To want a budget which puts young people and families first

Oh yes, I had forgotten all about capital gains tax which you pay if your spare house goes up in value.

There is no capital gains tax on the profits you make on selling your home if it's been your home for all (or most) of the time you've owned it, so that's an irrelevant point really. CGT is only payable when you're "home" is actually an investment, i.e. where you don't live there as your home, where it's rented out, etc.

I don’t think you have a full grasp of the tax situation. Have you not heard of capital gains tax payable when you sell a house or stamp duty when you buy another, or VAT when you make any improvements to your house. There are lots of devious ways governments can make a grab for money. Tax relief simply mitigates the effects of high taxation, it doesn’t negate it.

Not just Brexit. Leading economists mostly agreed that the 2008 crash would cause a decade of stagnation, zero real growth, etc., and that turned out to be spot on. Unfortunately, just as we should have been starting to grow again, we suffered Brexit and Covid, and now we probably have another decade of stagnation and zero real growth. The 2008 crash, Brexit and Covid have really done a number on us, with the younger generation bearing the brunt, especially the younger workers!

I have spent a little bit of it on books to help improve my toddlers speech. Plus wasn't child benefit a way of women having some of their money rather than the husband drink it away?

Exactly, why "should" it improve? There are no signs and no reasons for any sudden improvement in the nation's finances. All signs are showing a one way direction of travel. It's not just the UK, it's the entire developed Western World. There's a shift of World wealth away from the West to the East and Middle East. The best that Western economies and governments can do is some kind of managed decline to try to avoid huge economic crashes. All empires have suffered this - Russian, Egyptian, Roman, Greek, etc - all had their periods of being major "super-powers" and all ended up collapsing. Britain and the rest of Europe, North America, Australia, etc WILL go the same way. We've "peaked" and there's only one direction of travel now.

YANBU by any stretch of the imagination. The younger generations are now having to deal with an unprecedented recession caused by the major fuck-up that Brexit has been. They did not vote for this shit and now they are paying the consequences. So yes OP, I am with you. They need to be prioritised.

Or at least make it so that workers commuting using public transport can claim the costs against their wages as a tax deductible expense like in some other countries.

The fact that public services are generally poor with purchasing decisions doesn't make the idea wrong. Perhaps they need to engage better procurement practices, and actually aim for value for money and competitive pricing, rather than being conned by suppliers who rely on their lack of experience and poor knowledge of purchasing procedures. It's amazing how much better deals that private firms manage to get despite far lower purchasing power. Same with the NHS, not just schools. They're far too easily manipulated and conned into accepting expensive contracts and deliberately false price lists etc.

Todays young people don't KNOW that things wont ever get better

The ones that can read know. We never recovered from 08, we have an ageing population, services that have been starved. Why do you think our economy will suddenly improve?

Bus fares are still lower than 10 years ago though !

At least in the 2 regions I can compare

Although I do think that feee public transport should be the end goal

Thanks, I prefer to make my own decisions about what my kids need with child benefit. Why would the school have the money for txt books when I can source it half price on eBay then have money left over for other essentials. When school sends firms out to order books, calculators etc it's always far more expensive than sourcing it myself

Todays young people don't KNOW that things wont ever get better

It's a fear and a very real one I do agree

We need to work together ( not fight each other) to work out how that will happen

It won't happen if we fight each other, squabbling for scraps off the rich man's table

It also won't happen if we deny climate change , prioritise short term joy for decades of misery

I still think the big thing to fix is housing - people should be able to have a decent quality, safe and secure home , and two people working should be able to afford that easily without state benefits or handouts from family

And when they do have their own family they can get by for the early years ( expecting flash lifestyle in those early years is a bit much for my stomach but they should be able to afford to heat and eat )

I guess there is an underlying question as to what would be an acceptable minimum lifestyle- but that should be across all age ranges

I agree and it also shows what a load of balls Net Zero is.

If the planet were on fire or freezing-pick the one you like-governments would be making sure that buses and trains were cheap and accessible.

They're not because it is, as I said, a load of old balls.

Started writing something similar, and was thinking about using tv as the example, we had the BBC - one ‘subscription’. Now most people have at least two or three - BBC, Sky, Netflix, Now, Prime etc. Every school holiday, parents have to ‘make memories’. Parties used to be fun and games in your lounge for about six kids - now it’s whole class parties in the local hall, or experiences. People are spending so much more money than in the past.

But today's young also know that the chances of them achieving the same kind of "wealth" of the older generation are next to nil unless they benefit from an inheritance. Today's youngsters aren't going to benefit from the privatisation and demutualisation windfalls, the rampant house price inflation, endowment policy maturity profits, and probably not even basic state pension. Today's youngsters will, on average, have to wait longer before they can buy their own home, if ever. They're also having to pay student loan repayments to cover their Uni costs (the older generation either didn't need to go to Uni or got grants rather than loans). So many aspects are very different.

Divert the money to schools and colleges so that they can directly pay for and provide all the stuff that the kids actually need, such as text books, reasonable school trips, school meals, and yes, maybe even divert money to colleges to finance driving licences (it's a life skill and just as valid for many jobs as a paper qualification). Give schools a supply of vouchers to give parents for school uniforms. Where there's a will, there's a way!

It shouldn't be impossible in this day to have a smooth rather than hard cut off for any benefits - so if you don't claim pension credit but would have less income once the fuel allowance is taken into account you should get the difference

Years of under investment in our national IT systems I suspect

It actually can. It's called means testing and has been about for years.

But there has to be a cut off, some will lose out. Hence the outcry over means testing winter fuel.

Tech & globalisation does change though, it’s called progress. I didn’t have certain things because they didn’t actually exist…

It actually can. It's called means testing and has been about for years. OK, it's more clunky and expensive to administer than generalised policies, but it saves money in the long run by not giving benefits to those who don't need them, while taking them from those who do, putting them further into poverty. Poverty that ends up costing more in the long run.

Most older people had nothing like today's youth in their earlier lives! There seems to be a group between 20 and 35 that are most affected by expectations of adulthood being shaped by privileged childhoods, but that's hardly all or most of the population

I am only in my 50s - cinemas were a birthday treat, coffees and takeaways - we had fish and chips the day we moved house- cars - gadgets, days out to zoos or Christmas lights or anything really - we had a picnic in the hills , house had water running down the walls of the third bedroom, I recall my grandparents getting an inside loo and heating ... and we were quite well off I would say. My mam at least always had a job. I didn't get to buy a home till I married in my 30s.

She wants us to create a generational divide and advantage all younger people over all older ones, like with the tax free work for 5 years suggestion and the charges or funding restrictions to services disproportionately used by older people. Its too generalised and will not achieve fairness.

Young people do need some help though, they have been ignored for years. No government policy can work on every single individual basis it has to be a societal one.

People see what older people have now and can't believe that they haven't lived like that all their lives

That doesn’t make sense. Adults now see what their childhoods were like & see it’s often unaffordable these days.

Exactly. Which is why the OPs suggestions are flawed. She wants us to create a generational divide and advantage all younger people over all older ones, like with the tax free work for 5 years suggestion and the charges or funding restrictions to services disproportionately used by older people. Its too generalised and will not achieve fairness. You might as well say that men hold more wealth than women so let's increase their income tax and let women earn tax free. Charge men for prescriptions not women. Reduce funding for men's health and plough it into services for women.