private sector stepping up to offer the kind of pensions to their workers other sectors achieve.
Some form of sovereign pension fund into which all private companies would have to pay and increased contributions from workers, he says, thinking aloud.
The logical endpoint becomes the end of the State pension with everyone self financing their retirement (hopefully not via the American style 401 with everyone playing the stock market). Can’t see that happening anytime soon.
The current system is in trouble but the irony is a lot of older people are currently doing very well so it works - to a point.
That was the point, a real terms cut is viable.
Do to pensions the same as was done to many state employees over the past decade and a half "increases will be at 1% per year until the finances are sorted".
That's a nominal increase, but a real terms cut.
In real terms many people's salaries have been cut by over 20%, and that's people working for a living. Those who aren't working for their living deserve no more than those who are.
Wrong. Many pensioners don't have the option of working again to make up the difference. You're comparing apples and oranges.
I'm not wrong and many can.
Many people could work if they wanted to and even if they can't or don't is not an excuse to demand unaffordable money from those who are working.
Indeed pension conditions were changed in the 1980s multiple times, when the current generation of pensioners were working. There's no reason the same can't happen today when they're retired.
What a creep, you would rob poor pensioners and force them into the workhouse just to line your sorry arse. Hopefully you have no parents or grandparents as you will be like a vulture picking their bones.
Those keenest on impoverishing pensioners and forcing them to work are often business owners and the like who do absolutely fuck all to deserve their wealth or income.
Even that is a lagging indicator. The real economy is in a hell of a mess.
Who could have ever thought that raising taxes on employment while leaving unearned incomes untaxed might not be the best way to manage an economy?
Savings are taxed. Dividends are taxed. The tax on dividends has been increased. Pensions are taxed. Assets when sold are taxed. Other than houses you live in. Are you suggesting CGT on the sale of houses?
True. but it's bad politics for workers to be taxed more heavily than the retired (like me). And the low tax/untaxed nature of residential property is a disaster distorting the market and giving all the wrong incentives.
Also distorting the market is the ludicrous IHT rules whereby the rate is far too high (40%) and the exemptions capricious (extra if you own a home etc) and the ways of avoiding it a series of open goals, keeping Lincoln's Inn in business.
Low rate (5-10%), no exemptions, CTT at the same rate on inter vivos transactions is the way forward.
What mince are you talking , the only tax (sic ) that can be different is NI for working pensioners. So unless you specifically mean that miniscule point then you are talking absolute bollox.
Thanks. Not trivial if you see NI as simply a futher tax - which it is, as money is money.
For someone receiving say £50,000 pa gross from earned income the NI would be roughly £3k. This is not trivial. I suggest combining IT and NI at around 30% for income generally so that the person with an income of £50,000 gross from whatever source pays the same as the bloke who gets up at 6am to go to work on an overpriced season ticket to feed his starving children and pay the mortgage on an overpriced house.
Pensioners like me are extremely privileged, and I think as a group they are asking too much of others. I decline to join their number.
Exactly and at going tax rate so 43% in Scotland. People on here live in dreamland thinking pensioners earn gazillions and pay no taxes. FFS they pay the same taxes as any other person once above the paltry 12K allowance.
I mean they objectively don’t. They don’t pay National Insurance for one
And I'm not about shed any tears for pensioners with incomes over £43k per annum, particularly as they are unlikely to have housing costs or dependents.
I'm elderly & unfit myself and I reckon it's time to say the unsayable and acknowledge that too many resources are going into keeping people alive too long. Perhaps the real lesson we should learn from Covid for the next pandemic is to let it take its course amongst people like me & worse and focus on preserving the physical & mental health of the younger people.
Jones is a classic queers for Palestine type. Has made a career shouting about stuff rather than, say, becoming a politician and trying to do something about it.
Great header, thanks so much. Really enjoying this series. I suspect in the long run it will be better for labour to occasionally lose power, complacency can be a bigger danger. Given the extra public spending, is it surprising how poor the education scores are?
Spot the almost subliminal flash of Rachel Reeves towards the end of Clarkson's Farm S4 E8!
I like Clarkson's Farm but that stuff really winds me up. Whatever you think of the IHT change, the motivation for it was to prevent people like Clarkson inflating land prices by using it as a tax dodge. Part of the reason someone like Kaleb struggles to buy a farm is because the agricultural returns are so small, so the breakeven point is sometimes centuries in the future.
I'd forgive him if at the end of the next season he sells the land to Kaleb for a fair price for use as a farm (e.g. something like £0).
All true. That Clarkson emerged as the public face of the farm IHT campaign is ironic.
True but misleading. As Clarkson said, there are other tax shelters available.
The financial reality of the show is that Amazon more than subsidises any losses Clarkson makes on farming. So far as I can make out, everyone watches it, except for me.
Plus he is enormously wealthy from his career to date.
I think the response to the NICs changes, minimum wage, lower immigration, labour rights changes is going to be fascinating. Something for everyone.
In Scotland, we had a considerable surge in productivity growth in the aftermath of the 2008 recession, with many of the lower paid jobs being squeezed out. Will that happen again?
Will we end up like France, with a higher rate of unemployment offset by higher wages for those in work?
Which of the changes is actually having a bigger impact? The assumption was most of the NICs changes would be absorbed by wages, not employment rates - but that doesn't seem to be the case. Is this hammering minimum wage employers more? Are smaller businesses doing better because of the employment allowance? The NICs change is pretty small, in the grand scheme of things.
But the big question for me is the huge drop in vacancies since the peak in 2022, which appears to have accelerated slightly since November. Why has that happened - immigration?
Even that is a lagging indicator. The real economy is in a hell of a mess.
Who could have ever thought that raising taxes on employment while leaving unearned incomes untaxed might not be the best way to manage an economy?
Savings are taxed. Dividends are taxed. The tax on dividends has been increased. Pensions are taxed. Assets when sold are taxed. Other than houses you live in. Are you suggesting CGT on the sale of houses?
True. but it's bad politics for workers to be taxed more heavily than the retired (like me). And the low tax/untaxed nature of residential property is a disaster distorting the market and giving all the wrong incentives.
Also distorting the market is the ludicrous IHT rules whereby the rate is far too high (40%) and the exemptions capricious (extra if you own a home etc) and the ways of avoiding it a series of open goals, keeping Lincoln's Inn in business.
Low rate (5-10%), no exemptions, CTT at the same rate on inter vivos transactions is the way forward.
What mince are you talking , the only tax (sic ) that can be different is NI for working pensioners. So unless you specifically mean that miniscule point then you are talking absolute bollox.
Thanks. Not trivial if you see NI as simply a futher tax - which it is, as money is money.
For someone receiving say £50,000 pa gross from earned income the NI would be roughly £3k. This is not trivial. I suggest combining IT and NI at around 30% for income generally so that the person with an income of £50,000 gross from whatever source pays the same as the bloke who gets up at 6am to go to work on an overpriced season ticket to feed his starving children and pay the mortgage on an overpriced house.
Pensioners like me are extremely privileged, and I think as a group they are asking too much of others. I decline to join their number.
The additional taxes paid on earned income rather than pensions, dividends and rent is truly one of the mysteries of the age.
Sean Thomas has not one but two articles in the Speccie this week. One on otter's pockets and lads mags and another on Luxembourg.
He is stealing all his ideas from someone on PB. This young man will go far. (He's right about the golden age of lads mags).
The annoying thing is that the articles aren't always in the print version of the magazine.
The web content is after clicks, whereas the hard copy will focus on more the more thoughtful stuff.
I wish that last bit was true. The Speccie is far to much like a sort of Telegraph using longer words, sharper writers but still full of unmeritorious tripe.
Exactly and at going tax rate so 43% in Scotland. People on here live in dreamland thinking pensioners earn gazillions and pay no taxes. FFS they pay the same taxes as any other person once above the paltry 12K allowance.
I mean they objectively don’t. They don’t pay National Insurance for one
Name any other thing , NI is for pension etc and debatable to be called income tax but ignoring that they do pay income tax on their wages and liek other taxes levels are dependent on several things , name any income that is NOT taxed, and to boot majority of pensioners are NOT employed. Those that do work pay taxes on their wages, all taxes as demanded by law, you would have imagined a lawyer would know that. I expect such tripe from Dumbo Bart , you have joined the club.
Even that is a lagging indicator. The real economy is in a hell of a mess.
Who could have ever thought that raising taxes on employment while leaving unearned incomes untaxed might not be the best way to manage an economy?
Savings are taxed. Dividends are taxed. The tax on dividends has been increased. Pensions are taxed. Assets when sold are taxed. Other than houses you live in. Are you suggesting CGT on the sale of houses?
True. but it's bad politics for workers to be taxed more heavily than the retired (like me). And the low tax/untaxed nature of residential property is a disaster distorting the market and giving all the wrong incentives.
Also distorting the market is the ludicrous IHT rules whereby the rate is far too high (40%) and the exemptions capricious (extra if you own a home etc) and the ways of avoiding it a series of open goals, keeping Lincoln's Inn in business.
Low rate (5-10%), no exemptions, CTT at the same rate on inter vivos transactions is the way forward.
What mince are you talking , the only tax (sic ) that can be different is NI for working pensioners. So unless you specifically mean that miniscule point then you are talking absolute bollox.
Thanks. Not trivial if you see NI as simply a futher tax - which it is, as money is money.
For someone receiving say £50,000 pa gross from earned income the NI would be roughly £3k. This is not trivial. I suggest combining IT and NI at around 30% for income generally so that the person with an income of £50,000 gross from whatever source pays the same as the bloke who gets up at 6am to go to work on an overpriced season ticket to feed his starving children and pay the mortgage on an overpriced house.
Pensioners like me are extremely privileged, and I think as a group they are asking too much of others. I decline to join their number.
As another pensioner quite honestly I don't think I've ever been as well off as I am now. I've paid for my house, I've no debts (which I had when working due to a combination of misfortune and incompetence) I'm not paying into savings accounts for pensions and I'm not paying NI.
A lot of the anti pensioners vitriol seems to stem from them sitting on equity. What on earth would be the point in working for 50 years, paying off a mortgage and then 'downsizing' to some soulless shoebox? And all to support 'young people' to work 50 years, pay off a mortgage and...... People aren't battery hens.
Even that is a lagging indicator. The real economy is in a hell of a mess.
Who could have ever thought that raising taxes on employment while leaving unearned incomes untaxed might not be the best way to manage an economy?
Savings are taxed. Dividends are taxed. The tax on dividends has been increased. Pensions are taxed. Assets when sold are taxed. Other than houses you live in. Are you suggesting CGT on the sale of houses?
True. but it's bad politics for workers to be taxed more heavily than the retired (like me). And the low tax/untaxed nature of residential property is a disaster distorting the market and giving all the wrong incentives.
Also distorting the market is the ludicrous IHT rules whereby the rate is far too high (40%) and the exemptions capricious (extra if you own a home etc) and the ways of avoiding it a series of open goals, keeping Lincoln's Inn in business.
Low rate (5-10%), no exemptions, CTT at the same rate on inter vivos transactions is the way forward.
What mince are you talking , the only tax (sic ) that can be different is NI for working pensioners. So unless you specifically mean that miniscule point then you are talking absolute bollox.
NI should apply to all pension income itself not just working.
Taxes should be no higher on working for a living than not working.
Don't like it? Get a job.
You know what, although I agree in part, if the job market valued people like me I’d still be working.
Older people are perceived as being rigid, inflexible, unhelpful and obstructive and our experience not valued.
Deserted yesterday. What we may be seeing is families without children taking their holidays early before the schools break up and prices skyrocket. And in light of recent years, also before August heatwaves make France and points south unbearable. (Or, who knows, they might just be following the Gazette's travel writer.)
All of which means less spending in Blighty and more invisible imports wrecking our balance of trade.
They should come to the Faroes. Rhubarb juice with Faroese smoked salmon and scrambled free range Faroes eggs is a terrific breakfast. Who knew?
Also last night the Danish king and queen stayed in my hotel. True story. Much jollity was had. Whole thing surrounded by police. I think they were hoping to grab some beer time with me but I was off eating pilot whale blubber
Who knew about scrambled eggs and smoked salmon? Denis Healey (best prime minister we never had, part 94) used to advertise it on telly. He did not mention rhubarb but was MP for Leeds on the tip of the rhubarb triangle.
Even that is a lagging indicator. The real economy is in a hell of a mess.
Who could have ever thought that raising taxes on employment while leaving unearned incomes untaxed might not be the best way to manage an economy?
Savings are taxed. Dividends are taxed. The tax on dividends has been increased. Pensions are taxed. Assets when sold are taxed. Other than houses you live in. Are you suggesting CGT on the sale of houses?
True. but it's bad politics for workers to be taxed more heavily than the retired (like me). And the low tax/untaxed nature of residential property is a disaster distorting the market and giving all the wrong incentives.
Also distorting the market is the ludicrous IHT rules whereby the rate is far too high (40%) and the exemptions capricious (extra if you own a home etc) and the ways of avoiding it a series of open goals, keeping Lincoln's Inn in business.
Low rate (5-10%), no exemptions, CTT at the same rate on inter vivos transactions is the way forward.
What mince are you talking , the only tax (sic ) that can be different is NI for working pensioners. So unless you specifically mean that miniscule point then you are talking absolute bollox.
Thanks. Not trivial if you see NI as simply a futher tax - which it is, as money is money.
For someone receiving say £50,000 pa gross from earned income the NI would be roughly £3k. This is not trivial. I suggest combining IT and NI at around 30% for income generally so that the person with an income of £50,000 gross from whatever source pays the same as the bloke who gets up at 6am to go to work on an overpriced season ticket to feed his starving children and pay the mortgage on an overpriced house.
Pensioners like me are extremely privileged, and I think as a group they are asking too much of others. I decline to join their number.
The whole point is that pensioners are taxed like everyone else , they pay all eligible taxes as required by HMRC. If you mean tax should be reformed then that is a different topic. We have swiveled loons on here that would push their grannies under a bus because they pay NI and their grannies don't. A fair tax system is needed but charging NI on the pension is not the answer.
Yesterday's spending review commits the government to increasing current spending by £190bn a year more over the term of the Parliament. Public spending is committed to growing 2.3% in real terms.
These plans, in my view, condemn the UK to higher taxes and lower growth as well as spiralling ever nearer the plug hole of unsustainable debt. It is indicative of the complacency that is shared across the media and elsewhere, despite the lesson of Truss, that this disastrous course of action seems to engender so little comment with the focus being on the individual elements.
We are in serious trouble and yesterday made it worse.
The alternative is another decade of worsening austerity. Even yesterday's plans are significant cuts for many departments. We can't have both growth and the featherbedding of the Granny State.
I take no particular view on what the percentage of GDP spent by the government should be, just want a balanced budget and for the politicians to be honest about the trade offs. I am not expecting either any time soon.
We can't, so we need to choose growth and not the granny state.
Long past time to cut the NHS, Triple Lock etc and prioritise things other than the grey vote.
Even if you cut spending per old person, the numbers are going up a lot. 11m to 13m over 65s in 10 years. A 20% cut (unthinkable) in pensions would still leave the pension budget increasing.
In real terms its absolutely not unthinkable, just unpopular.
We need to have the same attitude to grey benefits that the older generation had to free tuition ... numbers have gone up so its just not viable
I don’t think any politician would ever stand up and propose a 20% cut in basic State pension. It might be logical or even desirable but it’s not going to happen.
We don’t do that kind of pay cut though I know as some of the post-Communist countries reverted to capitalist systems in the early 90s, they did cut wages and benefits for those in the State sector and even Greece and Spain cut public sector wages during the Eurozone crisis.
The British approach is to freeze wages which translates to a real term cut as you know.
Raising the age at which the State pension can be taken is one option and that will no doubt happen. To be fair, frozen thresholds mean many people are seeing their workplace pensions increasingly taxed (the State pension itself isn’t) so perhaps we need to rethink that to encourage more people to fund their own retirement from workplace schemes which means the private sector stepping up to offer the kind of pensions to their workers other sectors achieve.
Some form of sovereign pension fund into which all private companies would have to pay and increased contributions from workers, he says, thinking aloud.
The logical endpoint becomes the end of the State pension with everyone self financing their retirement (hopefully not via the American style 401 with everyone playing the stock market). Can’t see that happening anytime soon.
The current system is in trouble but the irony is a lot of older people are currently doing very well so it works - to a point.
That was the point, a real terms cut is viable.
Do to pensions the same as was done to many state employees over the past decade and a half "increases will be at 1% per year until the finances are sorted".
That's a nominal increase, but a real terms cut.
In real terms many people's salaries have been cut by over 20%, and that's people working for a living. Those who aren't working for their living deserve no more than those who are.
The only answer to pensions is mean testing the high earners and the asset rich plus increase to 70
Similarly with the NHS
Of course this is blasphemy to many, but reality can at times be difficult to accept and new hard thinking is required
But then you have to pay benefits to all those aged 67 to 70 who can't find work (or those younger who can't take the jobs they leave) we don't have the jobs to support work till 70
Im all for means testing the NHS though
I would just say any increase in the retirement age takes years to implement, otherwise we have WASPI's again
Don't fall for their nonsense Big G - the Waspi changes also took a long time to roll out. Its just a claim based on the government not coming round to each and every person affected with a a cup a tea and a bar chart in the lounge...
None of the wording anywhere seems to suggest survivors.
If by, some stroke of divine intervention, there is just one survivor they can come on here and win the eternally tedious air travel anecdotes battle royale.
Sooner or later, any decision made by Starmer’s Labour government turns out to be damaging for the UK
This is now being applied to the Gibraltar deal. Falling apart under scrutiny
What's the problem with the Gibraltar deal? They have fixed the border FUBAR so that people are able to cross it freely again as they need to. Gibraltar remains a BOT, the military facility remains untouched, and the people who voted in almost unanimity to not fuck their lives up get the fix they voted for.
Loads of details about the passport arrangements now being revealed. Allegations on X such as: every British citizen entering Gibraltar will now have their passports checked by Spain and a stay in Gibraltar will count as a stay in Schenghen. As visiting the EU. The Spanish will control how and when the British visit British territory abroad
Likewise some are claiming this will apply to British troops or sailors in the Navy
OK. This is Gibraltar. The deal is great for everyone who lives there - who didn't vote to be walled in. The deal is great for the workers Gibraltar needs to cross from Spain and back each day. The deal makes no difference to most people travelling to Gibraltar as how may are close to the 90/180 barrier? Which itself is on its way out as we work towards a solution longer term.
So in practice this deal in a very practical way improves the lives of the people of Gibraltar who voted for it. But imposes a theoretical dictat on Mr Keyboard of Clacton who doesn't travel to forrin anyway.
Even that is a lagging indicator. The real economy is in a hell of a mess.
Who could have ever thought that raising taxes on employment while leaving unearned incomes untaxed might not be the best way to manage an economy?
Savings are taxed. Dividends are taxed. The tax on dividends has been increased. Pensions are taxed. Assets when sold are taxed. Other than houses you live in. Are you suggesting CGT on the sale of houses?
True. but it's bad politics for workers to be taxed more heavily than the retired (like me). And the low tax/untaxed nature of residential property is a disaster distorting the market and giving all the wrong incentives.
Also distorting the market is the ludicrous IHT rules whereby the rate is far too high (40%) and the exemptions capricious (extra if you own a home etc) and the ways of avoiding it a series of open goals, keeping Lincoln's Inn in business.
Low rate (5-10%), no exemptions, CTT at the same rate on inter vivos transactions is the way forward.
What mince are you talking , the only tax (sic ) that can be different is NI for working pensioners. So unless you specifically mean that miniscule point then you are talking absolute bollox.
Thanks. Not trivial if you see NI as simply a futher tax - which it is, as money is money.
For someone receiving say £50,000 pa gross from earned income the NI would be roughly £3k. This is not trivial. I suggest combining IT and NI at around 30% for income generally so that the person with an income of £50,000 gross from whatever source pays the same as the bloke who gets up at 6am to go to work on an overpriced season ticket to feed his starving children and pay the mortgage on an overpriced house.
Pensioners like me are extremely privileged, and I think as a group they are asking too much of others. I decline to join their number.
As another pensioner quite honestly I don't think I've ever been as well off as I am now. I've paid for my house, I've no debts (which I had when working due to a combination of misfortune and incompetence) I'm not paying into savings accounts for pensions and I'm not paying NI.
I am the same, but the other side of the coin that as over 80's, we both suffer health issues and mobility and tempus fugit
Spot the almost subliminal flash of Rachel Reeves towards the end of Clarkson's Farm S4 E8!
I like Clarkson's Farm but that stuff really winds me up. Whatever you think of the IHT change, the motivation for it was to prevent people like Clarkson inflating land prices by using it as a tax dodge. Part of the reason someone like Kaleb struggles to buy a farm is because the agricultural returns are so small, so the breakeven point is sometimes centuries in the future.
I'd forgive him if at the end of the next season he sells the land to Kaleb for a fair price for use as a farm (e.g. something like £0).
Labour should have just exempted family farms and small businesses held for 2 generations or more from the IHT tax changes, that way tax dodgers would still have been hit and not been competing with the likes of Kaleb to buy farmland but traditional farming families wouldn't
Simpler - the IHT would be due when the land is sold. If the land is inherited again, then the IHT is replaced with the latest value, not doubled up.
So if you keep the family farm in the family - no tax. If you make money from selling it, you pay the IHT out of that.
Or a 5% taper per year of agricultural activity so a farm that has been active for 20+ years is exempted.
It doesn't matter how many better ways there were, Labour aren't interested. This is a revenge beating for the countryside that ripped the UK out of the EU. It's not rational policy making, it's angry urban lefties exacting revenge.
A lot of the anti pensioners vitriol seems to stem from them sitting on equity. What on earth would be the point in working for 50 years, paying off a mortgage and then 'downsizing' to some soulless shoebox? And all to support 'young people' to work 50 years, pay off a mortgage and...... People aren't battery hens.
It wouldn't be a problem if there were enough houses built for the next generation. Rationing of anything is only a factor when there's a shortage, but why should there be a shortage of housing in Britain? It's not like the country has been involved in a war recently which has seen millions of houses destroyed.
Sean Thomas has not one but two articles in the Speccie this week. One on otter's pockets and lads mags and another on Luxembourg.
He is stealing all his ideas from someone on PB. This young man will go far. (He's right about the golden age of lads mags).
The annoying thing is that the articles aren't always in the print version of the magazine.
The web content is after clicks, whereas the hard copy will focus on more the more thoughtful stuff.
I wish that last bit was true. The Speccie is far to much like a sort of Telegraph using longer words, sharper writers but still full of unmeritorious tripe.
The TLS used to be better for the right-leaning erudite. Is it still, now ?
I tread the LRB, which is sometimes wonderful, and sometimes dull.
Yesterday's spending review commits the government to increasing current spending by £190bn a year more over the term of the Parliament. Public spending is committed to growing 2.3% in real terms.
These plans, in my view, condemn the UK to higher taxes and lower growth as well as spiralling ever nearer the plug hole of unsustainable debt. It is indicative of the complacency that is shared across the media and elsewhere, despite the lesson of Truss, that this disastrous course of action seems to engender so little comment with the focus being on the individual elements.
We are in serious trouble and yesterday made it worse.
The alternative is another decade of worsening austerity. Even yesterday's plans are significant cuts for many departments. We can't have both growth and the featherbedding of the Granny State.
I take no particular view on what the percentage of GDP spent by the government should be, just want a balanced budget and for the politicians to be honest about the trade offs. I am not expecting either any time soon.
We can't, so we need to choose growth and not the granny state.
Long past time to cut the NHS, Triple Lock etc and prioritise things other than the grey vote.
Even if you cut spending per old person, the numbers are going up a lot. 11m to 13m over 65s in 10 years. A 20% cut (unthinkable) in pensions would still leave the pension budget increasing.
In real terms its absolutely not unthinkable, just unpopular.
We need to have the same attitude to grey benefits that the older generation had to free tuition ... numbers have gone up so its just not viable
I don’t think any politician would ever stand up and propose a 20% cut in basic State pension. It might be logical or even desirable but it’s not going to happen.
We don’t do that kind of pay cut though I know as some of the post-Communist countries reverted to capitalist systems in the early 90s, they did cut wages and benefits for those in the State sector and even Greece and Spain cut public sector wages during the Eurozone crisis.
The British approach is to freeze wages which translates to a real term cut as you know.
Raising the age at which the State pension can be taken is one option and that will no doubt happen. To be fair, frozen thresholds mean many people are seeing their workplace pensions increasingly taxed (the State pension itself isn’t) so perhaps we need to rethink that to encourage more people to fund their own retirement from workplace schemes which means the private sector stepping up to offer the kind of pensions to their workers other sectors achieve.
Some form of sovereign pension fund into which all private companies would have to pay and increased contributions from workers, he says, thinking aloud.
The logical endpoint becomes the end of the State pension with everyone self financing their retirement (hopefully not via the American style 401 with everyone playing the stock market). Can’t see that happening anytime soon.
The current system is in trouble but the irony is a lot of older people are currently doing very well so it works - to a point.
That was the point, a real terms cut is viable.
Do to pensions the same as was done to many state employees over the past decade and a half "increases will be at 1% per year until the finances are sorted".
That's a nominal increase, but a real terms cut.
In real terms many people's salaries have been cut by over 20%, and that's people working for a living. Those who aren't working for their living deserve no more than those who are.
The only answer to pensions is mean testing the high earners and the asset rich plus increase to 70
Similarly with the NHS
Of course this is blasphemy to many, but reality can at times be difficult to accept and new hard thinking is required
But then you have to pay benefits to all those aged 67 to 70 who can't find work (or those younger who can't take the jobs they leave) we don't have the jobs to support work till 70
Im all for means testing the NHS though
I would just say any increase in the retirement age takes years to implement, otherwise we have WASPI's again
Don't fall for their nonsense Big G - the Waspi changes also took a long time to roll out. Its just a claim based on the government not coming round to each and every person affected with a a cup a tea and a bar chart in the lounge...
Yet the pathetic Lib Dem’s want to give them billions.
My retirement age has changed twice. I’ve had no letter. Where’s my compo ?
Yesterday's spending review commits the government to increasing current spending by £190bn a year more over the term of the Parliament. Public spending is committed to growing 2.3% in real terms.
These plans, in my view, condemn the UK to higher taxes and lower growth as well as spiralling ever nearer the plug hole of unsustainable debt. It is indicative of the complacency that is shared across the media and elsewhere, despite the lesson of Truss, that this disastrous course of action seems to engender so little comment with the focus being on the individual elements.
We are in serious trouble and yesterday made it worse.
The alternative is another decade of worsening austerity. Even yesterday's plans are significant cuts for many departments. We can't have both growth and the featherbedding of the Granny State.
I take no particular view on what the percentage of GDP spent by the government should be, just want a balanced budget and for the politicians to be honest about the trade offs. I am not expecting either any time soon.
We can't, so we need to choose growth and not the granny state.
Long past time to cut the NHS, Triple Lock etc and prioritise things other than the grey vote.
Even if you cut spending per old person, the numbers are going up a lot. 11m to 13m over 65s in 10 years. A 20% cut (unthinkable) in pensions would still leave the pension budget increasing.
In real terms its absolutely not unthinkable, just unpopular.
We need to have the same attitude to grey benefits that the older generation had to free tuition ... numbers have gone up so its just not viable
I don’t think any politician would ever stand up and propose a 20% cut in basic State pension. It might be logical or even desirable but it’s not going to happen.
We don’t do that kind of pay cut though I know as some of the post-Communist countries reverted to capitalist systems in the early 90s, they did cut wages and benefits for those in the State sector and even Greece and Spain cut public sector wages during the Eurozone crisis.
The British approach is to freeze wages which translates to a real term cut as you know.
Raising the age at which the State pension can be taken is one option and that will no doubt happen. To be fair, frozen thresholds mean many people are seeing their workplace pensions increasingly taxed (the State pension itself isn’t) so perhaps we need to rethink that to encourage more people to fund their own retirement from workplace schemes which means the private sector stepping up to offer the kind of pensions to their workers other sectors achieve.
Some form of sovereign pension fund into which all private companies would have to pay and increased contributions from workers, he says, thinking aloud.
The logical endpoint becomes the end of the State pension with everyone self financing their retirement (hopefully not via the American style 401 with everyone playing the stock market). Can’t see that happening anytime soon.
The current system is in trouble but the irony is a lot of older people are currently doing very well so it works - to a point.
That was the point, a real terms cut is viable.
Do to pensions the same as was done to many state employees over the past decade and a half "increases will be at 1% per year until the finances are sorted".
That's a nominal increase, but a real terms cut.
In real terms many people's salaries have been cut by over 20%, and that's people working for a living. Those who aren't working for their living deserve no more than those who are.
The only answer to pensions is mean testing the high earners and the asset rich plus increase to 70
Similarly with the NHS
Of course this is blasphemy to many, but reality can at times be difficult to accept and new hard thinking is required
But then you have to pay benefits to all those aged 67 to 70 who can't find work (or those younger who can't take the jobs they leave) we don't have the jobs to support work till 70
Im all for means testing the NHS though
I would just say any increase in the retirement age takes years to implement, otherwise we have WASPI's again
Don't fall for their nonsense Big G - the Waspi changes also took a long time to roll out. Its just a claim based on the government not coming round to each and every person affected with a a cup a tea and a bar chart in the lounge...
To be fair I am not, and agree they had plenty of warning
Jones is a classic queers for Palestine type. Has made a career shouting about stuff rather than, say, becoming a politician and trying to do something about it.
Yeah, those people who shout about stuff without becoming politicians to do something about it are the absolute worst.
Sean Thomas has not one but two articles in the Speccie this week. One on otter's pockets and lads mags and another on Luxembourg.
He is stealing all his ideas from someone on PB. This young man will go far. (He's right about the golden age of lads mags).
The annoying thing is that the articles aren't always in the print version of the magazine.
The web content is after clicks, whereas the hard copy will focus on more the more thoughtful stuff.
I wish that last bit was true. The Speccie is far to much like a sort of Telegraph using longer words, sharper writers but still full of unmeritorious tripe.
I was commenting on publishing strategy generally, rather than specifically about the Spectator. The editorial objectives for a print publication and its online website are usually markedly different.
Deserted yesterday. What we may be seeing is families without children taking their holidays early before the schools break up and prices skyrocket. And in light of recent years, also before August heatwaves make France and points south unbearable. (Or, who knows, they might just be following the Gazette's travel writer.)
All of which means less spending in Blighty and more invisible imports wrecking our balance of trade.
They should come to the Faroes. Rhubarb juice with Faroese smoked salmon and scrambled free range Faroes eggs is a terrific breakfast. Who knew?
Also last night the Danish king and queen stayed in my hotel. True story. Much jollity was had. Whole thing surrounded by police. I think they were hoping to grab some beer time with me but I was off eating pilot whale blubber
Who knew about scrambled eggs and smoked salmon? Denis Healey (best prime minister we never had, part 94) used to advertise it on telly. He did not mention rhubarb but was MP for Leeds on the tip of the rhubarb triangle.
Had it for breakfast Sunday.
Smoked salmon, not rhubarb.
I’m growing rhubarb in the garden. Will turn it to wine later this year.
Exactly and at going tax rate so 43% in Scotland. People on here live in dreamland thinking pensioners earn gazillions and pay no taxes. FFS they pay the same taxes as any other person once above the paltry 12K allowance.
I mean they objectively don’t. They don’t pay National Insurance for one
Name any other thing , NI is for pension etc and debatable to be called income tax but ignoring that they do pay income tax on their wages and liek other taxes levels are dependent on several things , name any income that is NOT taxed, and to boot majority of pensioners are NOT employed. Those that do work pay taxes on their wages, all taxes as demanded by law, you would have imagined a lawyer would know that. I expect such tripe from Dumbo Bart , you have joined the club.
You said “they pay the same taxes as anyone else”. We’re not discussing whether NI is an income tax (although it is objectively a tax on income).
I pay National Insurance (8%) and student loan “repayments” (a capped income tax) of 6% and 9%. Something your generation never needed to do. You call us entitled but we are funding the retirement of the current and future retired.
Yesterday's spending review commits the government to increasing current spending by £190bn a year more over the term of the Parliament. Public spending is committed to growing 2.3% in real terms.
These plans, in my view, condemn the UK to higher taxes and lower growth as well as spiralling ever nearer the plug hole of unsustainable debt. It is indicative of the complacency that is shared across the media and elsewhere, despite the lesson of Truss, that this disastrous course of action seems to engender so little comment with the focus being on the individual elements.
We are in serious trouble and yesterday made it worse.
The alternative is another decade of worsening austerity. Even yesterday's plans are significant cuts for many departments. We can't have both growth and the featherbedding of the Granny State.
I take no particular view on what the percentage of GDP spent by the government should be, just want a balanced budget and for the politicians to be honest about the trade offs. I am not expecting either any time soon.
We can't, so we need to choose growth and not the granny state.
Long past time to cut the NHS, Triple Lock etc and prioritise things other than the grey vote.
Even if you cut spending per old person, the numbers are going up a lot. 11m to 13m over 65s in 10 years. A 20% cut (unthinkable) in pensions would still leave the pension budget increasing.
In real terms its absolutely not unthinkable, just unpopular.
We need to have the same attitude to grey benefits that the older generation had to free tuition ... numbers have gone up so its just not viable
I don’t think any politician would ever stand up and propose a 20% cut in basic State pension. It might be logical or even desirable but it’s not going to happen.
We don’t do that kind of pay cut though I know as some of the post-Communist countries reverted to capitalist systems in the early 90s, they did cut wages and benefits for those in the State sector and even Greece and Spain cut public sector wages during the Eurozone crisis.
The British approach is to freeze wages which translates to a real term cut as you know.
Raising the age at which the State pension can be taken is one option and that will no doubt happen. To be fair, frozen thresholds mean many people are seeing their workplace pensions increasingly taxed (the State pension itself isn’t) so perhaps we need to rethink that to encourage more people to fund their own retirement from workplace schemes which means the private sector stepping up to offer the kind of pensions to their workers other sectors achieve.
Some form of sovereign pension fund into which all private companies would have to pay and increased contributions from workers, he says, thinking aloud.
The logical endpoint becomes the end of the State pension with everyone self financing their retirement (hopefully not via the American style 401 with everyone playing the stock market). Can’t see that happening anytime soon.
The current system is in trouble but the irony is a lot of older people are currently doing very well so it works - to a point.
That was the point, a real terms cut is viable.
Do to pensions the same as was done to many state employees over the past decade and a half "increases will be at 1% per year until the finances are sorted".
That's a nominal increase, but a real terms cut.
In real terms many people's salaries have been cut by over 20%, and that's people working for a living. Those who aren't working for their living deserve no more than those who are.
The only answer to pensions is mean testing the high earners and the asset rich plus increase to 70
Similarly with the NHS
Of course this is blasphemy to many, but reality can at times be difficult to accept and new hard thinking is required
But then you have to pay benefits to all those aged 67 to 70 who can't find work (or those younger who can't take the jobs they leave) we don't have the jobs to support work till 70
Im all for means testing the NHS though
I would just say any increase in the retirement age takes years to implement, otherwise we have WASPI's again
Don't fall for their nonsense Big G - the Waspi changes also took a long time to roll out. Its just a claim based on the government not coming round to each and every person affected with a a cup a tea and a bar chart in the lounge...
Yet the pathetic Lib Dem’s want to give them billions.
My retirement age has changed twice. I’ve had no letter. Where’s my compo ?
A lot of the anti pensioners vitriol seems to stem from them sitting on equity. What on earth would be the point in working for 50 years, paying off a mortgage and then 'downsizing' to some soulless shoebox? And all to support 'young people' to work 50 years, pay off a mortgage and...... People aren't battery hens.
The most gorgeous home I've ever been in was a one bed flat in central Stockholm, owned by two pensioners. They'd sold their 4 bed family home when the kids left and owned a share in a lakeside cabin.
The rest of their cash went into considerable volumes of alcohol and a fish-based diet. They cycled everywhere, despite having mobility problems, and gave us a deeply entertaining tour of the city before lending us the hut for the weekend.
Spot the almost subliminal flash of Rachel Reeves towards the end of Clarkson's Farm S4 E8!
I like Clarkson's Farm but that stuff really winds me up. Whatever you think of the IHT change, the motivation for it was to prevent people like Clarkson inflating land prices by using it as a tax dodge. Part of the reason someone like Kaleb struggles to buy a farm is because the agricultural returns are so small, so the breakeven point is sometimes centuries in the future.
I'd forgive him if at the end of the next season he sells the land to Kaleb for a fair price for use as a farm (e.g. something like £0).
All true. That Clarkson emerged as the public face of the farm IHT campaign is ironic.
True but misleading. As Clarkson said, there are other tax shelters available.
The financial reality of the show is that Amazon more than subsidises any losses Clarkson makes on farming. So far as I can make out, everyone watches it, except for me.
It is good TV, and Clarkson manages to put himself across as quite likeable, even though I suspect he actually isn’t. He does concede that he doesn’t need the income from his farm to live on - just as well, as he isn’t making any.
Buying the farm as a tax dodge and then realising the possibility of milking a whole TV series out of it is genius, though. On Amazon it’s right at the top of the most viewed.
Why do you suspect he isn't likeable? I know there is the classic getting stroppy late at night/punching the member of the crew (not acceptable), but my impression of him is that is genuinely likeable, but probably prone to getting pissed off at times. Like a lot of people.
Yesterday's spending review commits the government to increasing current spending by £190bn a year more over the term of the Parliament. Public spending is committed to growing 2.3% in real terms.
These plans, in my view, condemn the UK to higher taxes and lower growth as well as spiralling ever nearer the plug hole of unsustainable debt. It is indicative of the complacency that is shared across the media and elsewhere, despite the lesson of Truss, that this disastrous course of action seems to engender so little comment with the focus being on the individual elements.
We are in serious trouble and yesterday made it worse.
The alternative is another decade of worsening austerity. Even yesterday's plans are significant cuts for many departments. We can't have both growth and the featherbedding of the Granny State.
I take no particular view on what the percentage of GDP spent by the government should be, just want a balanced budget and for the politicians to be honest about the trade offs. I am not expecting either any time soon.
We can't, so we need to choose growth and not the granny state.
Long past time to cut the NHS, Triple Lock etc and prioritise things other than the grey vote.
Even if you cut spending per old person, the numbers are going up a lot. 11m to 13m over 65s in 10 years. A 20% cut (unthinkable) in pensions would still leave the pension budget increasing.
In real terms its absolutely not unthinkable, just unpopular.
We need to have the same attitude to grey benefits that the older generation had to free tuition ... numbers have gone up so its just not viable
I don’t think any politician would ever stand up and propose a 20% cut in basic State pension. It might be logical or even desirable but it’s not going to happen.
We don’t do that kind of pay cut though I know as some of the post-Communist countries reverted to capitalist systems in the early 90s, they did cut wages and benefits for those in the State sector and even Greece and Spain cut public sector wages during the Eurozone crisis.
The British approach is to freeze wages which translates to a real term cut as you know.
Raising the age at which the State pension can be taken is one option and that will no doubt happen. To be fair, frozen thresholds mean many people are seeing their workplace pensions increasingly taxed (the State pension itself isn’t) so perhaps we need to rethink that to encourage more people to fund their own retirement from workplace schemes which means the private sector stepping up to offer the kind of pensions to their workers other sectors achieve.
Some form of sovereign pension fund into which all private companies would have to pay and increased contributions from workers, he says, thinking aloud.
The logical endpoint becomes the end of the State pension with everyone self financing their retirement (hopefully not via the American style 401 with everyone playing the stock market). Can’t see that happening anytime soon.
The current system is in trouble but the irony is a lot of older people are currently doing very well so it works - to a point.
That was the point, a real terms cut is viable.
Do to pensions the same as was done to many state employees over the past decade and a half "increases will be at 1% per year until the finances are sorted".
That's a nominal increase, but a real terms cut.
In real terms many people's salaries have been cut by over 20%, and that's people working for a living. Those who aren't working for their living deserve no more than those who are.
The only answer to pensions is mean testing the high earners and the asset rich plus increase to 70
Similarly with the NHS
Of course this is blasphemy to many, but reality can at times be difficult to accept and new hard thinking is required
But then you have to pay benefits to all those aged 67 to 70 who can't find work (or those younger who can't take the jobs they leave) we don't have the jobs to support work till 70
Im all for means testing the NHS though
I would just say any increase in the retirement age takes years to implement, otherwise we have WASPI's again
Don't fall for their nonsense Big G - the Waspi changes also took a long time to roll out. Its just a claim based on the government not coming round to each and every person affected with a a cup a tea and a bar chart in the lounge...
By some coincidence, I have just received a letter in a brown envelope marked “Information about State Pension age” (including the quotation marks).
Jones is a classic queers for Palestine type. Has made a career shouting about stuff rather than, say, becoming a politician and trying to do something about it.
Yeah, those people who shout about stuff without becoming politicians to do something about it are the absolute worst.
Bastards. They should have some kind of website. PoliticsBitching.com or something similar.
Even that is a lagging indicator. The real economy is in a hell of a mess.
Who could have ever thought that raising taxes on employment while leaving unearned incomes untaxed might not be the best way to manage an economy?
Savings are taxed. Dividends are taxed. The tax on dividends has been increased. Pensions are taxed. Assets when sold are taxed. Other than houses you live in. Are you suggesting CGT on the sale of houses?
True. but it's bad politics for workers to be taxed more heavily than the retired (like me). And the low tax/untaxed nature of residential property is a disaster distorting the market and giving all the wrong incentives.
Also distorting the market is the ludicrous IHT rules whereby the rate is far too high (40%) and the exemptions capricious (extra if you own a home etc) and the ways of avoiding it a series of open goals, keeping Lincoln's Inn in business.
Low rate (5-10%), no exemptions, CTT at the same rate on inter vivos transactions is the way forward.
What mince are you talking , the only tax (sic ) that can be different is NI for working pensioners. So unless you specifically mean that miniscule point then you are talking absolute bollox.
Thanks. Not trivial if you see NI as simply a futher tax - which it is, as money is money.
For someone receiving say £50,000 pa gross from earned income the NI would be roughly £3k. This is not trivial. I suggest combining IT and NI at around 30% for income generally so that the person with an income of £50,000 gross from whatever source pays the same as the bloke who gets up at 6am to go to work on an overpriced season ticket to feed his starving children and pay the mortgage on an overpriced house.
Pensioners like me are extremely privileged, and I think as a group they are asking too much of others. I decline to join their number.
As another pensioner quite honestly I don't think I've ever been as well off as I am now. I've paid for my house, I've no debts (which I had when working due to a combination of misfortune and incompetence) I'm not paying into savings accounts for pensions and I'm not paying NI.
I am the same, but the other side of the coin that as over 80's, we both suffer health issues and mobility and tempus fugit
Ha ha, yes. I've been told by the physio I ought to walk 1000 steps a day, to increase general mobility and improve balance. Takes up pb reading time, though!
Just achieved our 63rd wedding anniversary too, and the sun is shining so quite c cheerful this morning. Anniversary celebrations this weekend.
A lot of the anti pensioners vitriol seems to stem from them sitting on equity. What on earth would be the point in working for 50 years, paying off a mortgage and then 'downsizing' to some soulless shoebox? And all to support 'young people' to work 50 years, pay off a mortgage and...... People aren't battery hens.
The most gorgeous home I've ever been in was a one bed flat in central Stockholm, owned by two pensioners. They'd sold their 4 bed family home when the kids left and owned a share in a lakeside cabin.
The rest of their cash went into considerable volumes of alcohol and a fish-based diet. They cycled everywhere, despite having mobility problems, and gave us a deeply entertaining tour of the city.
That's great for them, but its not for everyone. Conveyer belt of share, rent, mortgage, own, downsize seems utterly pointless to me. But then I'm 53 and renting so I can only dream of owning at the moment
Spot the almost subliminal flash of Rachel Reeves towards the end of Clarkson's Farm S4 E8!
I like Clarkson's Farm but that stuff really winds me up. Whatever you think of the IHT change, the motivation for it was to prevent people like Clarkson inflating land prices by using it as a tax dodge. Part of the reason someone like Kaleb struggles to buy a farm is because the agricultural returns are so small, so the breakeven point is sometimes centuries in the future.
I'd forgive him if at the end of the next season he sells the land to Kaleb for a fair price for use as a farm (e.g. something like £0).
All true. That Clarkson emerged as the public face of the farm IHT campaign is ironic.
True but misleading. As Clarkson said, there are other tax shelters available.
The financial reality of the show is that Amazon more than subsidises any losses Clarkson makes on farming. So far as I can make out, everyone watches it, except for me.
It is good TV, and Clarkson manages to put himself across as quite likeable, even though I suspect he actually isn’t. He does concede that he doesn’t need the income from his farm to live on - just as well, as he isn’t making any.
Buying the farm as a tax dodge and then realising the possibility of milking a whole TV series out of it is genius, though. On Amazon it’s right at the top of the most viewed.
Why do you suspect he isn't likeable? I know there is the classic getting stroppy late at night/punching the member of the crew (not acceptable), but my impression of him is that is genuinely likeable, but probably prone to getting pissed off at times. Like a lot of people.
He was incredibly nasty to his mother on Who Do You Think You Are, mocking and belittling her in front of the cameras.
What Putin unleashed his evil, he did so on his own country, as well as on Ukraine.
Tis but a scratch. The great patriotic war of 1941-45 saw around 30 million dead.
That included people from Baltic States Belorussians and Ukrainians of course.
Red Army casualties over 6 million (and again I realise not all were Russian). Incredibly, when the war was basically won, they still took a million casualties taking Berlin.
Yesterday's spending review commits the government to increasing current spending by £190bn a year more over the term of the Parliament. Public spending is committed to growing 2.3% in real terms.
These plans, in my view, condemn the UK to higher taxes and lower growth as well as spiralling ever nearer the plug hole of unsustainable debt. It is indicative of the complacency that is shared across the media and elsewhere, despite the lesson of Truss, that this disastrous course of action seems to engender so little comment with the focus being on the individual elements.
We are in serious trouble and yesterday made it worse.
The alternative is another decade of worsening austerity. Even yesterday's plans are significant cuts for many departments. We can't have both growth and the featherbedding of the Granny State.
I take no particular view on what the percentage of GDP spent by the government should be, just want a balanced budget and for the politicians to be honest about the trade offs. I am not expecting either any time soon.
We can't, so we need to choose growth and not the granny state.
Long past time to cut the NHS, Triple Lock etc and prioritise things other than the grey vote.
Even if you cut spending per old person, the numbers are going up a lot. 11m to 13m over 65s in 10 years. A 20% cut (unthinkable) in pensions would still leave the pension budget increasing.
In real terms its absolutely not unthinkable, just unpopular.
We need to have the same attitude to grey benefits that the older generation had to free tuition ... numbers have gone up so its just not viable
I don’t think any politician would ever stand up and propose a 20% cut in basic State pension. It might be logical or even desirable but it’s not going to happen.
We don’t do that kind of pay cut though I know as some of the post-Communist countries reverted to capitalist systems in the early 90s, they did cut wages and benefits for those in the State sector and even Greece and Spain cut public sector wages during the Eurozone crisis.
The British approach is to freeze wages which translates to a real term cut as you know.
Raising the age at which the State pension can be taken is one option and that will no doubt happen. To be fair, frozen thresholds mean many people are seeing their workplace pensions increasingly taxed (the State pension itself isn’t) so perhaps we need to rethink that to encourage more people to fund their own retirement from workplace schemes which means the private sector stepping up to offer the kind of pensions to their workers other sectors achieve.
Some form of sovereign pension fund into which all private companies would have to pay and increased contributions from workers, he says, thinking aloud.
The logical endpoint becomes the end of the State pension with everyone self financing their retirement (hopefully not via the American style 401 with everyone playing the stock market). Can’t see that happening anytime soon.
The current system is in trouble but the irony is a lot of older people are currently doing very well so it works - to a point.
That was the point, a real terms cut is viable.
Do to pensions the same as was done to many state employees over the past decade and a half "increases will be at 1% per year until the finances are sorted".
That's a nominal increase, but a real terms cut.
In real terms many people's salaries have been cut by over 20%, and that's people working for a living. Those who aren't working for their living deserve no more than those who are.
The only answer to pensions is mean testing the high earners and the asset rich plus increase to 70
Similarly with the NHS
Of course this is blasphemy to many, but reality can at times be difficult to accept and new hard thinking is required
But then you have to pay benefits to all those aged 67 to 70 who can't find work (or those younger who can't take the jobs they leave) we don't have the jobs to support work till 70
Im all for means testing the NHS though
I would just say any increase in the retirement age takes years to implement, otherwise we have WASPI's again
Don't fall for their nonsense Big G - the Waspi changes also took a long time to roll out. Its just a claim based on the government not coming round to each and every person affected with a a cup a tea and a bar chart in the lounge...
Yet the pathetic Lib Dem’s want to give them billions.
My retirement age has changed twice. I’ve had no letter. Where’s my compo ?
Get on the blower to the Fox Beater General
God knows what that means but it was not a serious comment.
A lot of the anti pensioners vitriol seems to stem from them sitting on equity. What on earth would be the point in working for 50 years, paying off a mortgage and then 'downsizing' to some soulless shoebox? And all to support 'young people' to work 50 years, pay off a mortgage and...... People aren't battery hens.
It wouldn't be a problem if there were enough houses built for the next generation. Rationing of anything is only a factor when there's a shortage, but why should there be a shortage of housing in Britain? It's not like the country has been involved in a war recently which has seen millions of houses destroyed.
Britain simply hasn't built enough houses.
For quite a time, more dwellings were created by converting houses into flats as well as replacing old houses by blocks of flats. Part of the problem now is that the stock of houses to convert to flats has all but run out.
What Putin unleashed his evil, he did so on his own country, as well as on Ukraine.
Tis but a scratch. The great patriotic war of 1941-45 saw around 30 million dead.
That included people from Baltic States Belorussians and Ukrainians of course.
Red Army casualties over 6 million (and again I realise not all were Russian). Incredibly, when the war was basically won, they still took a million casualties taking Berlin.
The German army was by then using old men who didn't care any more and young boys who were imbued with the idea of death or glory, perhaps?
I'm not minimising the losses of course. Many a Russian wife and mother waited in vain for husbands, sons and indeed daughters to come home. Indeed I read somewhere that daughters were less likely to survive because they knew what would happen to them if they were captured.
Even that is a lagging indicator. The real economy is in a hell of a mess.
Who could have ever thought that raising taxes on employment while leaving unearned incomes untaxed might not be the best way to manage an economy?
Savings are taxed. Dividends are taxed. The tax on dividends has been increased. Pensions are taxed. Assets when sold are taxed. Other than houses you live in. Are you suggesting CGT on the sale of houses?
True. but it's bad politics for workers to be taxed more heavily than the retired (like me). And the low tax/untaxed nature of residential property is a disaster distorting the market and giving all the wrong incentives.
Also distorting the market is the ludicrous IHT rules whereby the rate is far too high (40%) and the exemptions capricious (extra if you own a home etc) and the ways of avoiding it a series of open goals, keeping Lincoln's Inn in business.
Low rate (5-10%), no exemptions, CTT at the same rate on inter vivos transactions is the way forward.
What mince are you talking , the only tax (sic ) that can be different is NI for working pensioners. So unless you specifically mean that miniscule point then you are talking absolute bollox.
Thanks. Not trivial if you see NI as simply a futher tax - which it is, as money is money.
For someone receiving say £50,000 pa gross from earned income the NI would be roughly £3k. This is not trivial. I suggest combining IT and NI at around 30% for income generally so that the person with an income of £50,000 gross from whatever source pays the same as the bloke who gets up at 6am to go to work on an overpriced season ticket to feed his starving children and pay the mortgage on an overpriced house.
Pensioners like me are extremely privileged, and I think as a group they are asking too much of others. I decline to join their number.
As another pensioner quite honestly I don't think I've ever been as well off as I am now. I've paid for my house, I've no debts (which I had when working due to a combination of misfortune and incompetence) I'm not paying into savings accounts for pensions and I'm not paying NI.
Ditto. The young working person who has to spend their entire earned income is paying both income tax and NI on their income, and is paying a high proportion of their income in sales taxes (VAT, fuel and alcohol duty, etc.).
Whereas the better-off pensioner only pays income tax on pension income, and has likely managed to shelter their savings in tax free ISAs such that they aren’t paying any tax at all on investment or savings income. Capital gains are taxed at less than income, significantly so for higher rate taxpayers. And I’d bet that those better-off pensioners are probably subject to a lower proportion of VAT on their income, as gifts, holidays and savings don’t attract it and fuel is levied at just 5%. And they don’t have commuting costs. They do probably pay their share of alcohol duty….
A lot of the anti pensioners vitriol seems to stem from them sitting on equity. What on earth would be the point in working for 50 years, paying off a mortgage and then 'downsizing' to some soulless shoebox? And all to support 'young people' to work 50 years, pay off a mortgage and...... People aren't battery hens.
The most gorgeous home I've ever been in was a one bed flat in central Stockholm, owned by two pensioners. They'd sold their 4 bed family home when the kids left and owned a share in a lakeside cabin.
The rest of their cash went into considerable volumes of alcohol and a fish-based diet. They cycled everywhere, despite having mobility problems, and gave us a deeply entertaining tour of the city.
That's great for them, but its not for everyone. Conveyer belt of share, rent, mortgage, own, downsize seems utterly pointless to me. But then I'm 53 and renting so I can only dream of owning at the moment
Just set up the tax system for it and it will work. Charge CGT on primary residence, remove IHT allowances, abolish Stamp Duty, flat rate of council tax. At the moment we incentivise clinging onto property.
Yesterday's spending review commits the government to increasing current spending by £190bn a year more over the term of the Parliament. Public spending is committed to growing 2.3% in real terms.
These plans, in my view, condemn the UK to higher taxes and lower growth as well as spiralling ever nearer the plug hole of unsustainable debt. It is indicative of the complacency that is shared across the media and elsewhere, despite the lesson of Truss, that this disastrous course of action seems to engender so little comment with the focus being on the individual elements.
We are in serious trouble and yesterday made it worse.
The alternative is another decade of worsening austerity. Even yesterday's plans are significant cuts for many departments. We can't have both growth and the featherbedding of the Granny State.
I take no particular view on what the percentage of GDP spent by the government should be, just want a balanced budget and for the politicians to be honest about the trade offs. I am not expecting either any time soon.
We can't, so we need to choose growth and not the granny state.
Long past time to cut the NHS, Triple Lock etc and prioritise things other than the grey vote.
Even if you cut spending per old person, the numbers are going up a lot. 11m to 13m over 65s in 10 years. A 20% cut (unthinkable) in pensions would still leave the pension budget increasing.
In real terms its absolutely not unthinkable, just unpopular.
We need to have the same attitude to grey benefits that the older generation had to free tuition ... numbers have gone up so its just not viable
I don’t think any politician would ever stand up and propose a 20% cut in basic State pension. It might be logical or even desirable but it’s not going to happen.
We don’t do that kind of pay cut though I know as some of the post-Communist countries reverted to capitalist systems in the early 90s, they did cut wages and benefits for those in the State sector and even Greece and Spain cut public sector wages during the Eurozone crisis.
The British approach is to freeze wages which translates to a real term cut as you know.
Raising the age at which the State pension can be taken is one option and that will no doubt happen. To be fair, frozen thresholds mean many people are seeing their workplace pensions increasingly taxed (the State pension itself isn’t) so perhaps we need to rethink that to encourage more people to fund their own retirement from workplace schemes which means the private sector stepping up to offer the kind of pensions to their workers other sectors achieve.
Some form of sovereign pension fund into which all private companies would have to pay and increased contributions from workers, he says, thinking aloud.
The logical endpoint becomes the end of the State pension with everyone self financing their retirement (hopefully not via the American style 401 with everyone playing the stock market). Can’t see that happening anytime soon.
The current system is in trouble but the irony is a lot of older people are currently doing very well so it works - to a point.
That was the point, a real terms cut is viable.
Do to pensions the same as was done to many state employees over the past decade and a half "increases will be at 1% per year until the finances are sorted".
That's a nominal increase, but a real terms cut.
In real terms many people's salaries have been cut by over 20%, and that's people working for a living. Those who aren't working for their living deserve no more than those who are.
The only answer to pensions is mean testing the high earners and the asset rich plus increase to 70
Similarly with the NHS
Of course this is blasphemy to many, but reality can at times be difficult to accept and new hard thinking is required
But then you have to pay benefits to all those aged 67 to 70 who can't find work (or those younger who can't take the jobs they leave) we don't have the jobs to support work till 70
Im all for means testing the NHS though
I would just say any increase in the retirement age takes years to implement, otherwise we have WASPI's again
Don't fall for their nonsense Big G - the Waspi changes also took a long time to roll out. Its just a claim based on the government not coming round to each and every person affected with a a cup a tea and a bar chart in the lounge...
Yet the pathetic Lib Dem’s want to give them billions.
My retirement age has changed twice. I’ve had no letter. Where’s my compo ?
Get on the blower to the Fox Beater General
God knows what that means but it was not a serious comment.
A lot of the anti pensioners vitriol seems to stem from them sitting on equity. What on earth would be the point in working for 50 years, paying off a mortgage and then 'downsizing' to some soulless shoebox? And all to support 'young people' to work 50 years, pay off a mortgage and...... People aren't battery hens.
It doesn't need to be a shoe-box. My recently retired colleague lives in a 850K, 6 bedroom house with his wife. They do not need sech a place in reality, but also have no need for cash. But later in their retirement he has expressed a desire to move to a posh flat - no stairs, lots of nice space, but more appropriate for their lives at that point in time.
And thats the point - making appropriate housing for people to downsize to.
A lot of the anti pensioners vitriol seems to stem from them sitting on equity. What on earth would be the point in working for 50 years, paying off a mortgage and then 'downsizing' to some soulless shoebox? And all to support 'young people' to work 50 years, pay off a mortgage and...... People aren't battery hens.
The most gorgeous home I've ever been in was a one bed flat in central Stockholm, owned by two pensioners. They'd sold their 4 bed family home when the kids left and owned a share in a lakeside cabin.
The rest of their cash went into considerable volumes of alcohol and a fish-based diet. They cycled everywhere, despite having mobility problems, and gave us a deeply entertaining tour of the city before lending us the hut for the weekend.
I go out every morning for a cycle ride. Is it a close pass irrespective of the direction of the traffic or only if the traffic is in the same direction of travel as you ?
Even that is a lagging indicator. The real economy is in a hell of a mess.
Who could have ever thought that raising taxes on employment while leaving unearned incomes untaxed might not be the best way to manage an economy?
Savings are taxed. Dividends are taxed. The tax on dividends has been increased. Pensions are taxed. Assets when sold are taxed. Other than houses you live in. Are you suggesting CGT on the sale of houses?
True. but it's bad politics for workers to be taxed more heavily than the retired (like me). And the low tax/untaxed nature of residential property is a disaster distorting the market and giving all the wrong incentives.
Also distorting the market is the ludicrous IHT rules whereby the rate is far too high (40%) and the exemptions capricious (extra if you own a home etc) and the ways of avoiding it a series of open goals, keeping Lincoln's Inn in business.
Low rate (5-10%), no exemptions, CTT at the same rate on inter vivos transactions is the way forward.
What mince are you talking , the only tax (sic ) that can be different is NI for working pensioners. So unless you specifically mean that miniscule point then you are talking absolute bollox.
Thanks. Not trivial if you see NI as simply a futher tax - which it is, as money is money.
For someone receiving say £50,000 pa gross from earned income the NI would be roughly £3k. This is not trivial. I suggest combining IT and NI at around 30% for income generally so that the person with an income of £50,000 gross from whatever source pays the same as the bloke who gets up at 6am to go to work on an overpriced season ticket to feed his starving children and pay the mortgage on an overpriced house.
Pensioners like me are extremely privileged, and I think as a group they are asking too much of others. I decline to join their number.
As another pensioner quite honestly I don't think I've ever been as well off as I am now. I've paid for my house, I've no debts (which I had when working due to a combination of misfortune and incompetence) I'm not paying into savings accounts for pensions and I'm not paying NI.
I am the same, but the other side of the coin that as over 80's, we both suffer health issues and mobility and tempus fugit
Ha ha, yes. I've been told by the physio I ought to walk 1000 steps a day, to increase general mobility and improve balance. Takes up pb reading time, though!
Just achieved our 63rd wedding anniversary too, and the sun is shining so quite c cheerful this morning. Anniversary celebrations this weekend.
Many congratulations and enjoy your weekend
2 years ahead of us, and only 2 more for you both to receive another personally signed congratulations card from Charles and Camilla
None of the wording anywhere seems to suggest survivors.
If by, some stroke of divine intervention, there is just one survivor they can come on here and win the eternally tedious air travel anecdotes battle royale.
I thought they become a superhero? Or am I remembering that Bruce Willis film wrong?
Yesterday's spending review commits the government to increasing current spending by £190bn a year more over the term of the Parliament. Public spending is committed to growing 2.3% in real terms.
These plans, in my view, condemn the UK to higher taxes and lower growth as well as spiralling ever nearer the plug hole of unsustainable debt. It is indicative of the complacency that is shared across the media and elsewhere, despite the lesson of Truss, that this disastrous course of action seems to engender so little comment with the focus being on the individual elements.
We are in serious trouble and yesterday made it worse.
The alternative is another decade of worsening austerity. Even yesterday's plans are significant cuts for many departments. We can't have both growth and the featherbedding of the Granny State.
I take no particular view on what the percentage of GDP spent by the government should be, just want a balanced budget and for the politicians to be honest about the trade offs. I am not expecting either any time soon.
We can't, so we need to choose growth and not the granny state.
Long past time to cut the NHS, Triple Lock etc and prioritise things other than the grey vote.
Even if you cut spending per old person, the numbers are going up a lot. 11m to 13m over 65s in 10 years. A 20% cut (unthinkable) in pensions would still leave the pension budget increasing.
In real terms its absolutely not unthinkable, just unpopular.
We need to have the same attitude to grey benefits that the older generation had to free tuition ... numbers have gone up so its just not viable
I don’t think any politician would ever stand up and propose a 20% cut in basic State pension. It might be logical or even desirable but it’s not going to happen.
We don’t do that kind of pay cut though I know as some of the post-Communist countries reverted to capitalist systems in the early 90s, they did cut wages and benefits for those in the State sector and even Greece and Spain cut public sector wages during the Eurozone crisis.
The British approach is to freeze wages which translates to a real term cut as you know.
Raising the age at which the State pension can be taken is one option and that will no doubt happen. To be fair, frozen thresholds mean many people are seeing their workplace pensions increasingly taxed (the State pension itself isn’t) so perhaps we need to rethink that to encourage more people to fund their own retirement from workplace schemes which means the private sector stepping up to offer the kind of pensions to their workers other sectors achieve.
Some form of sovereign pension fund into which all private companies would have to pay and increased contributions from workers, he says, thinking aloud.
The logical endpoint becomes the end of the State pension with everyone self financing their retirement (hopefully not via the American style 401 with everyone playing the stock market). Can’t see that happening anytime soon.
The current system is in trouble but the irony is a lot of older people are currently doing very well so it works - to a point.
That was the point, a real terms cut is viable.
Do to pensions the same as was done to many state employees over the past decade and a half "increases will be at 1% per year until the finances are sorted".
That's a nominal increase, but a real terms cut.
In real terms many people's salaries have been cut by over 20%, and that's people working for a living. Those who aren't working for their living deserve no more than those who are.
The only answer to pensions is mean testing the high earners and the asset rich plus increase to 70
Similarly with the NHS
Of course this is blasphemy to many, but reality can at times be difficult to accept and new hard thinking is required
But then you have to pay benefits to all those aged 67 to 70 who can't find work (or those younger who can't take the jobs they leave) we don't have the jobs to support work till 70
Im all for means testing the NHS though
I would just say any increase in the retirement age takes years to implement, otherwise we have WASPI's again
Don't fall for their nonsense Big G - the Waspi changes also took a long time to roll out. Its just a claim based on the government not coming round to each and every person affected with a a cup a tea and a bar chart in the lounge...
Yet the pathetic Lib Dem’s want to give them billions.
My retirement age has changed twice. I’ve had no letter. Where’s my compo ?
Get on the blower to the Fox Beater General
God knows what that means but it was not a serious comment.
Translation: Get on the phone to Jolyon Maugham
My mate manages the Bob Monkhouse estate, or certainly did. He had folder after folder of comic gags and asides.
Even that is a lagging indicator. The real economy is in a hell of a mess.
Who could have ever thought that raising taxes on employment while leaving unearned incomes untaxed might not be the best way to manage an economy?
Savings are taxed. Dividends are taxed. The tax on dividends has been increased. Pensions are taxed. Assets when sold are taxed. Other than houses you live in. Are you suggesting CGT on the sale of houses?
True. but it's bad politics for workers to be taxed more heavily than the retired (like me). And the low tax/untaxed nature of residential property is a disaster distorting the market and giving all the wrong incentives.
Also distorting the market is the ludicrous IHT rules whereby the rate is far too high (40%) and the exemptions capricious (extra if you own a home etc) and the ways of avoiding it a series of open goals, keeping Lincoln's Inn in business.
Low rate (5-10%), no exemptions, CTT at the same rate on inter vivos transactions is the way forward.
What mince are you talking , the only tax (sic ) that can be different is NI for working pensioners. So unless you specifically mean that miniscule point then you are talking absolute bollox.
Thanks. Not trivial if you see NI as simply a futher tax - which it is, as money is money.
For someone receiving say £50,000 pa gross from earned income the NI would be roughly £3k. This is not trivial. I suggest combining IT and NI at around 30% for income generally so that the person with an income of £50,000 gross from whatever source pays the same as the bloke who gets up at 6am to go to work on an overpriced season ticket to feed his starving children and pay the mortgage on an overpriced house.
Pensioners like me are extremely privileged, and I think as a group they are asking too much of others. I decline to join their number.
As another pensioner quite honestly I don't think I've ever been as well off as I am now. I've paid for my house, I've no debts (which I had when working due to a combination of misfortune and incompetence) I'm not paying into savings accounts for pensions and I'm not paying NI.
Ditto. The young working person who has to spend their entire earned income is paying both income tax and NI on their income, and is paying a high proportion of their income in sales taxes (VAT, fuel and alcohol duty, etc.).
Whereas the better-off pensioner only pays income tax on pension income, and has likely managed to shelter their savings in tax free ISAs such that they aren’t paying any tax at all on investment or savings income. Capital gains are taxed at less than income, significantly so for higher rate taxpayers. And I’d bet that those better-off pensioners are probably subject to a lower proportion of VAT on their income, as gifts, holidays and savings don’t attract it and fuel is levied at just 5%. And they don’t have commuting costs. They do probably pay their share of alcohol duty….
I don't. My bottle of sherry is still going strong after 5 or 6 years or more.
Sean Thomas has not one but two articles in the Speccie this week. One on otter's pockets and lads mags and another on Luxembourg.
He is stealing all his ideas from someone on PB. This young man will go far. (He's right about the golden age of lads mags).
The annoying thing is that the articles aren't always in the print version of the magazine.
The web content is after clicks, whereas the hard copy will focus on more the more thoughtful stuff.
I wish that last bit was true. The Speccie is far to much like a sort of Telegraph using longer words, sharper writers but still full of unmeritorious tripe.
The TLS used to be better for the right-leaning erudite. Is it still, now ?
I tread the LRB, which is sometimes wonderful, and sometimes dull.
TLS is, IMHO, still worth reading but significantly less good than it was. It lacks a big team of heavyweight academic reviewers. For me its selection of books to review is too eccentric.
LRB, for me, is startlingly dull and uniform. The longer stuff rarely is worth the weight it is given, and its secular liberal assumptions make every page dull. Standout for me was pages and pages given over to the USA abortion debate after overturning Roe v Wade. Not a glimmer anywhere of the multi faceted moral complexities of the issues. It was a distorted mirror image of the Daily Mail.
Jones is a classic queers for Palestine type. Has made a career shouting about stuff rather than, say, becoming a politician and trying to do something about it.
Yeah, those people who shout about stuff without becoming politicians to do something about it are the absolute worst.
Funny but there is a truth in this. Its easier to shout abuse on the side lines than to manage the football team. Governing is to choose. Labour are currently learning (again) that its not that easy. People like Jones espouse purity of opinion and forget that reality is much more nuanced. Hence the gays for Palestine jibe.
Even that is a lagging indicator. The real economy is in a hell of a mess.
Who could have ever thought that raising taxes on employment while leaving unearned incomes untaxed might not be the best way to manage an economy?
Savings are taxed. Dividends are taxed. The tax on dividends has been increased. Pensions are taxed. Assets when sold are taxed. Other than houses you live in. Are you suggesting CGT on the sale of houses?
True. but it's bad politics for workers to be taxed more heavily than the retired (like me). And the low tax/untaxed nature of residential property is a disaster distorting the market and giving all the wrong incentives.
Also distorting the market is the ludicrous IHT rules whereby the rate is far too high (40%) and the exemptions capricious (extra if you own a home etc) and the ways of avoiding it a series of open goals, keeping Lincoln's Inn in business.
Low rate (5-10%), no exemptions, CTT at the same rate on inter vivos transactions is the way forward.
What mince are you talking , the only tax (sic ) that can be different is NI for working pensioners. So unless you specifically mean that miniscule point then you are talking absolute bollox.
Thanks. Not trivial if you see NI as simply a futher tax - which it is, as money is money.
For someone receiving say £50,000 pa gross from earned income the NI would be roughly £3k. This is not trivial. I suggest combining IT and NI at around 30% for income generally so that the person with an income of £50,000 gross from whatever source pays the same as the bloke who gets up at 6am to go to work on an overpriced season ticket to feed his starving children and pay the mortgage on an overpriced house.
Pensioners like me are extremely privileged, and I think as a group they are asking too much of others. I decline to join their number.
As another pensioner quite honestly I don't think I've ever been as well off as I am now. I've paid for my house, I've no debts (which I had when working due to a combination of misfortune and incompetence) I'm not paying into savings accounts for pensions and I'm not paying NI.
Ditto. The young working person who has to spend their entire earned income is paying both income tax and NI on their income, and is paying a high proportion of their income in sales taxes (VAT, fuel and alcohol duty, etc.).
Whereas the better-off pensioner only pays income tax on pension income, and has likely managed to shelter their savings in tax free ISAs such that they aren’t paying any tax at all on investment or savings income. Capital gains are taxed at less than income, significantly so for higher rate taxpayers. And I’d bet that those better-off pensioners are probably subject to a lower proportion of VAT on their income, as gifts, holidays and savings don’t attract it and fuel is levied at just 5%. And they don’t have commuting costs. They do probably pay their share of alcohol duty….
I don't. My bottle of sherry is still going strong after 5 or 6 years or more.
And I don't drink, other than an occassional Welsh cider
Spot the almost subliminal flash of Rachel Reeves towards the end of Clarkson's Farm S4 E8!
I like Clarkson's Farm but that stuff really winds me up. Whatever you think of the IHT change, the motivation for it was to prevent people like Clarkson inflating land prices by using it as a tax dodge. Part of the reason someone like Kaleb struggles to buy a farm is because the agricultural returns are so small, so the breakeven point is sometimes centuries in the future.
I'd forgive him if at the end of the next season he sells the land to Kaleb for a fair price for use as a farm (e.g. something like £0).
All true. That Clarkson emerged as the public face of the farm IHT campaign is ironic.
True but misleading. As Clarkson said, there are other tax shelters available.
The financial reality of the show is that Amazon more than subsidises any losses Clarkson makes on farming. So far as I can make out, everyone watches it, except for me.
It is good TV, and Clarkson manages to put himself across as quite likeable, even though I suspect he actually isn’t. He does concede that he doesn’t need the income from his farm to live on - just as well, as he isn’t making any.
Buying the farm as a tax dodge and then realising the possibility of milking a whole TV series out of it is genius, though. On Amazon it’s right at the top of the most viewed.
Why do you suspect he isn't likeable? I know there is the classic getting stroppy late at night/punching the member of the crew (not acceptable), but my impression of him is that is genuinely likeable, but probably prone to getting pissed off at times. Like a lot of people.
He was incredibly nasty to his mother on Who Do You Think You Are, mocking and belittling her in front of the cameras.
I'll take your word for it. Maybe he didn't like her, or maybe that's the family humour.
The danger for the government is that they are starting to look like they are losing a tangible relationship with the truth.
Starmer and Reeves talking about the improving economy being a reason they can partly reverse WFA, for instance, is a huge hostage to fortune when you get negative growth figures.
Because neither of them are particularly convincing political communicators, these sorts of party lines are at risk of making them look shifty and untrustworthy.
Even that is a lagging indicator. The real economy is in a hell of a mess.
Who could have ever thought that raising taxes on employment while leaving unearned incomes untaxed might not be the best way to manage an economy?
Savings are taxed. Dividends are taxed. The tax on dividends has been increased. Pensions are taxed. Assets when sold are taxed. Other than houses you live in. Are you suggesting CGT on the sale of houses?
True. but it's bad politics for workers to be taxed more heavily than the retired (like me). And the low tax/untaxed nature of residential property is a disaster distorting the market and giving all the wrong incentives.
Also distorting the market is the ludicrous IHT rules whereby the rate is far too high (40%) and the exemptions capricious (extra if you own a home etc) and the ways of avoiding it a series of open goals, keeping Lincoln's Inn in business.
Low rate (5-10%), no exemptions, CTT at the same rate on inter vivos transactions is the way forward.
What mince are you talking , the only tax (sic ) that can be different is NI for working pensioners. So unless you specifically mean that miniscule point then you are talking absolute bollox.
Thanks. Not trivial if you see NI as simply a futher tax - which it is, as money is money.
For someone receiving say £50,000 pa gross from earned income the NI would be roughly £3k. This is not trivial. I suggest combining IT and NI at around 30% for income generally so that the person with an income of £50,000 gross from whatever source pays the same as the bloke who gets up at 6am to go to work on an overpriced season ticket to feed his starving children and pay the mortgage on an overpriced house.
Pensioners like me are extremely privileged, and I think as a group they are asking too much of others. I decline to join their number.
As another pensioner quite honestly I don't think I've ever been as well off as I am now. I've paid for my house, I've no debts (which I had when working due to a combination of misfortune and incompetence) I'm not paying into savings accounts for pensions and I'm not paying NI.
Ditto. The young working person who has to spend their entire earned income is paying both income tax and NI on their income, and is paying a high proportion of their income in sales taxes (VAT, fuel and alcohol duty, etc.).
Whereas the better-off pensioner only pays income tax on pension income, and has likely managed to shelter their savings in tax free ISAs such that they aren’t paying any tax at all on investment or savings income. Capital gains are taxed at less than income, significantly so for higher rate taxpayers. And I’d bet that those better-off pensioners are probably subject to a lower proportion of VAT on their income, as gifts, holidays and savings don’t attract it and fuel is levied at just 5%. And they don’t have commuting costs. They do probably pay their share of alcohol duty….
We're certainly paying our share of alcohol duty. Given that because of my overall health problems we don't feel we can do much in the way of holidays.......
Yesterday's spending review commits the government to increasing current spending by £190bn a year more over the term of the Parliament. Public spending is committed to growing 2.3% in real terms.
These plans, in my view, condemn the UK to higher taxes and lower growth as well as spiralling ever nearer the plug hole of unsustainable debt. It is indicative of the complacency that is shared across the media and elsewhere, despite the lesson of Truss, that this disastrous course of action seems to engender so little comment with the focus being on the individual elements.
We are in serious trouble and yesterday made it worse.
The alternative is another decade of worsening austerity. Even yesterday's plans are significant cuts for many departments. We can't have both growth and the featherbedding of the Granny State.
I take no particular view on what the percentage of GDP spent by the government should be, just want a balanced budget and for the politicians to be honest about the trade offs. I am not expecting either any time soon.
We can't, so we need to choose growth and not the granny state.
Long past time to cut the NHS, Triple Lock etc and prioritise things other than the grey vote.
Even if you cut spending per old person, the numbers are going up a lot. 11m to 13m over 65s in 10 years. A 20% cut (unthinkable) in pensions would still leave the pension budget increasing.
In real terms its absolutely not unthinkable, just unpopular.
We need to have the same attitude to grey benefits that the older generation had to free tuition ... numbers have gone up so its just not viable
I don’t think any politician would ever stand up and propose a 20% cut in basic State pension. It might be logical or even desirable but it’s not going to happen.
We don’t do that kind of pay cut though I know as some of the post-Communist countries reverted to capitalist systems in the early 90s, they did cut wages and benefits for those in the State sector and even Greece and Spain cut public sector wages during the Eurozone crisis.
The British approach is to freeze wages which translates to a real term cut as you know.
Raising the age at which the State pension can be taken is one option and that will no doubt happen. To be fair, frozen thresholds mean many people are seeing their workplace pensions increasingly taxed (the State pension itself isn’t) so perhaps we need to rethink that to encourage more people to fund their own retirement from workplace schemes which means the private sector stepping up to offer the kind of pensions to their workers other sectors achieve.
Some form of sovereign pension fund into which all private companies would have to pay and increased contributions from workers, he says, thinking aloud.
The logical endpoint becomes the end of the State pension with everyone self financing their retirement (hopefully not via the American style 401 with everyone playing the stock market). Can’t see that happening anytime soon.
The current system is in trouble but the irony is a lot of older people are currently doing very well so it works - to a point.
That was the point, a real terms cut is viable.
Do to pensions the same as was done to many state employees over the past decade and a half "increases will be at 1% per year until the finances are sorted".
That's a nominal increase, but a real terms cut.
In real terms many people's salaries have been cut by over 20%, and that's people working for a living. Those who aren't working for their living deserve no more than those who are.
The only answer to pensions is mean testing the high earners and the asset rich plus increase to 70
Similarly with the NHS
Of course this is blasphemy to many, but reality can at times be difficult to accept and new hard thinking is required
But then you have to pay benefits to all those aged 67 to 70 who can't find work (or those younger who can't take the jobs they leave) we don't have the jobs to support work till 70
Im all for means testing the NHS though
I would just say any increase in the retirement age takes years to implement, otherwise we have WASPI's again
Don't fall for their nonsense Big G - the Waspi changes also took a long time to roll out. Its just a claim based on the government not coming round to each and every person affected with a a cup a tea and a bar chart in the lounge...
By some coincidence, I have just received a letter in a brown envelope marked “Information about State Pension age” (including the quotation marks).
The pension age letter directs me to this page on the review under the Sunak government. It seems to suggest the next review might alter the date again. Could it be downwards now that lifespan growth has stalled? https://www.gov.uk/government/news/state-pension-age-review-published
None of the wording anywhere seems to suggest survivors.
If by, some stroke of divine intervention, there is just one survivor they can come on here and win the eternally tedious air travel anecdotes battle royale.
Spot the almost subliminal flash of Rachel Reeves towards the end of Clarkson's Farm S4 E8!
I like Clarkson's Farm but that stuff really winds me up. Whatever you think of the IHT change, the motivation for it was to prevent people like Clarkson inflating land prices by using it as a tax dodge. Part of the reason someone like Kaleb struggles to buy a farm is because the agricultural returns are so small, so the breakeven point is sometimes centuries in the future.
I'd forgive him if at the end of the next season he sells the land to Kaleb for a fair price for use as a farm (e.g. something like £0).
All true. That Clarkson emerged as the public face of the farm IHT campaign is ironic.
True but misleading. As Clarkson said, there are other tax shelters available.
The financial reality of the show is that Amazon more than subsidises any losses Clarkson makes on farming. So far as I can make out, everyone watches it, except for me.
It is good TV, and Clarkson manages to put himself across as quite likeable, even though I suspect he actually isn’t. He does concede that he doesn’t need the income from his farm to live on - just as well, as he isn’t making any.
Buying the farm as a tax dodge and then realising the possibility of milking a whole TV series out of it is genius, though. On Amazon it’s right at the top of the most viewed.
Why do you suspect he isn't likeable? I know there is the classic getting stroppy late at night/punching the member of the crew (not acceptable), but my impression of him is that is genuinely likeable, but probably prone to getting pissed off at times. Like a lot of people.
He was incredibly nasty to his mother on Who Do You Think You Are, mocking and belittling her in front of the cameras.
I'll take your word for it. Maybe he didn't like her, or maybe that's the family humour.
I got the feeling of both, but in a strange and unexplored way. Family issues.
Thank you for the article. I enjoyed it and its previous one. I look forward to the next seven, as I'm sure we all do. The published ones in Gareth's "The Challenge For..." series are:
Yesterday's spending review commits the government to increasing current spending by £190bn a year more over the term of the Parliament. Public spending is committed to growing 2.3% in real terms.
These plans, in my view, condemn the UK to higher taxes and lower growth as well as spiralling ever nearer the plug hole of unsustainable debt. It is indicative of the complacency that is shared across the media and elsewhere, despite the lesson of Truss, that this disastrous course of action seems to engender so little comment with the focus being on the individual elements.
We are in serious trouble and yesterday made it worse.
The alternative is another decade of worsening austerity. Even yesterday's plans are significant cuts for many departments. We can't have both growth and the featherbedding of the Granny State.
I take no particular view on what the percentage of GDP spent by the government should be, just want a balanced budget and for the politicians to be honest about the trade offs. I am not expecting either any time soon.
We can't, so we need to choose growth and not the granny state.
Long past time to cut the NHS, Triple Lock etc and prioritise things other than the grey vote.
Even if you cut spending per old person, the numbers are going up a lot. 11m to 13m over 65s in 10 years. A 20% cut (unthinkable) in pensions would still leave the pension budget increasing.
In real terms its absolutely not unthinkable, just unpopular.
We need to have the same attitude to grey benefits that the older generation had to free tuition ... numbers have gone up so its just not viable
I don’t think any politician would ever stand up and propose a 20% cut in basic State pension. It might be logical or even desirable but it’s not going to happen.
We don’t do that kind of pay cut though I know as some of the post-Communist countries reverted to capitalist systems in the early 90s, they did cut wages and benefits for those in the State sector and even Greece and Spain cut public sector wages during the Eurozone crisis.
The British approach is to freeze wages which translates to a real term cut as you know.
Raising the age at which the State pension can be taken is one option and that will no doubt happen. To be fair, frozen thresholds mean many people are seeing their workplace pensions increasingly taxed (the State pension itself isn’t) so perhaps we need to rethink that to encourage more people to fund their own retirement from workplace schemes which means the private sector stepping up to offer the kind of pensions to their workers other sectors achieve.
Some form of sovereign pension fund into which all private companies would have to pay and increased contributions from workers, he says, thinking aloud.
The logical endpoint becomes the end of the State pension with everyone self financing their retirement (hopefully not via the American style 401 with everyone playing the stock market). Can’t see that happening anytime soon.
The current system is in trouble but the irony is a lot of older people are currently doing very well so it works - to a point.
That was the point, a real terms cut is viable.
Do to pensions the same as was done to many state employees over the past decade and a half "increases will be at 1% per year until the finances are sorted".
That's a nominal increase, but a real terms cut.
In real terms many people's salaries have been cut by over 20%, and that's people working for a living. Those who aren't working for their living deserve no more than those who are.
The only answer to pensions is mean testing the high earners and the asset rich plus increase to 70
Similarly with the NHS
Of course this is blasphemy to many, but reality can at times be difficult to accept and new hard thinking is required
But then you have to pay benefits to all those aged 67 to 70 who can't find work (or those younger who can't take the jobs they leave) we don't have the jobs to support work till 70
Im all for means testing the NHS though
I would just say any increase in the retirement age takes years to implement, otherwise we have WASPI's again
Don't fall for their nonsense Big G - the Waspi changes also took a long time to roll out. Its just a claim based on the government not coming round to each and every person affected with a a cup a tea and a bar chart in the lounge...
By some coincidence, I have just received a letter in a brown envelope marked “Information about State Pension age” (including the quotation marks).
The pension age letter directs me to this page on the review under the Sunak government. It seems to suggest the next review might alter the date again. Could it be downwards now that lifespan growth has stalled? https://www.gov.uk/government/news/state-pension-age-review-published
A lot of the anti pensioners vitriol seems to stem from them sitting on equity. What on earth would be the point in working for 50 years, paying off a mortgage and then 'downsizing' to some soulless shoebox? And all to support 'young people' to work 50 years, pay off a mortgage and...... People aren't battery hens.
It doesn't need to be a shoe-box. My recently retired colleague lives in a 850K, 6 bedroom house with his wife. They do not need sech a place in reality, but also have no need for cash. But later in their retirement he has expressed a desire to move to a posh flat - no stairs, lots of nice space, but more appropriate for their lives at that point in time.
And thats the point - making appropriate housing for people to downsize to.
Indeed. There is no infrastructure in place for these options. More than that though is that its often pensioners in a modest paid off home (let's say a 2 to 3 bed semi in a normal suburban area) who somehow are seen to be greedy because of their 'equity'. 50 years in the system to get 'something' to call your own and a piss poor state pension is nothing the youth need to be jealous of. Its the millionaire pensioners shouldn't get WFA thing - most of them aren't millionaires and many did suffer by taking a real terms 2% cut in income
Yesterday's spending review commits the government to increasing current spending by £190bn a year more over the term of the Parliament. Public spending is committed to growing 2.3% in real terms.
These plans, in my view, condemn the UK to higher taxes and lower growth as well as spiralling ever nearer the plug hole of unsustainable debt. It is indicative of the complacency that is shared across the media and elsewhere, despite the lesson of Truss, that this disastrous course of action seems to engender so little comment with the focus being on the individual elements.
We are in serious trouble and yesterday made it worse.
The alternative is another decade of worsening austerity. Even yesterday's plans are significant cuts for many departments. We can't have both growth and the featherbedding of the Granny State.
I take no particular view on what the percentage of GDP spent by the government should be, just want a balanced budget and for the politicians to be honest about the trade offs. I am not expecting either any time soon.
We can't, so we need to choose growth and not the granny state.
Long past time to cut the NHS, Triple Lock etc and prioritise things other than the grey vote.
Even if you cut spending per old person, the numbers are going up a lot. 11m to 13m over 65s in 10 years. A 20% cut (unthinkable) in pensions would still leave the pension budget increasing.
In real terms its absolutely not unthinkable, just unpopular.
We need to have the same attitude to grey benefits that the older generation had to free tuition ... numbers have gone up so its just not viable
I don’t think any politician would ever stand up and propose a 20% cut in basic State pension. It might be logical or even desirable but it’s not going to happen.
We don’t do that kind of pay cut though I know as some of the post-Communist countries reverted to capitalist systems in the early 90s, they did cut wages and benefits for those in the State sector and even Greece and Spain cut public sector wages during the Eurozone crisis.
The British approach is to freeze wages which translates to a real term cut as you know.
Raising the age at which the State pension can be taken is one option and that will no doubt happen. To be fair, frozen thresholds mean many people are seeing their workplace pensions increasingly taxed (the State pension itself isn’t) so perhaps we need to rethink that to encourage more people to fund their own retirement from workplace schemes which means the private sector stepping up to offer the kind of pensions to their workers other sectors achieve.
Some form of sovereign pension fund into which all private companies would have to pay and increased contributions from workers, he says, thinking aloud.
The logical endpoint becomes the end of the State pension with everyone self financing their retirement (hopefully not via the American style 401 with everyone playing the stock market). Can’t see that happening anytime soon.
The current system is in trouble but the irony is a lot of older people are currently doing very well so it works - to a point.
That was the point, a real terms cut is viable.
Do to pensions the same as was done to many state employees over the past decade and a half "increases will be at 1% per year until the finances are sorted".
That's a nominal increase, but a real terms cut.
In real terms many people's salaries have been cut by over 20%, and that's people working for a living. Those who aren't working for their living deserve no more than those who are.
The only answer to pensions is mean testing the high earners and the asset rich plus increase to 70
Similarly with the NHS
Of course this is blasphemy to many, but reality can at times be difficult to accept and new hard thinking is required
But then you have to pay benefits to all those aged 67 to 70 who can't find work (or those younger who can't take the jobs they leave) we don't have the jobs to support work till 70
Im all for means testing the NHS though
I would just say any increase in the retirement age takes years to implement, otherwise we have WASPI's again
Don't fall for their nonsense Big G - the Waspi changes also took a long time to roll out. Its just a claim based on the government not coming round to each and every person affected with a a cup a tea and a bar chart in the lounge...
Yet the pathetic Lib Dem’s want to give them billions.
My retirement age has changed twice. I’ve had no letter. Where’s my compo ?
Get on the blower to the Fox Beater General
God knows what that means but it was not a serious comment.
Translation: Get on the phone to Jolyon Maugham
My mate manages the Bob Monkhouse estate, or certainly did. He had folder after folder of comic gags and asides.
That wouldn’t make it into his archive.
My Father still enjoys sex at 86. He lives at 82, its no distance AND OTHER CLASSICS
Spot the almost subliminal flash of Rachel Reeves towards the end of Clarkson's Farm S4 E8!
I like Clarkson's Farm but that stuff really winds me up. Whatever you think of the IHT change, the motivation for it was to prevent people like Clarkson inflating land prices by using it as a tax dodge. Part of the reason someone like Kaleb struggles to buy a farm is because the agricultural returns are so small, so the breakeven point is sometimes centuries in the future.
I'd forgive him if at the end of the next season he sells the land to Kaleb for a fair price for use as a farm (e.g. something like £0).
Labour should have just exempted family farms and small businesses held for 2 generations or more from the IHT tax changes, that way tax dodgers would still have been hit and not been competing with the likes of Kaleb to buy farmland but traditional farming families wouldn't
Simpler - the IHT would be due when the land is sold. If the land is inherited again, then the IHT is replaced with the latest value, not doubled up.
So if you keep the family farm in the family - no tax. If you make money from selling it, you pay the IHT out of that.
Or a 5% taper per year of agricultural activity so a farm that has been active for 20+ years is exempted.
It doesn't matter how many better ways there were, Labour aren't interested. This is a revenge beating for the countryside that ripped the UK out of the EU. It's not rational policy making, it's angry urban lefties exacting revenge.
Though of course the NFU backed Remain and white working class ex industrial towns and seaside towns were even more strongly for Brexit than rural areas and Reform is now beating Labour in all of them
A lot of the anti pensioners vitriol seems to stem from them sitting on equity. What on earth would be the point in working for 50 years, paying off a mortgage and then 'downsizing' to some soulless shoebox? And all to support 'young people' to work 50 years, pay off a mortgage and...... People aren't battery hens.
The most gorgeous home I've ever been in was a one bed flat in central Stockholm, owned by two pensioners. They'd sold their 4 bed family home when the kids left and owned a share in a lakeside cabin.
The rest of their cash went into considerable volumes of alcohol and a fish-based diet. They cycled everywhere, despite having mobility problems, and gave us a deeply entertaining tour of the city before lending us the hut for the weekend.
I go out every morning for a cycle ride. Is it a close pass irrespective of the direction of the traffic or only if the traffic is in the same direction of travel as you ?
I don't think there is an explicit rule about oncoming cyclists - I've looked this up before. But I think the general guidance given by the Code would cover it anyway.
This is a regular issue for me on one particular street with parked cars. I just take primary position to prevent any squeezing from either direction, and pull in where possible to let oncoming cars pass.
Even that is a lagging indicator. The real economy is in a hell of a mess.
Who could have ever thought that raising taxes on employment while leaving unearned incomes untaxed might not be the best way to manage an economy?
Savings are taxed. Dividends are taxed. The tax on dividends has been increased. Pensions are taxed. Assets when sold are taxed. Other than houses you live in. Are you suggesting CGT on the sale of houses?
True. but it's bad politics for workers to be taxed more heavily than the retired (like me). And the low tax/untaxed nature of residential property is a disaster distorting the market and giving all the wrong incentives.
Also distorting the market is the ludicrous IHT rules whereby the rate is far too high (40%) and the exemptions capricious (extra if you own a home etc) and the ways of avoiding it a series of open goals, keeping Lincoln's Inn in business.
Low rate (5-10%), no exemptions, CTT at the same rate on inter vivos transactions is the way forward.
What mince are you talking , the only tax (sic ) that can be different is NI for working pensioners. So unless you specifically mean that miniscule point then you are talking absolute bollox.
Thanks. Not trivial if you see NI as simply a futher tax - which it is, as money is money.
For someone receiving say £50,000 pa gross from earned income the NI would be roughly £3k. This is not trivial. I suggest combining IT and NI at around 30% for income generally so that the person with an income of £50,000 gross from whatever source pays the same as the bloke who gets up at 6am to go to work on an overpriced season ticket to feed his starving children and pay the mortgage on an overpriced house.
Pensioners like me are extremely privileged, and I think as a group they are asking too much of others. I decline to join their number.
As another pensioner quite honestly I don't think I've ever been as well off as I am now. I've paid for my house, I've no debts (which I had when working due to a combination of misfortune and incompetence) I'm not paying into savings accounts for pensions and I'm not paying NI.
I am the same, but the other side of the coin that as over 80's, we both suffer health issues and mobility and tempus fugit
Ha ha, yes. I've been told by the physio I ought to walk 1000 steps a day, to increase general mobility and improve balance. Takes up pb reading time, though!
Just achieved our 63rd wedding anniversary too, and the sun is shining so quite c cheerful this morning. Anniversary celebrations this weekend.
None of the wording anywhere seems to suggest survivors.
If by, some stroke of divine intervention, there is just one survivor they can come on here and win the eternally tedious air travel anecdotes battle royale.
A lot of the anti pensioners vitriol seems to stem from them sitting on equity. What on earth would be the point in working for 50 years, paying off a mortgage and then 'downsizing' to some soulless shoebox? And all to support 'young people' to work 50 years, pay off a mortgage and...... People aren't battery hens.
It doesn't need to be a shoe-box. My recently retired colleague lives in a 850K, 6 bedroom house with his wife. They do not need sech a place in reality, but also have no need for cash. But later in their retirement he has expressed a desire to move to a posh flat - no stairs, lots of nice space, but more appropriate for their lives at that point in time.
And thats the point - making appropriate housing for people to downsize to.
Indeed. There is no infrastructure in place for these options. More than that though is that its often pensioners in a modest paid off home (let's say a 2 to 3 bed semi in a normal suburban area) who somehow are seen to be greedy because of their 'equity'. 50 years in the system to get 'something' to call your own and a piss poor state pension is nothing the youth need to be jealous of. Its the millionaire pensioners shouldn't get WFA thing - most of them aren't millionaires and many did suffer by taking a real terms 2% cut in income
The mechanics of allowing people to downsize without paying stamp duty are already there in the rules which govern additional property stamp duty on multiple properties:
"If you’re replacing your main residence
You will not pay the extra 5% SDLT if both of the following apply:
the property you’re buying is replacing your main residence your previous main residence was sold within 36 months of completing your new purchase"
A lot of the anti pensioners vitriol seems to stem from them sitting on equity. What on earth would be the point in working for 50 years, paying off a mortgage and then 'downsizing' to some soulless shoebox? And all to support 'young people' to work 50 years, pay off a mortgage and...... People aren't battery hens.
The most gorgeous home I've ever been in was a one bed flat in central Stockholm, owned by two pensioners. They'd sold their 4 bed family home when the kids left and owned a share in a lakeside cabin.
The rest of their cash went into considerable volumes of alcohol and a fish-based diet. They cycled everywhere, despite having mobility problems, and gave us a deeply entertaining tour of the city before lending us the hut for the weekend.
I go out every morning for a cycle ride. Is it a close pass irrespective of the direction of the traffic or only if the traffic is in the same direction of travel as you ?
I don't think there is an explicit rule about oncoming cyclists - I've looked this up before. But I think the general guidance given by the Code would cover it anyway.
This is a regular issue for me on one particular street with parked cars. I just take primary position to prevent any squeezing from either direction, and pull in where possible to let oncoming cars pass.
I had three or four this morning oncoming that were, although around 10MPH, less than 1 metre. I didn’t feel unsafe more wary.
Sooner or later, any decision made by Starmer’s Labour government turns out to be damaging for the UK
This is now being applied to the Gibraltar deal. Falling apart under scrutiny
What's the problem with the Gibraltar deal? They have fixed the border FUBAR so that people are able to cross it freely again as they need to. Gibraltar remains a BOT, the military facility remains untouched, and the people who voted in almost unanimity to not fuck their lives up get the fix they voted for.
Loads of details about the passport arrangements now being revealed. Allegations on X such as: every British citizen entering Gibraltar will now have their passports checked by Spain and a stay in Gibraltar will count as a stay in Schenghen. As visiting the EU. The Spanish will control how and when the British visit British territory abroad
Likewise some are claiming this will apply to British troops or sailors in the Navy
OK. This is Gibraltar. The deal is great for everyone who lives there - who didn't vote to be walled in. The deal is great for the workers Gibraltar needs to cross from Spain and back each day. The deal makes no difference to most people travelling to Gibraltar as how may are close to the 90/180 barrier? Which itself is on its way out as we work towards a solution longer term.
So in practice this deal in a very practical way improves the lives of the people of Gibraltar who voted for it. But imposes a theoretical dictat on Mr Keyboard of Clacton who doesn't travel to forrin anyway.
Honestly this is classic @Leon. Shouting about stuff and expounding simple solutions to things that are always more complicated to implement. You wanted Brexit, which you thought was simple, but it had consequences, one of them being the border at Gibraltar. Are you coming up with a solution? No, just shouting again. This solves the big problem, but unfortunately may have a knock on problem for a small minority of others. You didn't seem to have any sympathy for all those people who were buggered by the 90/180 rule who had commitments (eg family), property of businesses in the EU, which was a huge number of people yet you are now worried about the very very minute number of Brits who both may make a visit to Gibraltar and who in addition might fall foul of the 90/180 day rule. With the exception of people stationed on Gibraltar it is unlikely to impact any UK visitors who weren't bordering on exceeding the limit anyway. You know those ones you didn't care about previously.
As far as people stationed on the rock there will obviously have to be a solution because some are not just Navy sailors visiting, but based there for 3/6/12 months so will all fail the 90 day test.
Even that is a lagging indicator. The real economy is in a hell of a mess.
Who could have ever thought that raising taxes on employment while leaving unearned incomes untaxed might not be the best way to manage an economy?
Savings are taxed. Dividends are taxed. The tax on dividends has been increased. Pensions are taxed. Assets when sold are taxed. Other than houses you live in. Are you suggesting CGT on the sale of houses?
True. but it's bad politics for workers to be taxed more heavily than the retired (like me). And the low tax/untaxed nature of residential property is a disaster distorting the market and giving all the wrong incentives.
Also distorting the market is the ludicrous IHT rules whereby the rate is far too high (40%) and the exemptions capricious (extra if you own a home etc) and the ways of avoiding it a series of open goals, keeping Lincoln's Inn in business.
Low rate (5-10%), no exemptions, CTT at the same rate on inter vivos transactions is the way forward.
What mince are you talking , the only tax (sic ) that can be different is NI for working pensioners. So unless you specifically mean that miniscule point then you are talking absolute bollox.
NI should apply to all pension income itself not just working.
Taxes should be no higher on working for a living than not working.
Don't like it? Get a job.
You halfwitted poltroon I have a job, can you actually read. I bet I pay more tax than you earn on benefits as well.
You don't pay NI, you don't pay the graduate tax, and I don't get a penny in benefits. So if you pay even a penny in tax that exceeds what I earn in benefits, but that's nothing to be proud of.
Sooner or later, any decision made by Starmer’s Labour government turns out to be damaging for the UK
This is now being applied to the Gibraltar deal. Falling apart under scrutiny
What's the problem with the Gibraltar deal? They have fixed the border FUBAR so that people are able to cross it freely again as they need to. Gibraltar remains a BOT, the military facility remains untouched, and the people who voted in almost unanimity to not fuck their lives up get the fix they voted for.
Loads of details about the passport arrangements now being revealed. Allegations on X such as: every British citizen entering Gibraltar will now have their passports checked by Spain and a stay in Gibraltar will count as a stay in Schenghen. As visiting the EU. The Spanish will control how and when the British visit British territory abroad
Likewise some are claiming this will apply to British troops or sailors in the Navy
OK. This is Gibraltar. The deal is great for everyone who lives there - who didn't vote to be walled in. The deal is great for the workers Gibraltar needs to cross from Spain and back each day. The deal makes no difference to most people travelling to Gibraltar as how may are close to the 90/180 barrier? Which itself is on its way out as we work towards a solution longer term.
So in practice this deal in a very practical way improves the lives of the people of Gibraltar who voted for it. But imposes a theoretical dictat on Mr Keyboard of Clacton who doesn't travel to forrin anyway.
Honestly this is classic @Leon. Shouting about stuff and expounding simple solutions to things that are always more complicated to implement. You wanted Brexit, which you thought was simple, but it had consequences, one of them being the border at Gibraltar. Are you coming up with a solution? No, just shouting again. This solves the big problem, but unfortunately may have a knock on problem for a small minority of others. You didn't seem to have any sympathy for all those people who were buggered by the 90/180 rule who had commitments (eg family), property of businesses in the EU, which was a huge number of people yet you are now worried about the very very minute number of Brits who both may make a visit to Gibraltar and who in addition might fall foul of the 90/180 day rule. With the exception of people stationed on Gibraltar it is unlikely to impact any UK visitors who weren't bordering on exceeding the limit anyway. You know those ones you didn't care about previously.
As far as people stationed on the rock there will obviously have to be a solution because some are not just Navy sailors visiting, but based there for 3/6/12 months so will all fail the 90 day test.
I don't see the issue: they would simply be residents. Just like a non-EU citizen resident in France technically is not supposed to spend more than 90/180 days in Schengen countries other than France. Not much by way of enforcement, of course.
Comments
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c8d1r3m8z92t
Many thanks Gareth
Buying the farm as a tax dodge and then realising the possibility of milking a whole TV series out of it is genius, though. On Amazon it’s right at the top of the most viewed.
Including them sorta plays into Putin's hands: Ukrainians are just Russians.
First serious Dreamliner crash.
None of the wording anywhere seems to suggest survivors.
For someone receiving say £50,000 pa gross from earned income the NI would be roughly £3k. This is not trivial. I suggest combining IT and NI at around 30% for income generally so that the person with an income of £50,000 gross from whatever source pays the same as the bloke who gets up at 6am to go to work on an overpriced season ticket to feed his starving children and pay the mortgage on an overpriced house.
Pensioners like me are extremely privileged, and I think as a group they are asking too much of others. I decline to join their number.
Same as unviable businesses going bust.
In Scotland, we had a considerable surge in productivity growth in the aftermath of the 2008 recession, with many of the lower paid jobs being squeezed out. Will that happen again?
Will we end up like France, with a higher rate of unemployment offset by higher wages for those in work?
Which of the changes is actually having a bigger impact? The assumption was most of the NICs changes would be absorbed by wages, not employment rates - but that doesn't seem to be the case. Is this hammering minimum wage employers more? Are smaller businesses doing better because of the employment allowance? The NICs change is pretty small, in the grand scheme of things.
But the big question for me is the huge drop in vacancies since the peak in 2022, which appears to have accelerated slightly since November. Why has that happened - immigration?
The question is whether Iran is strong enough to intimidate him.
People aren't battery hens.
Older people are perceived as being rigid, inflexible, unhelpful and obstructive and our experience not valued.
A fair tax system is needed but charging NI on the pension is not the answer.
So in practice this deal in a very practical way improves the lives of the people of Gibraltar who voted for it. But imposes a theoretical dictat on Mr Keyboard of Clacton who doesn't travel to forrin anyway.
It doesn't matter how many better ways there were, Labour aren't interested. This is a revenge beating for the countryside that ripped the UK out of the EU. It's not rational policy making, it's angry urban lefties exacting revenge.
Britain simply hasn't built enough houses.
I tread the LRB, which is sometimes wonderful, and sometimes dull.
My retirement age has changed twice. I’ve had no letter. Where’s my compo ?
Smoked salmon, not rhubarb.
I’m growing rhubarb in the garden. Will turn it to wine later this year.
I pay National Insurance (8%) and student loan “repayments” (a capped income tax) of 6% and 9%. Something your generation never needed to do. You call us entitled but we are funding the retirement of the current and future retired.
The rest of their cash went into considerable volumes of alcohol and a fish-based diet. They cycled everywhere, despite having mobility problems, and gave us a deeply entertaining tour of the city before lending us the hut for the weekend.
Just achieved our 63rd wedding anniversary too, and the sun is shining so quite c cheerful this morning. Anniversary celebrations this weekend.
I'm not minimising the losses of course. Many a Russian wife and mother waited in vain for husbands, sons and indeed daughters to come home. Indeed I read somewhere that daughters were less likely to survive because they knew what would happen to them if they were captured.
Whereas the better-off pensioner only pays income tax on pension income, and has likely managed to shelter their savings in tax free ISAs such that they aren’t paying any tax at all on investment or savings income. Capital gains are taxed at less than income, significantly so for higher rate taxpayers. And I’d bet that those better-off pensioners are probably subject to a lower proportion of VAT on their income, as gifts, holidays and savings don’t attract it and fuel is levied at just 5%. And they don’t have commuting costs. They do probably pay their share of alcohol duty….
And thats the point - making appropriate housing for people to downsize to.
A question for you and @MattW
I go out every morning for a cycle ride. Is it a close pass irrespective of the direction of the traffic or only if the traffic is in the same direction of travel as you ?
2 years ahead of us, and only 2 more for you both to receive another personally signed congratulations card from Charles and Camilla
That wouldn’t make it into his archive.
https://www.pprune.org/accidents-close-calls/666472-plane-crash-near-ahmedabad.html
LRB, for me, is startlingly dull and uniform. The longer stuff rarely is worth the weight it is given, and its secular liberal assumptions make every page dull. Standout for me was pages and pages given over to the USA abortion debate after overturning Roe v Wade. Not a glimmer anywhere of the multi faceted moral complexities of the issues. It was a distorted mirror image of the Daily Mail.
Starmer and Reeves talking about the improving economy being a reason they can partly reverse WFA, for instance, is a huge hostage to fortune when you get negative growth figures.
Because neither of them are particularly convincing political communicators, these sorts of party lines are at risk of making them look shifty and untrustworthy.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/state-pension-age-review-published
Thank you for the article. I enjoyed it and its previous one. I look forward to the next seven, as I'm sure we all do. The published ones in Gareth's "The Challenge For..." series are:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg71v533q6o
More than that though is that its often pensioners in a modest paid off home (let's say a 2 to 3 bed semi in a normal suburban area) who somehow are seen to be greedy because of their 'equity'. 50 years in the system to get 'something' to call your own and a piss poor state pension is nothing the youth need to be jealous of.
Its the millionaire pensioners shouldn't get WFA thing - most of them aren't millionaires and many did suffer by taking a real terms 2% cut in income
Edit: Any reason a British Indian would travel on an Indian passport? So maybe more than 53.
AND OTHER CLASSICS
This is a regular issue for me on one particular street with parked cars. I just take primary position to prevent any squeezing from either direction, and pull in where possible to let oncoming cars pass.
Anyone with a British passport would use it when travelling to Britain to avoid any question of visa issues.
"If you’re replacing your main residence
You will not pay the extra 5% SDLT if both of the following apply:
the property you’re buying is replacing your main residence
your previous main residence was sold within 36 months of completing your new purchase"
https://www.gov.uk/stamp-duty-land-tax/residential-property-rates
So it would be a fairly simple tax change, with not much extra bureaucracy.
We can only keep our fingers crossed for some survivability.
I suspect this only works for her because the USA, like us, doesn't have exit controls.
As far as people stationed on the rock there will obviously have to be a solution because some are not just Navy sailors visiting, but based there for 3/6/12 months so will all fail the 90 day test.
So other than that, great job. 0/3, well done.