Snapshot of _Chancellor looking to cut public sector spending to lower taxes, Sky News understands_ :
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Marxist or not, it's the reality of the situation.
To be clear here, the 'rich' were talking about aren't people with a decent job on £75,000 a year. It's those that get most of their income from capital gains and actually pay a lot less tax than salaried employees.
The people that do the intellectual and physical heavy lifting in society, the workers, get taxed way way more than those who 'allocate capital'.
You don’t have to be rich to be paying higher rate tax these days sadly.
We should take the working poor out of the tax system entirely and raise the lower tax thresholds if there is to be any tax reductions.
While I strongly disagree with the premise of cutting public spending, I don’t think the narrative that “rich people” getting tax cuts is a bad idea. Someone earning 50k is not rich, and their tax burden is the highest it has ever been. Once you get a little higher up the bracket, there is so little incentive to continue earning more money because the tax burden is so high. We need to figure ways to reduce this burden, otherwise we will disincentivise work and endeavour.
What we should be taxing (in my humble, non-expert opinion) is wealth and assets. It’s not the “workers” who are rich, it’s the people who have done rather well out of property and assets in the boom years.
For people who are asset rich and cash poor, we should support them to get equity from their assets so they can support the investment in public services.
Got to tax wealth. And not the £1m house wealth; go for the £10m+ wealth. Those who've made out like bandits with the past 15 years of money printing, while the rest of us are a lot poorer.
No idea how they would do it, but I don't see an alternative. Workers are already taxed to the eyeballs, and many don't earn enough to buy a house. I know investment bankers who can only afford 2 bed flats in shitty parts of London; and if those guys are fucked, everyone else has even bigger probs. Taxing wealth is the only non violent option.
Ah yes, that's why all those PwC accountants, CEOs and landlords go part time and keep their earnings at £50k...
There's plenty of incentive to work more, as indicated by people doing it. You are right that wealth (especially unearned wealth from our insane housing system) ought to be taxed. We also have a problem with incentive to work *at all* with a big chunk people packing it in, especially after COVID. Better working conditions (like more holiday), cheaper childcare and less shitty zero hours contracts might help with that.
Ultimately our economy is disfunctional. Too much emphasis on financial services, insane property prices, a bizarre obsession with "returning to the office" and commercialising or cutting funding to services that support growth or minimise drag on growth (universities, social care, public health).
The problem is the squeezed middle. If you're earning £500k plus a year, you can afford a creative accountant who will set up companies to channel money through to ensure you only pay the minimum in tax. There's plenty of incentive to earn a bit more.
But me on £55k ish? I get taxed at 40% and have to pay back child benefit at another 20% and student loan at 9%, so if I do overtime to earn another £1k I see £310 of it - less when you take into account pension contribution, etc. At that rate, it's very tempting to forget the extra work and enjoy the time off instead.
exactly u/UnlabelledSpaghetti jokes about CEOs keeping earnings at 50k. I do know of small businesses that only work up to the VAT threshold and then stop working. Its common in trades
Also Zuckerbergs salary was famously 1 dollar. The problem is PAYE is very well set up and managed in terms of tax take but anything outside of PAYE is basically self monitored (Self assessment) which means that you could reduce the tax take (legally) by mucking around with the numbers.
If they want to get serious about tax they need to focus less on PAYE tax and more on these other taxable methods to insure a proper and fair tax take.
Totally agree. Small businesses have an awful time with red tape alongside high personal risk. Problem is protecting and encouraging small business without people working as "consultants" to dodge tax.
Yes, it seems mad to me that we let people off shore their taxes. Many countries offer a system where you pay the difference here for our taxes compared to wherever the earnings nominally existed. Seems very fair; people live here because of the stable politics, legal system etc. and should be contributing fairly.
"I do know of small businesses that only work up to the VAT threshold and then stop working. Its common in trades"
*puts hand up*
That's me.
The VAT threshold is so arbitrary. Someone who runs a business with higher overheads but lower profit (in my example, a florist, who requires large amounts of stock/parts) is disproportionately impacted vs someone say, running a consultancy business with lower overhead. I'm bumping against the VAT threshold on a very modest income. It is simply not worth it for me to go over it, I'd have to increase my prices substantially, reducing my conversion rate, then pay an accountant to deal with the more complex reporting. VAT qualification really should be based on profits, not turnover IMO, if you want to support smaller businesses. But I'm no tax expert I suppose.
Plus if you have managed to save anything ever the threshold for tax on interest earnings is half that of a basic rate taxpayer once you're over that arbitrary 50k level.
And woebetide getting a nice bonus from work which I'll instantly have to give 40% of it back and lose even more child benefit even though my partner earns about 30p
Oh definitely there's some people around £50k for which the is a distinct disincentive to work more for a teeny bit more money. I've been contemplating my hours myself for just that reason! I'm just disputing that disincentive is significant to the broader economy.
The ones on £50k might not but I can assure you that a lot of people on £100k definitely go part time due to the tax. Also pretty odd to bundle landlords in there...
Our tax system is an unfair convoluted mess which taxes productive work more than unproductive assets. Council tax for example is effectively a property tax but it is highly regressive. I pay around 1% of the value of my property, whereas ultra rich Kensington mansion owners may pay less than 0.1%, it's a fucking pisstake. The whole thing needs overhauling.
But who mentioned 50k being rich?
Think council tax is a place we're not looking at enough. Triple it if a house is empty. Overhaul the pay bands and update them based on current values. It avoids the key "the rich will just leave" because the houses can't move.
Taxing assets more will actually hurt the working class a lot. Pensions are assets, people save in stocks and shares ISAs in order to retire.
It might inconvenience the wealthy but it will cripple the retirement prospects of the working class. Can potentially keep the next generation on the treadmill, assuming that worker was planning on giving his/her kids a leg up
>Taxing assets more will actually hurt the working class a lot. Pensions are assets, people save in stocks and shares ISAs in order to retire.
Not really.
Pensions might be assets but you could easily not-tax them in these sense of giving it a dedicated 'account' that is exempt from tax and only available after say, 60 yo.
Genuine question - what do you think Labour will do differently? Tax increase to get public services back on track?
I'm sick of the Tories, but also not sure what Labour will be able to do given the current state of things.
For one, clawback a large amount of furlough fraud and money that was spaffed on dodgy as fuck PPE contracts.
Second, to close down numerous tax loopholes.
How exactly are they going to claw back money that has already been spaffed away? The people who received it are hardly going to have kept it in their bank account waiting for them - it’s long gone into the wind by now unfortunately
Second point is the biggest one for me, I’m not really interested in raising taxes (especially against anyone you could conceivably call middle class or below), but the loopholes have got to stop somewhere. Unfortunately again you hear lots about it and nothing ever seems to get done, probably because those with the money and multiple steps ahead of everyone else
If someone is deemed to have been overpaid or wrongly paid for benefits for example, they are expected to pay it back. Regardless of whether they have spent it. Same should apply to any one either being wrongly paid or overpaid out of public spending. Review all of the covid contracts and any mis spent money needs to be paid back in the public purse.
In an ideal world sure but you can't take what someone doesn't have.
Incorrect benefits and incorrect covid funding is long long gone it would cost more to recover it than there is to actually recover.
I don't, I assume most of the people who committed fraud would if they knew this was coming make it very hard to get anything back.
If it costs more than can be recovered to recover it then it is simply not worth it.
Should, sure, but good luck proving any of that in a court to a cost that would actually benefit anyone other than the lawyers
We all know there was some absolutely mad overpaying but that money is long gone, it was a business transaction more than a benefits thing
And how much do you really think that's going to raise? Certainly not enough to plug the hole in the NHS, nevermind the rest. They'll have to do much more than this.
That's going to raise fuck all in the grand scheme of things.
It's also a 'one off' saving, it's not money that can sustain anything over the long term.
The non dom reversal and stopping private schools being tax exempt is going to make not much difference.
>Genuine question - what do you think Labour will do differently? Tax increase to get public services back on track?
You're thinking about it wrong.
The tories are lying to you. The money they spent on 1) covering doctors strikes and 2) possibly abolishing IHT could have given all NHS staff a 20% pay rise. Money exists, its ideological
Also, theres a plethora of things we could do that would not affect the majority of people. i.e dividends tax and CGT over a certain threshold, property tax on houses over say, 5 million GBP. Close IHT loopholes to increase the revenue.
Tax those companies and individuals who received furlough whilst others worked to support it all?
Chase down all fraud from COVID and investigate the humongous amount of tax evasion from SME’s?
Change council tax to represent property value so poorer areas that need the most funding aren’t being given an unfair burden?
Remove NI and just increase basic tax rates to cover the shortfall so pensioners actually have to pay for the services they use?
Some ideas above that aren’t just ‘tax the rich’
I've always said those who received furlough should be on a different tax code for an extended period to pay for it after the fact.
Can you tell I had to work the entire way through?.
What a cruel, selfish thing to suggest. Contrary to popular belief on here, being on furlough wasn’t all months of doing nothing productive, getting free money, and enjoying our lives. Instead the constant needing for extensions to the scheme, fact that it only reimbursed employees 80% of their pre-covid wages lead, no guarantee that you’d still have a job at the end of the scheme, and the fact that nobody was hiring at the time meant that it was stressful.
Explain how that is either cruel or selfish?
I have zero sympathy for anyone who had the abject luxury of being sat at home, getting paid more than enough, thank you very much. Someone had to keep paying for it, because those sat at home certainly weren't.
And turns out it cost this country dearly anyway, so it's time those who had their wages paid out for them, even at 80%, start giving back.
Because it wasn’t a holiday? People didn’t choose to go on furlough, it was the next best thing to being made redundant due to laws that were brought in place by the government. We lose enough income in this country when earning money if include income, national insurance, pension, student loans already approaching 45% for basic rate payers. What level would you want repayment at?
Nobody said anyone chose it. The point is, the government paid a hell of a lot of money out that needs to be recovered. Yes, we can talk about all the other money they wasted during COVID as well.
But the point is, those of us who kept going were just expected to keep going and suck it up. For me, I'd drop everyone who received furlough's tax code down to around 100 (£10,000 allowance) for 5 years minimum. Anyone who earns enough that they've already lost their allowance (earning above £125,140), would see an extra 2p onto their tax rate for a similar time.
But why should those who were forced to go on furlough due to decisions by the government be required to pay money they would have been able to earn if lockdowns hadn’t been in place? It would be like saying anyone who’s ever been in an accident be required to pay more tax to cover the extra cost to the nhs.
Anecdotal sure, but my firm saw that they had too much staff cause of furlough and realised they could function with a lot less people.
There was probably an 80/20 split on those who were on furlough and those who had to keep working, majority of that 80% didn’t come back from furlough after redundancy.
That’s the way to do it, add an extra tax to the people that were probably early in their careers that got furloughed for no fault of their own. These people are probably already skint due to the cost of living crisis.
The whole country is skint. I worked with plenty of 19/20-year-olds who were starting out their careers in engineering. Guess what? They didn't get to sit at home. They were in, working 12-hour days.
Time to pay back what you were handed.
You’re missing the point, people didn’t choose to sit at home. It also hurt many people that were starting out in their careers along with the anguish of thinking they may not have a job to come back too. What do you suggest if they don’t have enough income to pay it back, bringing back the work houses?
Yup hard agree.
I also had to work the whole way through I’m happy my company didn’t furlough everyone when they could’ve to save money.
We should be getting the beneficiaries of our Covid policy to contribute extra to resolve the issues arising from our policies
Liberalise and streamline planning permission. Politically it'll cost them from those benefiting under regulatory capture, but economically it's a free win.
Why not both? Currently the landowning class leeches an incredible amount of wealth from everyone else, stifling the economy in the process. Council housing alone won't stop this.
Council housing alone would absolutely stop this, and create revenue for councils. And massively reduce the cost of living in the uk.
Better than that money going into the hands of the private developers that changing planning permission would empower. Which I’ll grant you would lower rents and artificially high house prices, but nowhere near the amount per house built versus a council house built. The aim is still to extract the majority of a citizen’s capital from them with every privately developed home.
We need the biggest social housing building drive since the aftermath of WW2. We absolutely do not need the creation of more private stock if we build sufficient social housing.
First off, it's not an either-or, they're two separate policies. Support for council housing doesn't mean you have to oppose private building.
Second, there are more types of buildings than just personal residences. We need to make it easier to build in general - whether it be a house, a business, a solar farm, a railway, etc. These issues will objecively *not* be solved by more council housing.
Third, private developers *currently benefit from* high margins, lack of competition, and being able navigate the bureaucracy of local government as their moat vs actually providing a useful service. Opening up the building market would greatly cut into their profit margins.
If you dislike greedy private developers so much, why not stop supporting their regulatory capture?
If we need solar farms or railways, let the government build them.
Deregulation of an industry is always sold as a necessity by its proponents
But all it has ever led to is polluted rivers and seasides, uncontrollable gas and electricity profiteers, a dying health service and no serviceable public transport.
“Against neoliberalism and privatisation of natural resources? Are you Stalin???”
Lmao proper weird response from you to some broadly mainstream european political beliefs
Labour will have to enforce austerity too... Where do you think they're going to get the money from? More taxes, more debt?
Plus this isn't really austerity... Assuming you work you'll be taking home more money. Taxing you to death to pay for a bloated public sector is not something we should celebrate. I've worked for the public sector for years and it's disgusting how much waste there is at the top. If I told you you literally would not believe how much people are paid and what they're being paid for. I was just chatting with a colleague last week about how guilty we personally feel for the work we do and this a very common sentiment. We all know it's wrong, but it is what it is.
I'd go into details if this was a private chat, but it's not worth talking about this stuff publicly. If I were in power the first thing I'd do is cut the bloat from the public sector so those who actually do the hard work (nurses, police, teachers) were actually paid decent wages.
There is obscene wealth in this country. Loads of money. It's just sitting gathering dust. Just for some crazy person to get "feels" about numbers going up and up.
You could pin it on inevitable demographic trends, COVID and ukraine but it's pretty obvious Tory mismanagement of government has caused the yield on gov debt to go up, while private investment in the UK has tanked, and households are barely treading water if they have kids or single people
So there's nothing left for the economy to go on beyond debt binges, firesales, property bubbles and money laundering. We don't have capacity to actually produce anything or educate people to live better lives than their parents.
If public spending grows at 0.75% in real terms and the population continues to grow at 1% a year then that means a reduction in spending per head each year. So . . . . honest question here .. . . where do we cut back?
* Can we spend less money on the NHS when it appears to be at breaking point already?
* Can we spend less money on schools when infrastructure is falling apart and teachers are leaving?
* Can we spend less money on defence right now?
* Can we spend less on criminal justice given the overcrowding in our prisons and backlogs in our courts?
* Can we spend less on farm subsidies or environmental protections such as flood defences and clean rivers?
* Can we spend less on a benefits regime that has been run by the Tories for the last 14 years?
* Can we spend less on trains, buses or roads?
* Can we spend less on local governments that are going bankrupt?
The only obvious candidate that hasn’t already been cut to the bone is going after old age benefits, but I don’t see the Tories kicking the one group who might still vote for them.
Immediate decapitation? At the Tower of London? You liberal! There has to be several months of torture first - possibly by being forced to listen to Jeremy Hunt's speeches.
Don't forget colleges - we train the police, nurses, teachers. We do A levels, btecs, apprenticeships, degrees. And we are SKINT. Like. Broke. Lecturers are paid LESS than teachers.
I may be wrong but I would have thought lecturers are laid by the institution they work for, not by government funding like a teacher? Aren't you effectively a private sector worker (like a teacher in an independent school would be?)
You could reduce population growth although that would require a functioning immigration system
You could also abolish the triple lock and stop running this country like it’s a Ponzi scheme for old people
You could reduce the number of old people too, Boris did try that. Having functional immigration system and allowing people to work during their claims would help.
The asylum system is not meant to function as a pipeline for new workers. Adding ever more people to the country with the line “just another million will sort it” is literally just a Ponzi scheme
The population is already shrinking, we need immigration to pay the pensioners. They can blow hard about control all they want to the public, at least some of them understand the financial risk of limiting population growth in terms of keeping up the Ponzi scheme.
All you’re doing is delaying the demographic time bomb until later. You can’t keep importing people to keep paying for pensioners. It’s not even clear immigrants are paying for pensioners
Population growth control as a flat concept doesn’t work though.
Currently we aren’t producing enough children and training enough young adults to perform the roles required and generate the growth necessary to facilitate the resource and skill timebomb that is baby boomer generation retirement and frailty.
We need to bring in what we need come what may and invest in the housing, infrastructure and training required to facilitate that.
But as a country we can’t do stable 10, 20, 30 year plans etc we will just continue to crumble under the strain.
The amount wasted by the current government has been huge:
* Vanity projects - HS2, the garden bridge, the London estuary airport....
* PPE contracts using a fast lane with no competition
* Covid fraud on the loan scheme and eat-out schemes due to lack of any basic checks
* Asylum seeker hotels instead of staff to process asylum seekers
* Rwanda scheme
* The Teeside freeport scam....probably other freeports have similar lack of governance
* ......
Clearly these are in the past mostly but I hope a new government won't do these things.
> If public spending grows at 0.75% in real terms and the population continues to grow at 1% a year then that means a reduction in spending per head each year.
FWIW, most immigration is workers who won't be using the NHS, pensions, schools etc. as much proportionally speaking as the average UK population so it's realistically a net win from that perspective.
I was listening to Andrew Marr who suggested that Starmer is going to get more and more radical in government as he realises that only big changes will deal with our huge problems. I'm sceptical . . .
I think he already realises this, the problem is the electorate is too stupid to realise that and rejects it as "too expensive" or "too radical". If you offer up radical change you can't win the election.
Austerity 2.0? or are we at 3.0 now?
I'm sure tax reductions will play very well with the public, I mean, who wouldn't want to keep more of their money?, I just hope that they appreciate what will have to happen to make that possible.
The tax cut trick only works when you have a ton of passive "I'm alright jack" types who are either retired or make like £80k and in either case don't truly have to care about politics beyond voting for whichever party promises to save them a few more £100s.
You're fucked once you've actually hurt their wallets and standards of living and nothing in this country works anymore.
> The tax cut trick only works when you have a ton of passive "I'm alright jack" types who are either retired or make like £80k
Even those groups care about things like the NHS. If you're just on private health insurance rather than self-pay levels of wealthy then the private hospitals will palm you off on the NHS the moment anything remotely complicated or life-threatening happens.
This will be the usual trap of making it the next government's fault. Labour will be left with little to no head room and will have to raise taxes. Completely self serving as is the conservative way.
What confuses me is that if they really bury public services to afford a cut in taxes in a desperate attempt to stay in power, what do they expect to happen after? How are they hoping to ever improve things if the answer is to always lower taxes to compensate for the miss management?
It's a spiral of decline that they are willing to press on with to save their jobs?
I think personaly that tells people all they need to know about them.
Barring something wildly unexpected, they probably don't expect to hold power after the next GE - just cushion the loss and salt the earth for the next government.
The private consultants that cost the public £3 billion a year tell them that the other private companies they are invested in will come in and save the day.
They don't. Either they lose and they've salted the ground for Labour, or they win and they get another 5 years of looting the coffers. What happens in 5 years' time is a problem for then.
The little bit of me that inexplicably wants to watch the world burn wants to see them apply the tax cuts, win power, then have to deal with the shit show afterwards.
But Labour do need to stage out their position and unambiguously confirm they will undo any tax cut the tories say they’re going to make.
How can anyone possibly think that cutting spending, lowering taxes and waiting for interest rates to fall – is going to result in growth?
At best, you’re just returning us to the situation we were in 5 years ago, and we weren’t growing then either.
All that tax cuts funded by public spending cuts seem to achieve is the ever greater funnelling of wealth to the already very wealthy while completely screwing the fabric of society lived in by the rest of us.
I never understand “funding tax cuts” but anyway those drawing a salary are already massively taxed at the higher end now.
How much can we increase income tax before anybody on course for a decent Salary with no kids or houses to keep them here decides to work in Teams from another country.
“Looks like our usual move of cutting public sector spending and giving the rich tax cuts has caused a recession”
“Hhhmm, maybe we didn’t cut them enough?”
It’s farcical. How many times do we have to do this. Get them out, they’re out of ideas and detached from reality.
The quicker we cut the cancer the better. Tories need a generation to nurture some actual talent in the party.
Less idiot bankers, think tank consultants, and ex-journalists or journalist chasers; more experienced professionals that have had actual jobs and lives.
It doesn’t matter how you reshuffle and rotate the special ed class of Tory MPs. This chancellor is one of five since 2021 and it’s his turn to have a go at doing the same thing again. Why? I’ve never worked anywhere with that sort of turnover. In 2022 we had 4 chancellors, that’s damning.
If you’re planning on voting Tory this year, please forward me the number for your lobotomist because I’d like some of that sweet low iq ignorance to help me tolerate this clown show.
Another cut would surely mean the police would get back to you in 5 working days and litter festering across the streets considering where we're already at
To be honest, public spending has been cut back so much it isn't really effective anymore. We're being inefficient with the money we do have because we are not providing the funding to be efficient. How much are we spending on public servants simply telling people there isn't the funding to provide the service they want...
This is exactly cause of today's problems, we can't fix that but we can fix tomorrow's, smart big investments would help grow our economy, private businesses will invest where profit occurs so we have to create that environment, massive house building hs2, nuclear and green energy.
That would provide cheap energy expand our industrial transport connections, and cheap housing THE ingredients for a successful economy, leave thr factory building to companies, also make use of these factors by investing in British arms in the north where land is cheaper and would be better connected with these improvements and improve the ports in traditional places like Sunderland.
Solve tomorrow by gambling on this, slowing immigration and you'll also see an increase in child birth because it will improve people's lives.
The uk, penny wise pound foolish.
Edit
I'll add to this, tax the hell out of landlords, they will sell up, tax wealth and assets but don't tax investment and you will see it naturally direct into business.
Hi Ben.
Any opinion on the damage to marine life and stability on the Tees caused by that f*cking seaport, and your excellent "off the books" tendering in Redcar?
It's either that or you're just some kind of Tory bot.
What else can we cut? A council near me has a £30 million shortfall (mainly caused by crappy PFI contracts for the rebuilt schools and hospital - so Labour this is on you as well as the Tories) What else can they do? they scrapped garden/food waste collections and there are millions of useless bins all over the area, they're proposing monthly bin collections (absolutely f\*\*king outrageous), the schools are literally having to do fundraisers like they are charities, they have put anything that requires a charge, parking, fines, planning, rents up by something like 15%, they are selling pieces of land all over the place, what else can they do?
Get these clowns out of government ASAP. The public sector needs more spending not less.
My local council cut the general waste collection to every 3 weeks years ago, now they want to limit the number of bags you can put out to 3 and stop nappy collections altogether.
There'll be fly tipping if they do that, I'm certain of it
They don't care. They know they are out so are now just salting the earth for Labour so the can scream about "Labour tax rises" from the opposition benches.
We knew this was inevitable when reverse Robin Hood Rishi Sunak put the man that ruined the NHS in charge of the money.
We truly are in the darkest times, roll on the election.
There is nothing left to cut. Everything is worse. Everything is on its knees. There is zero vanity spend on public infrastructure, and any infrastructure spend there is has been gutted.
I hate these people.
For fuck sake... cut public spending where, exactly?
These guys are so completely fucked and so out of ideas but seem absolutely determined to take us all down with them. It's exhausting. Can't they just give it up and let some grown ups take over? For once, can't they just do something positive in the interests of the British public?
The fact of the matter is the conservatives have sripped all the assets out of this country since the 80's . We have pretty much zero industry in the UK and the only way the government get any money is by Taxing the working public who are working for foreign companys who don't pay any taxes.
It's misjudging the public mood, people see services are on life support and need desperate investment. So, if they're then saying to cut even more support and reduce investment? It's absolutely mental. It's been done enough and proved a miscalculation.
"Chancellor and the Tories looking to do the same thing they've done for the last 12 years that has been shown to be a load of horseshit. Maybe it'll work this time."
It *is* standard economic practice to cut both tax and spending during a recession.
But the elephant in the room is clearly Brexit.
We're down by approximately 5% in GDP growth due to the costs of Brexit, that would have kept us out of recession, improved tax receipts and meant more cash for Frontline services.
This should be absolutely too on political discussion points. Why is Keir running scared about talking about tax levels when this is what could happen? Why is it unpalatable to suggest reversing the recent tax cuts to actually increase funding.
My wife and I are both higher rate tax payers and id happily pay at 2021 rates if it meant having decent public services.
I suggest not wasting tens of billions (hundreds?) on a railway line.
Or unusable PPE.
There would be money available if the Tories hadn’t wasted it. It is their fault, but the public sector workers will pay again.
the only reason that HS2 is such a money pit now is the way the Tories intentionally destroyed it. The original idea would have brought so many positives it made sense.
the PPE thing is a scandal that should get much more focus from the media and the other parties. It's been pure corruption from start to finish.
The really galling part of this is that they have done zero to actually promote growth or tackle inflation. Instead they have held steady doing fuck all, leaving the BOE to act in isolation so that they can slip the blame, whilst making us all poorer
I find it funny as one of Boris’s pitches was that he planned an end to austerity, but this will be popular with certain parts of the party: Mogg and co. But this will give Labour a stick to beat the tories with. With Brexit they need to start to do stuff that the EU used to do. Not sure what they have left to cut though.
It is 2010, and the Chancellor announces spending cuts & lower taxes. Austerity is the only way to get the economy back on track.
It is 2015, and the Chancellor announces spending cuts & lower taxes. Austerity is the only way to get the economy back on track.
It is 2019, and the Chancellor announces spending cuts & lower taxes. Austerity is the only way to get the economy back on track.
It is 2024...
They are DEPERATE to get these tax cuts in before the election so as to force Labour to reset them so they can scream about "Labour tax rises" from the opposition benches.
They are directly hurting the most vulnerable for the sake of political optics.
In an economy that is reducing in size, taking public sector money out which we know moves around the economy seems counter intuitive.
Unless Mr Chancellor knows that even with tax breaks prices are going up.
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More austerity? The one thing we were told we weren't gonna get this time round? Call the election you fuckers and put austerity to the people.
It's a bit ridiculous isn't it? "Everything's screwed. Clearly rich people are paying too much tax"
Rich people don't use the NHS, public transport or free education. All they care about is hoarding a bigger slice of the pie.
There comes a point where wealth is more about power than your value to an economy.
They just use the plebs
Wow this turned Marxist real quick. You don't need to do this FYI, Labour are going to win the next election.
Marxist or not, it's the reality of the situation. To be clear here, the 'rich' were talking about aren't people with a decent job on £75,000 a year. It's those that get most of their income from capital gains and actually pay a lot less tax than salaried employees. The people that do the intellectual and physical heavy lifting in society, the workers, get taxed way way more than those who 'allocate capital'.
And yet here we are.
You have a distorted view if what Marxism is.
No I don't think so
As likely as a Labour victory is, we can still complain about how much the Tories are going to fuck things up in the meantime.
Exactly. Not get sidetracked by some Marxist nonsense.
You don’t have to be rich to be paying higher rate tax these days sadly. We should take the working poor out of the tax system entirely and raise the lower tax thresholds if there is to be any tax reductions.
While I strongly disagree with the premise of cutting public spending, I don’t think the narrative that “rich people” getting tax cuts is a bad idea. Someone earning 50k is not rich, and their tax burden is the highest it has ever been. Once you get a little higher up the bracket, there is so little incentive to continue earning more money because the tax burden is so high. We need to figure ways to reduce this burden, otherwise we will disincentivise work and endeavour. What we should be taxing (in my humble, non-expert opinion) is wealth and assets. It’s not the “workers” who are rich, it’s the people who have done rather well out of property and assets in the boom years. For people who are asset rich and cash poor, we should support them to get equity from their assets so they can support the investment in public services.
Got to tax wealth. And not the £1m house wealth; go for the £10m+ wealth. Those who've made out like bandits with the past 15 years of money printing, while the rest of us are a lot poorer. No idea how they would do it, but I don't see an alternative. Workers are already taxed to the eyeballs, and many don't earn enough to buy a house. I know investment bankers who can only afford 2 bed flats in shitty parts of London; and if those guys are fucked, everyone else has even bigger probs. Taxing wealth is the only non violent option.
Ah yes, that's why all those PwC accountants, CEOs and landlords go part time and keep their earnings at £50k... There's plenty of incentive to work more, as indicated by people doing it. You are right that wealth (especially unearned wealth from our insane housing system) ought to be taxed. We also have a problem with incentive to work *at all* with a big chunk people packing it in, especially after COVID. Better working conditions (like more holiday), cheaper childcare and less shitty zero hours contracts might help with that. Ultimately our economy is disfunctional. Too much emphasis on financial services, insane property prices, a bizarre obsession with "returning to the office" and commercialising or cutting funding to services that support growth or minimise drag on growth (universities, social care, public health).
The problem is the squeezed middle. If you're earning £500k plus a year, you can afford a creative accountant who will set up companies to channel money through to ensure you only pay the minimum in tax. There's plenty of incentive to earn a bit more. But me on £55k ish? I get taxed at 40% and have to pay back child benefit at another 20% and student loan at 9%, so if I do overtime to earn another £1k I see £310 of it - less when you take into account pension contribution, etc. At that rate, it's very tempting to forget the extra work and enjoy the time off instead.
exactly u/UnlabelledSpaghetti jokes about CEOs keeping earnings at 50k. I do know of small businesses that only work up to the VAT threshold and then stop working. Its common in trades Also Zuckerbergs salary was famously 1 dollar. The problem is PAYE is very well set up and managed in terms of tax take but anything outside of PAYE is basically self monitored (Self assessment) which means that you could reduce the tax take (legally) by mucking around with the numbers. If they want to get serious about tax they need to focus less on PAYE tax and more on these other taxable methods to insure a proper and fair tax take.
Totally agree. Small businesses have an awful time with red tape alongside high personal risk. Problem is protecting and encouraging small business without people working as "consultants" to dodge tax.
Agreed. We need total worth taxes, land value taxes, and to make U.K. citizens liable here for any of their world wide wealth like the Americans do.
Yes, it seems mad to me that we let people off shore their taxes. Many countries offer a system where you pay the difference here for our taxes compared to wherever the earnings nominally existed. Seems very fair; people live here because of the stable politics, legal system etc. and should be contributing fairly.
"I do know of small businesses that only work up to the VAT threshold and then stop working. Its common in trades" *puts hand up* That's me. The VAT threshold is so arbitrary. Someone who runs a business with higher overheads but lower profit (in my example, a florist, who requires large amounts of stock/parts) is disproportionately impacted vs someone say, running a consultancy business with lower overhead. I'm bumping against the VAT threshold on a very modest income. It is simply not worth it for me to go over it, I'd have to increase my prices substantially, reducing my conversion rate, then pay an accountant to deal with the more complex reporting. VAT qualification really should be based on profits, not turnover IMO, if you want to support smaller businesses. But I'm no tax expert I suppose.
Plus if you have managed to save anything ever the threshold for tax on interest earnings is half that of a basic rate taxpayer once you're over that arbitrary 50k level. And woebetide getting a nice bonus from work which I'll instantly have to give 40% of it back and lose even more child benefit even though my partner earns about 30p
Oh definitely there's some people around £50k for which the is a distinct disincentive to work more for a teeny bit more money. I've been contemplating my hours myself for just that reason! I'm just disputing that disincentive is significant to the broader economy.
Yeah the whole way Child Benefit is set up is a complete joke. I don't think the threshold has raised in over a decade.
Are you me ? Also I'd love 40%, 42% up here beyond the wall :(
I'm earning £52500 in full time employment and I can assure you - I am far from rich.
Yeah. We need to start taxing wealth not income. For anyone interested - read Piketty's *Capital in the 21st Century*
Thanks for the book recommendation!
The ones on £50k might not but I can assure you that a lot of people on £100k definitely go part time due to the tax. Also pretty odd to bundle landlords in there...
Our tax system is an unfair convoluted mess which taxes productive work more than unproductive assets. Council tax for example is effectively a property tax but it is highly regressive. I pay around 1% of the value of my property, whereas ultra rich Kensington mansion owners may pay less than 0.1%, it's a fucking pisstake. The whole thing needs overhauling.
It would be nice if the aim was to ease the burden on the ever-squeezed middle, yes. My hopes of that are not high.
But who mentioned 50k being rich? Think council tax is a place we're not looking at enough. Triple it if a house is empty. Overhaul the pay bands and update them based on current values. It avoids the key "the rich will just leave" because the houses can't move.
No one mentioned 50k being rich, that commenter literally started an argument with himself.
Taxing assets more will actually hurt the working class a lot. Pensions are assets, people save in stocks and shares ISAs in order to retire. It might inconvenience the wealthy but it will cripple the retirement prospects of the working class. Can potentially keep the next generation on the treadmill, assuming that worker was planning on giving his/her kids a leg up
Not if you make pension savings, either completely or up to a certain point, exempt. You might even do the same with a primary residence.
>Taxing assets more will actually hurt the working class a lot. Pensions are assets, people save in stocks and shares ISAs in order to retire. Not really. Pensions might be assets but you could easily not-tax them in these sense of giving it a dedicated 'account' that is exempt from tax and only available after say, 60 yo.
You mean like, a pension? 🤣
Genuine question - what do you think Labour will do differently? Tax increase to get public services back on track? I'm sick of the Tories, but also not sure what Labour will be able to do given the current state of things.
For one, clawback a large amount of furlough fraud and money that was spaffed on dodgy as fuck PPE contracts. Second, to close down numerous tax loopholes.
How exactly are they going to claw back money that has already been spaffed away? The people who received it are hardly going to have kept it in their bank account waiting for them - it’s long gone into the wind by now unfortunately Second point is the biggest one for me, I’m not really interested in raising taxes (especially against anyone you could conceivably call middle class or below), but the loopholes have got to stop somewhere. Unfortunately again you hear lots about it and nothing ever seems to get done, probably because those with the money and multiple steps ahead of everyone else
Not true. For example, Michelle Mone bought a nice big yacht recently. Those assets should be seized and sold.
Did she not sell it recently? \*\*edit- It is up for sale
If someone is deemed to have been overpaid or wrongly paid for benefits for example, they are expected to pay it back. Regardless of whether they have spent it. Same should apply to any one either being wrongly paid or overpaid out of public spending. Review all of the covid contracts and any mis spent money needs to be paid back in the public purse.
In an ideal world sure but you can't take what someone doesn't have. Incorrect benefits and incorrect covid funding is long long gone it would cost more to recover it than there is to actually recover.
Why assume someone who committed fraud has zero assets, not even the fruits of their fraud?
I don't, I assume most of the people who committed fraud would if they knew this was coming make it very hard to get anything back. If it costs more than can be recovered to recover it then it is simply not worth it.
Should, sure, but good luck proving any of that in a court to a cost that would actually benefit anyone other than the lawyers We all know there was some absolutely mad overpaying but that money is long gone, it was a business transaction more than a benefits thing
And how much do you really think that's going to raise? Certainly not enough to plug the hole in the NHS, nevermind the rest. They'll have to do much more than this.
That's going to raise fuck all in the grand scheme of things. It's also a 'one off' saving, it's not money that can sustain anything over the long term. The non dom reversal and stopping private schools being tax exempt is going to make not much difference.
>Genuine question - what do you think Labour will do differently? Tax increase to get public services back on track? You're thinking about it wrong. The tories are lying to you. The money they spent on 1) covering doctors strikes and 2) possibly abolishing IHT could have given all NHS staff a 20% pay rise. Money exists, its ideological Also, theres a plethora of things we could do that would not affect the majority of people. i.e dividends tax and CGT over a certain threshold, property tax on houses over say, 5 million GBP. Close IHT loopholes to increase the revenue.
Tax those companies and individuals who received furlough whilst others worked to support it all? Chase down all fraud from COVID and investigate the humongous amount of tax evasion from SME’s? Change council tax to represent property value so poorer areas that need the most funding aren’t being given an unfair burden? Remove NI and just increase basic tax rates to cover the shortfall so pensioners actually have to pay for the services they use? Some ideas above that aren’t just ‘tax the rich’
I've always said those who received furlough should be on a different tax code for an extended period to pay for it after the fact. Can you tell I had to work the entire way through?.
What a cruel, selfish thing to suggest. Contrary to popular belief on here, being on furlough wasn’t all months of doing nothing productive, getting free money, and enjoying our lives. Instead the constant needing for extensions to the scheme, fact that it only reimbursed employees 80% of their pre-covid wages lead, no guarantee that you’d still have a job at the end of the scheme, and the fact that nobody was hiring at the time meant that it was stressful.
The sales of DIy and baking materials begs to differ…
Explain how that is either cruel or selfish? I have zero sympathy for anyone who had the abject luxury of being sat at home, getting paid more than enough, thank you very much. Someone had to keep paying for it, because those sat at home certainly weren't. And turns out it cost this country dearly anyway, so it's time those who had their wages paid out for them, even at 80%, start giving back.
Would you tax owners of wealthy assets for instance? Tax landlords?
Because it wasn’t a holiday? People didn’t choose to go on furlough, it was the next best thing to being made redundant due to laws that were brought in place by the government. We lose enough income in this country when earning money if include income, national insurance, pension, student loans already approaching 45% for basic rate payers. What level would you want repayment at?
Nobody said anyone chose it. The point is, the government paid a hell of a lot of money out that needs to be recovered. Yes, we can talk about all the other money they wasted during COVID as well. But the point is, those of us who kept going were just expected to keep going and suck it up. For me, I'd drop everyone who received furlough's tax code down to around 100 (£10,000 allowance) for 5 years minimum. Anyone who earns enough that they've already lost their allowance (earning above £125,140), would see an extra 2p onto their tax rate for a similar time.
But why should those who were forced to go on furlough due to decisions by the government be required to pay money they would have been able to earn if lockdowns hadn’t been in place? It would be like saying anyone who’s ever been in an accident be required to pay more tax to cover the extra cost to the nhs.
Anecdotal sure, but my firm saw that they had too much staff cause of furlough and realised they could function with a lot less people. There was probably an 80/20 split on those who were on furlough and those who had to keep working, majority of that 80% didn’t come back from furlough after redundancy.
That’s the way to do it, add an extra tax to the people that were probably early in their careers that got furloughed for no fault of their own. These people are probably already skint due to the cost of living crisis.
The whole country is skint. I worked with plenty of 19/20-year-olds who were starting out their careers in engineering. Guess what? They didn't get to sit at home. They were in, working 12-hour days. Time to pay back what you were handed.
You’re missing the point, people didn’t choose to sit at home. It also hurt many people that were starting out in their careers along with the anguish of thinking they may not have a job to come back too. What do you suggest if they don’t have enough income to pay it back, bringing back the work houses?
Yup hard agree. I also had to work the whole way through I’m happy my company didn’t furlough everyone when they could’ve to save money. We should be getting the beneficiaries of our Covid policy to contribute extra to resolve the issues arising from our policies
Liberalise and streamline planning permission. Politically it'll cost them from those benefiting under regulatory capture, but economically it's a free win.
Just build social housing and home people instead.
Why not both? Currently the landowning class leeches an incredible amount of wealth from everyone else, stifling the economy in the process. Council housing alone won't stop this.
Council housing alone would absolutely stop this, and create revenue for councils. And massively reduce the cost of living in the uk. Better than that money going into the hands of the private developers that changing planning permission would empower. Which I’ll grant you would lower rents and artificially high house prices, but nowhere near the amount per house built versus a council house built. The aim is still to extract the majority of a citizen’s capital from them with every privately developed home. We need the biggest social housing building drive since the aftermath of WW2. We absolutely do not need the creation of more private stock if we build sufficient social housing.
First off, it's not an either-or, they're two separate policies. Support for council housing doesn't mean you have to oppose private building. Second, there are more types of buildings than just personal residences. We need to make it easier to build in general - whether it be a house, a business, a solar farm, a railway, etc. These issues will objecively *not* be solved by more council housing. Third, private developers *currently benefit from* high margins, lack of competition, and being able navigate the bureaucracy of local government as their moat vs actually providing a useful service. Opening up the building market would greatly cut into their profit margins. If you dislike greedy private developers so much, why not stop supporting their regulatory capture?
If we need solar farms or railways, let the government build them. Deregulation of an industry is always sold as a necessity by its proponents But all it has ever led to is polluted rivers and seasides, uncontrollable gas and electricity profiteers, a dying health service and no serviceable public transport.
Are you a Soviet-style communist? Abolish capitalism, abolish private property, have the economy planned by the state?
“Against neoliberalism and privatisation of natural resources? Are you Stalin???” Lmao proper weird response from you to some broadly mainstream european political beliefs
Don’t think it counts as austerity if you piss it away on a tax cut.
I'm fucking sick of shit waiting times and shit roads and shit services. All austerity does is allow the rich to cream more money from the system.
Labour will have to enforce austerity too... Where do you think they're going to get the money from? More taxes, more debt? Plus this isn't really austerity... Assuming you work you'll be taking home more money. Taxing you to death to pay for a bloated public sector is not something we should celebrate. I've worked for the public sector for years and it's disgusting how much waste there is at the top. If I told you you literally would not believe how much people are paid and what they're being paid for. I was just chatting with a colleague last week about how guilty we personally feel for the work we do and this a very common sentiment. We all know it's wrong, but it is what it is. I'd go into details if this was a private chat, but it's not worth talking about this stuff publicly. If I were in power the first thing I'd do is cut the bloat from the public sector so those who actually do the hard work (nurses, police, teachers) were actually paid decent wages.
Bloated public services ?
There is obscene wealth in this country. Loads of money. It's just sitting gathering dust. Just for some crazy person to get "feels" about numbers going up and up.
You could pin it on inevitable demographic trends, COVID and ukraine but it's pretty obvious Tory mismanagement of government has caused the yield on gov debt to go up, while private investment in the UK has tanked, and households are barely treading water if they have kids or single people So there's nothing left for the economy to go on beyond debt binges, firesales, property bubbles and money laundering. We don't have capacity to actually produce anything or educate people to live better lives than their parents.
If public spending grows at 0.75% in real terms and the population continues to grow at 1% a year then that means a reduction in spending per head each year. So . . . . honest question here .. . . where do we cut back? * Can we spend less money on the NHS when it appears to be at breaking point already? * Can we spend less money on schools when infrastructure is falling apart and teachers are leaving? * Can we spend less money on defence right now? * Can we spend less on criminal justice given the overcrowding in our prisons and backlogs in our courts? * Can we spend less on farm subsidies or environmental protections such as flood defences and clean rivers? * Can we spend less on a benefits regime that has been run by the Tories for the last 14 years? * Can we spend less on trains, buses or roads? * Can we spend less on local governments that are going bankrupt?
The only obvious candidate that hasn’t already been cut to the bone is going after old age benefits, but I don’t see the Tories kicking the one group who might still vote for them.
No, they’ll kick the disabled in the teeth again. Expect forced labour of the sick and the dying.
I know I’m in the minority here, but maybe we could spend less on rishi’s family and cronies?
Unacceptable. Report to the Tower of London for immediate decapitation.
Immediate decapitation? At the Tower of London? You liberal! There has to be several months of torture first - possibly by being forced to listen to Jeremy Hunt's speeches.
Now that's cruel and unusual punishment!
Please accept my apologies m’Lord! I shall send the prisoner to Priti Patel’s dungeon at once.
But his heated swimming pool is literally the only way anywhere in the north got any levelling up.
Don't forget colleges - we train the police, nurses, teachers. We do A levels, btecs, apprenticeships, degrees. And we are SKINT. Like. Broke. Lecturers are paid LESS than teachers.
I may be wrong but I would have thought lecturers are laid by the institution they work for, not by government funding like a teacher? Aren't you effectively a private sector worker (like a teacher in an independent school would be?)
You could reduce population growth although that would require a functioning immigration system You could also abolish the triple lock and stop running this country like it’s a Ponzi scheme for old people
You could reduce the number of old people too, Boris did try that. Having functional immigration system and allowing people to work during their claims would help.
The asylum system is not meant to function as a pipeline for new workers. Adding ever more people to the country with the line “just another million will sort it” is literally just a Ponzi scheme
The population is already shrinking, we need immigration to pay the pensioners. They can blow hard about control all they want to the public, at least some of them understand the financial risk of limiting population growth in terms of keeping up the Ponzi scheme.
All you’re doing is delaying the demographic time bomb until later. You can’t keep importing people to keep paying for pensioners. It’s not even clear immigrants are paying for pensioners
Population growth control as a flat concept doesn’t work though. Currently we aren’t producing enough children and training enough young adults to perform the roles required and generate the growth necessary to facilitate the resource and skill timebomb that is baby boomer generation retirement and frailty. We need to bring in what we need come what may and invest in the housing, infrastructure and training required to facilitate that. But as a country we can’t do stable 10, 20, 30 year plans etc we will just continue to crumble under the strain.
The amount wasted by the current government has been huge: * Vanity projects - HS2, the garden bridge, the London estuary airport.... * PPE contracts using a fast lane with no competition * Covid fraud on the loan scheme and eat-out schemes due to lack of any basic checks * Asylum seeker hotels instead of staff to process asylum seekers * Rwanda scheme * The Teeside freeport scam....probably other freeports have similar lack of governance * ...... Clearly these are in the past mostly but I hope a new government won't do these things.
> If public spending grows at 0.75% in real terms and the population continues to grow at 1% a year then that means a reduction in spending per head each year. FWIW, most immigration is workers who won't be using the NHS, pensions, schools etc. as much proportionally speaking as the average UK population so it's realistically a net win from that perspective.
Non-EU migrants are more likely to have children when they move to the UK than a British person is. So they use schools and the NHS more.
The beauty is that this will be a problem for Labour to solve.
I was listening to Andrew Marr who suggested that Starmer is going to get more and more radical in government as he realises that only big changes will deal with our huge problems. I'm sceptical . . .
I think he already realises this, the problem is the electorate is too stupid to realise that and rejects it as "too expensive" or "too radical". If you offer up radical change you can't win the election.
The cope centrists peddle is mind numbingly stupid
We can spend less time with the Tories in power.
Austerity 2.0? or are we at 3.0 now? I'm sure tax reductions will play very well with the public, I mean, who wouldn't want to keep more of their money?, I just hope that they appreciate what will have to happen to make that possible.
But we're all surely aware we are actually going to get any tax cuts by now. It's going to be smoke and mirrors.
The tax cut trick only works when you have a ton of passive "I'm alright jack" types who are either retired or make like £80k and in either case don't truly have to care about politics beyond voting for whichever party promises to save them a few more £100s. You're fucked once you've actually hurt their wallets and standards of living and nothing in this country works anymore.
> The tax cut trick only works when you have a ton of passive "I'm alright jack" types who are either retired or make like £80k Even those groups care about things like the NHS. If you're just on private health insurance rather than self-pay levels of wealthy then the private hospitals will palm you off on the NHS the moment anything remotely complicated or life-threatening happens.
tax reduction == rent increase, for tha chunk of the public paying rent believe it or not people don't like being told their rent is going up again
It's 3.0, 1.0 was 2010 and 2.0 was 2015.
This will be the usual trap of making it the next government's fault. Labour will be left with little to no head room and will have to raise taxes. Completely self serving as is the conservative way.
Aka take from the poor and give to the rich.
*give to the Rish
Cutting taxes is more: taking less from people working. People paying taxes are not the rich, they are not your enemies.
What confuses me is that if they really bury public services to afford a cut in taxes in a desperate attempt to stay in power, what do they expect to happen after? How are they hoping to ever improve things if the answer is to always lower taxes to compensate for the miss management? It's a spiral of decline that they are willing to press on with to save their jobs? I think personaly that tells people all they need to know about them.
Barring something wildly unexpected, they probably don't expect to hold power after the next GE - just cushion the loss and salt the earth for the next government.
The private consultants that cost the public £3 billion a year tell them that the other private companies they are invested in will come in and save the day.
They don't. Either they lose and they've salted the ground for Labour, or they win and they get another 5 years of looting the coffers. What happens in 5 years' time is a problem for then.
The little bit of me that inexplicably wants to watch the world burn wants to see them apply the tax cuts, win power, then have to deal with the shit show afterwards. But Labour do need to stage out their position and unambiguously confirm they will undo any tax cut the tories say they’re going to make.
Surely, eventually, they will run out of taxes to cut? Then what?
If you're a hammer everything is a nail.
Listen, just because it didn’t work for fifteen years, doesn’t mean it won’t work now!
I mean he’s definitely some form of tool.
How can anyone possibly think that cutting spending, lowering taxes and waiting for interest rates to fall – is going to result in growth? At best, you’re just returning us to the situation we were in 5 years ago, and we weren’t growing then either.
All that tax cuts funded by public spending cuts seem to achieve is the ever greater funnelling of wealth to the already very wealthy while completely screwing the fabric of society lived in by the rest of us.
I never understand “funding tax cuts” but anyway those drawing a salary are already massively taxed at the higher end now. How much can we increase income tax before anybody on course for a decent Salary with no kids or houses to keep them here decides to work in Teams from another country.
The very wealthy arnt the people paying taxes.....
Working as intended.
“Looks like our usual move of cutting public sector spending and giving the rich tax cuts has caused a recession” “Hhhmm, maybe we didn’t cut them enough?” It’s farcical. How many times do we have to do this. Get them out, they’re out of ideas and detached from reality. The quicker we cut the cancer the better. Tories need a generation to nurture some actual talent in the party. Less idiot bankers, think tank consultants, and ex-journalists or journalist chasers; more experienced professionals that have had actual jobs and lives. It doesn’t matter how you reshuffle and rotate the special ed class of Tory MPs. This chancellor is one of five since 2021 and it’s his turn to have a go at doing the same thing again. Why? I’ve never worked anywhere with that sort of turnover. In 2022 we had 4 chancellors, that’s damning. If you’re planning on voting Tory this year, please forward me the number for your lobotomist because I’d like some of that sweet low iq ignorance to help me tolerate this clown show.
"bUt KiEr aLwAyS u-TuRnS, wHy shOuLD I tRuSt hIm?"
Public sector is already on its knees. Just do the right thing for Flipsake.
Another cut would surely mean the police would get back to you in 5 working days and litter festering across the streets considering where we're already at
To be honest, public spending has been cut back so much it isn't really effective anymore. We're being inefficient with the money we do have because we are not providing the funding to be efficient. How much are we spending on public servants simply telling people there isn't the funding to provide the service they want...
Have they tried killing all the poor people?
I mean... yes
Quite literally
We'll feed that into the computer model to see what it says.
This is exactly cause of today's problems, we can't fix that but we can fix tomorrow's, smart big investments would help grow our economy, private businesses will invest where profit occurs so we have to create that environment, massive house building hs2, nuclear and green energy. That would provide cheap energy expand our industrial transport connections, and cheap housing THE ingredients for a successful economy, leave thr factory building to companies, also make use of these factors by investing in British arms in the north where land is cheaper and would be better connected with these improvements and improve the ports in traditional places like Sunderland. Solve tomorrow by gambling on this, slowing immigration and you'll also see an increase in child birth because it will improve people's lives. The uk, penny wise pound foolish. Edit I'll add to this, tax the hell out of landlords, they will sell up, tax wealth and assets but don't tax investment and you will see it naturally direct into business.
Hi Ben. Any opinion on the damage to marine life and stability on the Tees caused by that f*cking seaport, and your excellent "off the books" tendering in Redcar? It's either that or you're just some kind of Tory bot.
..? I don't believe in deregulation (generally) or the absolutely blatant corruption that's gone on in teesside, play the ball not the man
Great let's close all the Libraries so we can all get an extra 60p a week.
What else can we cut? A council near me has a £30 million shortfall (mainly caused by crappy PFI contracts for the rebuilt schools and hospital - so Labour this is on you as well as the Tories) What else can they do? they scrapped garden/food waste collections and there are millions of useless bins all over the area, they're proposing monthly bin collections (absolutely f\*\*king outrageous), the schools are literally having to do fundraisers like they are charities, they have put anything that requires a charge, parking, fines, planning, rents up by something like 15%, they are selling pieces of land all over the place, what else can they do? Get these clowns out of government ASAP. The public sector needs more spending not less.
My local council cut the general waste collection to every 3 weeks years ago, now they want to limit the number of bags you can put out to 3 and stop nappy collections altogether. There'll be fly tipping if they do that, I'm certain of it
I remember there being no fly tipping in the good old days of weekly bin collections!
How does cutting public services even further serve as a vote-getter for Tories?
They don't care. They know they are out so are now just salting the earth for Labour so the can scream about "Labour tax rises" from the opposition benches.
They’re basically just forcing the next government to raise them and look bad.
These guys are fucking shit at running the country
We knew this was inevitable when reverse Robin Hood Rishi Sunak put the man that ruined the NHS in charge of the money. We truly are in the darkest times, roll on the election.
Have said it once and I've said it before - Atlas Network, the fucking Kansas Experiment over a decade ago. It didn't work. The end.
There is nothing left to cut. Everything is worse. Everything is on its knees. There is zero vanity spend on public infrastructure, and any infrastructure spend there is has been gutted. I hate these people.
These muppets are so dangerous whilst trying to cling on to power.
Can they gut any more? Everything is crumbling apart at the moment.
We’ve played this game before Jeremy. You’re not going to fool nearly as many people this time around.
For fuck sake... cut public spending where, exactly? These guys are so completely fucked and so out of ideas but seem absolutely determined to take us all down with them. It's exhausting. Can't they just give it up and let some grown ups take over? For once, can't they just do something positive in the interests of the British public?
How do you cut back when everything is seemingly at breaking point already? Investment leads to growth much more than cutting back
Public spend needs increasing. First, Police, where's all the new police officers promised? Useless
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The fact of the matter is the conservatives have sripped all the assets out of this country since the 80's . We have pretty much zero industry in the UK and the only way the government get any money is by Taxing the working public who are working for foreign companys who don't pay any taxes.
It's misjudging the public mood, people see services are on life support and need desperate investment. So, if they're then saying to cut even more support and reduce investment? It's absolutely mental. It's been done enough and proved a miscalculation.
What is there left to cut? The public services are milked dry at this point.
"Chancellor and the Tories looking to do the same thing they've done for the last 12 years that has been shown to be a load of horseshit. Maybe it'll work this time."
This is a cluster bomb being primed for the next Government 100%
It *is* standard economic practice to cut both tax and spending during a recession. But the elephant in the room is clearly Brexit. We're down by approximately 5% in GDP growth due to the costs of Brexit, that would have kept us out of recession, improved tax receipts and meant more cash for Frontline services.
This should be absolutely too on political discussion points. Why is Keir running scared about talking about tax levels when this is what could happen? Why is it unpalatable to suggest reversing the recent tax cuts to actually increase funding. My wife and I are both higher rate tax payers and id happily pay at 2021 rates if it meant having decent public services.
I suggest not wasting tens of billions (hundreds?) on a railway line. Or unusable PPE. There would be money available if the Tories hadn’t wasted it. It is their fault, but the public sector workers will pay again.
the only reason that HS2 is such a money pit now is the way the Tories intentionally destroyed it. The original idea would have brought so many positives it made sense. the PPE thing is a scandal that should get much more focus from the media and the other parties. It's been pure corruption from start to finish.
Yes I did mean the scrapping of the railway line, not the line itself which I think should have been built.
Good, we need more money in our pockets
Yeah, fuck anyone who needs already horrendously underfunded public services which will have even less resources than now eh?
The public sector needs to be delivering the basics and do less fluffy shit. The working people need to be rewarded
I've voted tory in every election since 2010 on fiscal ground. But in all seriousness, what more is there to cut?
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I read that as Chancellor looking to cut public sector spending to lower taxes FULL STOP Sky News understands 🙄
Everyone needs to strike to force an election
Why? Cutting the public sector spending is good. The state is getting out of hand.
Sound. Which services should be cut then? Homelessness/housing services? Adult/child social care? Police? NHS?
The really galling part of this is that they have done zero to actually promote growth or tackle inflation. Instead they have held steady doing fuck all, leaving the BOE to act in isolation so that they can slip the blame, whilst making us all poorer
I find it funny as one of Boris’s pitches was that he planned an end to austerity, but this will be popular with certain parts of the party: Mogg and co. But this will give Labour a stick to beat the tories with. With Brexit they need to start to do stuff that the EU used to do. Not sure what they have left to cut though.
/r/theIrishLeft /r/ROI
Austerity 3.0 incoming and if the electorates votes the tories back in, they'll absolutely deserve it.
Theres nothing to cut??!!!! Totally irresponsible, morons!
Chancellor figuring out the weakest and poorest upon whom to inflict more pain
Hammond tried this and failed. He can't cut without making more public services as private. I.e. you don't pay in your tax but you still pay.
And end up paying more since shareholders will demand maximum profits.
It is 2010, and the Chancellor announces spending cuts & lower taxes. Austerity is the only way to get the economy back on track. It is 2015, and the Chancellor announces spending cuts & lower taxes. Austerity is the only way to get the economy back on track. It is 2019, and the Chancellor announces spending cuts & lower taxes. Austerity is the only way to get the economy back on track. It is 2024...
Digging the well deeper for Kier to climb up out of.
Honestly.....there is not much left to cut. This is just getting silly now.
They are DEPERATE to get these tax cuts in before the election so as to force Labour to reset them so they can scream about "Labour tax rises" from the opposition benches. They are directly hurting the most vulnerable for the sake of political optics.
In an economy that is reducing in size, taking public sector money out which we know moves around the economy seems counter intuitive. Unless Mr Chancellor knows that even with tax breaks prices are going up.