Is your household contributing net tax ?

Surely fiscal drag will sort a lot of this out eventually? By the government reducing NI and keeping the tax rate boundaries the same, the government appears to have done something fairly clever (for once).

Those of working age, in employment, pay a bit less in NI, but with each pay rise, over time, and en masse, means that overall the country should receive more in income tax.

Keep this up for say, five years, and I'd expect the numbers to start looking a bit more healthy on the balance sheet as people fall into the higher rate tax bracket.

Or is this an oversimplified view?

What would you propose? Less food for children of sluts?

So Hayley’s decision is immoral - when should the state pay for her to breed? Why should other people pay higher taxes and have less OF THEIR OWN money to spend as they see fit so she gets supported? But because we chose not to penalise the children, Hayley gets a subsidised life.

You keep banging the same old drum but you are not listening and not addressing the points being made. If you want to bring people round to your way of thinking you are going to have to respond to what they are saying.

No.

https://ash.org.uk/media-centre/news/press-releases/new-figures-show-smoking-costs-billions-more-than-tobacco-taxes-as-consultation-on-creating-a-smokefree-generation-closes#:~:text=Chief%20Executive%20of%20ASH%20Deborah%20Arnott%20said%3A&text=The%20cost%20of%20smoking%20to,and%20create%20a%20healthier%20workforce.

It's a rigged market though, not pure capitalism. Bankers are only paid so much because they run the system that way. Same with CEOs - they love to talk up a load of shit about how demanding the job is etc but 90% of people could and would do it and probably at least as well, they just didn't go to the right schools and oxbridge so they won't get a chance.

Never mind the kids, what about the old bastards like me who have the temerity to have lived past 60? Cunts, we are, thieving cunts -

They all say they’ve worked all of their lives & paid in. But they weren’t expected to live that long, & have therefore took a lot more out than they ever paid in.

It's not fantasy economics. Its a lack of understanding of the law on your part. You are legally required to care for your minor children unless you seek to terminate that duty via court and the associated costs that entails.

Your DP has no such duty to you.

If you became so disabled that you had high needs and required a care package or residential care if your partner chose to provide this support instead he would indeed be saving the tax payer a fortune.

It's absolutely disingenuous to claim otherwise

That would come under the banner of not thought through by certain posters. Along with rape victims, abused children/parents, estranged families, people in casual relationships where contraception failed....

Frankly bizarre that anyone could suggest it.

I’m disabled and if eventually my condition gets so bad that DP ends up my carer, I wouldn’t see it as him saving the state thousands of pounds. In the same way I’m not saving the state thousands by raising my children and not putting them into care. I realise that sounds bad but I don’t think this type of fantasy economics helps.

What we have with the tories then!

Well carers save us millions so their contribution would appear to far exceed the average person's.

I'm not sure how else to say this. You can say should all you want but it's completely unworkable and utterly unenforceable.

We can't even get hundreds of thousands of fathers to contribute for their children where they actually do have a legal duty to let alone where no such duty exists when they are adults. You just aren't thinking this through at all.

Fraud involving disabilities benefits is tiny in comparison to tax evasion and its so tiresome to have to have to keep stating this. It's a distraction tactic, nothing more.

Yes it's impossible to have a sensible conversation when forcing individuals to care for others potentially against their will is proposed.

Unbelievable.

And the revenue provided by tobacco companies doesn't balance that out?

I take huge issue with that. While family taking responsibility is a grand moral ideal, how do households manage when one wage dissappear when caring becomes a full time job and is replaced by a "token payment" of 81.90 and the threat of criminalization if you manage by some miracle to earn a penny over 151.01 in some part time position, as has happened to countless recently reported in the press?

The COL is the issue ultimately with a liberal dose of capitalism without compassion or logic.

Can i ask how you feel about able bodied children who go on to be disabled. Say Im 40. My parent is 68. If i get menugitis this week and my insurance only pays out a bit due to some get out clause, am i back being there responsibility financially.

Parents of disabled children who grow up become disabled adults should care for them or contribute to their care costs if they have to go in a home. I accept that Partners and Spouses are different because their relationship is different to that of a parent and child. If a person becomes disabled during a relationship and has assets then their share of the joint assets should go towards their care much like the elderly if they have to go into a a home. The financial burden falls onto the state when their assets reduce to a an agreed level. Family first, state second.

There is no one magic bullet which will make money go further. There is a limit to how much the very wealthy will tolerate before they go elsewhere. Just ask the French. Is grouping those with more than you into one homogenous group and calling them selfish tax dodgers any better than people on benefits being grouped together as lazy scroungers?

You cannot expect to have a sensible conversation on the subject of benefits and only talk about tax avoidance and wealth. It's pointless unless you also discuss benefit cheats and waste in the system. Maybe it would be easier to provide more support for carers if absent parents actually had to contribute to their children, or the government didn't waste billions, Track and Trace springs to or if there were rent caps in certain places or we focused more effectively on prevention.

Many carers on these threads have shown as much contempt for others as they claim is shown to them.

I'm not a nurse, but I was a care assistant during COVID and at least from my standpoint, the gesture was appreciated at the time - because we had little else, we'd never been appreciated yet were expected to put ourselves at risk for the greater good for the lowest you're legally allowed to pay someone.
'
and it's certainly not a good reason to not pay decent wages and have decent working conditions, to then tell people they're not contributing, doesn't make the job any more respected now or 'worth' more to society and I think that's the point - with some people it's almost like "You got a clap for going to work, what more do you want?! 🙄"

Conveniently forgetting that hospital staff predominantly were at higher risk when treating COVID and put at more risk by the PPE scandals (to make a government crony a few quid) and care workers as well as those they looked after knowingly exposed by lack of PPE completely and by sending untested patients into an environment where being together and sociable is the whole bloody point and social distancing virtually impossible - and then blamed for the results.

I was also told if I wanted to keep my job a year or so later I had to have the vaccination and care workers who even questioned it were demonised. This was after years of being told we didn't need to be vaccinated against things like flu because the service users were vaccinated - we didn't need to be, if we weren't vulnerable ourselves in some way. By the same people who threw us and the vulnerable people in our care under the bus at the start of it - and people wondered why there was a lack of trust?! They then ensured a proportion of what workforce was left went home because of Brexit and the rest of us were back to being lazy scroungers not being arsed to get a decent job and contribute enough tax.

So yeah we got clapped, we got appreciated, for a few months, compared to years of being treated like shit.

Perhaps ask nurses if they’ll take another round of applause instead of a pay rise?

I regret applauding now. We were trying to say thank you and now it's thrown in our faces for ever after.

You are so right

Good post

Yes I’m a net contributor. And sometimes it sticks in the craw that I pay such a higher percentage of my income than the likes of Rishi Sunak (although the gross figure he pays is obviously a lot higher). But none of that changes the fact that I fully believe and am committed to the welfare state. A society can only be civilised if it takes care of its most vulnerable.

Exactly.

I worked in social care (same goes for childcare and other sectors essential for society to run) for many years - not a net contributor financially, because it's value is very low, it's considered unskilled and therefore low paid, yet essential to society.
But how many people are enabled to go and do their net contribution job by those working in those sectors? And not at home having to care for their own elderly, ill, infirm or disabled family members?

I also got tax credits for a time because my earnings were too low to live on, even by this governments standards - so you're going to pay for these services one way or the other really. Either by way of increased wages for the people in those jobs, or low wages and a bigger benefits bill. People are not going to be available to do those jobs if they're living under a bridge somewhere, they need to be able to actually survive to be able to contribute the work they do.

People want these services, they don't think that those providing them deserve a higher wage because it's unskilled (or more accurately imo, in case it devalues their income because someone 'unskilled' is earning more) but they also don't want people on low wages or supported by the tax payer.

The real kicker there though is the companies charging a fortune, paying a pittance for the actual work and pocketing the difference - but we idolise those people as examples of what 'hard work' can 'earn' you (as a society) ignoring it's other people's hard work that makes it all happen, and those other people are the ones being told they're not contributing.

Sorry posted too soon.

Many key workers aren’t net contributors - it isn’t their fault they need to be better paid.

The way around this, aside from closing corporate tax loopholes is to change tax codes.

Many key workers aren’t net contributors If you’re a key workers