Salary sacrifice to be taxed

To be honest, it’s nowhere near the anti pensioner stuff that I’ve read from you. As someone nearing retirement, the sentiments against pensioners are unwelcome and actually feel personal too.

When I started work there was no company pension available to me from my (private sector) employer. I was well over 30 having worked since 17 full time before one was available. With paying what I could afford into a pension, I still NEED the state pension - but it won’t cover cruises and the like, not that I’d thank you for a cruise anyway.

You keep referring to the millionaire pensioners and their cruises and mansions - I just don’t think you realise how the majority of pensioners live.

And so from your extensive knowledge and expertise, what are your thoughts on merging NI and income tax, and taxing ALL forms of income fairly and equally? I mean, why should those a la Sunak pay less % tax than me when that income yes may have some risk, but doesn’t require a job as such. And CGT? And while I’m asking, bringing other passive “by luck of birth” income like IHT into it as well. Because I totally get that seeming unfairness causes a lot of the current division in society. And I also disagree that middle earners should keep on paying more when the mega rich seem untouchable.

The reason that pensions have "tax breaks" is to encourage people to save into them so that they aren't totally reliant on the state in retirement AND because the money is taxed when it is taken out of the pension (annuity or drawdown) so taxing on the way in and out of the pension would be paying tax twice.

I don't think this will get anywhere - twiddling with a tax cap on pensions or the 25% tax free is one thing but removing tax incentives from (non super high earner) pensions would be detrimental in the long term.

No. Many, many experts tell them the same and they absolutely do not listen, as can been seen very clearly by the decisions they have made.

It is extremely tiresome and fortunately I don’t have to endure it very frequently, only every few months or so. But yes, it requires a lot of patience, my supply of which is pretty much exhausted. It was particularly bad during the Conservative government(s) when the various Ministers were changing every few months so they had no idea about their briefs or any of the subject matter.

I had hoped that perhaps there might be some improvement at least at the Exchequer with Reeves in office because she repeatedly talked about growth pre-election and is supposed to have some background in economics but she seems to have minimal grasp of the very basics.

It’s all very depressing if you do care about the UK’s future. The calibre of people in these roles is utterly shocking. Whatever the party colours, they simply aren’t capable of these roles and the calibre seems to be getting continually worse.

I'm sure they listen, if they do anything about it we all will find out at the budget.

Please accept my sympathies. You must have nerves of steel and patience of a saint to deal with people who have to pass the single communal brain cell around for sharing whenever they need to speak or do anything.

Well, if they did speak to any expert with even a basic grasp of economics previously then they certainly didn’t listen to them.

The IFS and many other organisations - every credible economist - has been telling them and the public that their economic plans didn’t stack up and would not work since before the general election.

I don’t want to out myself but in my role I meet with Ministers sometimes - in both this and previous Governments - and I know many others who do also. I can tell you categorically that they are not listening. As should be abundantly clear from the decisions that they have made.

Do you see any evidence of them listening?

That’s exactly the point that I’ve been making, hence the need for fiscal policy to change and state pension welfare and healthcare to be entirely reformed because these are BY FAR our two largest expenses. Other than paying the interest on the national debt that the Boomers ran up, of course.

Sadly, nobody is prepared to engage with the solutions that have to happen in order for the UK to be restored to a fiscally viable position.

My originally reply was removed for some reason , however your reply is worryingly true...

Ah, I see. You have no answer to the economic points I’ve made so it’s now time for personal insults, is it?

Glad you agree that thick people voting and thick people running the country should have some failsafe measures in place. Finally, you’re getting it.

How do you know they haven't spoken to the experts before?
Where is the evidence she is having basic lessons, maybe Sam coates is in the same room as well. I don't believe everything the press writes.

Exactly. Honestly I’ve tried so hard to be polite but some of the comments here are just so stupid it is extremely difficult to maintain.

Maybe they should have talked to such experts to design a viable policy prospectus before being elected?

Maybe after their catastrophic budget last year and the (entirely predictable and predicted) effect that it had on the UK economy they should have consulted some experts about how to fix this?

If you don’t think it’s concerning that the Chancellor of the Exchequer is having to be briefed on the very basics about economic cause and effect because she is still trying to work out what policies she should put in place just over two weeks before her annual budget (never mind thinking through the details properly and having a clear plan in place for implementation before announcing things, eh?) then I’m not sure what to say to you.

Do you think that indicates her being competent to run the UK economy and that she has a viable economic plan in place that has any prospect of working? Particularly given she’s leaking things like the topic of this thread to the media which is one of the most economically illiterate things I’ve ever heard?

Unfortunately, even if you do for some inexplicable reason believe this indicates competence or is remotely acceptable for someone in her role, I don’t think anybody in the markets will be in agreement with you.

The fact that you think it’s no big deal that thickos are being voted in (by thickos) to vote on issues they don’t have the first clue about, at a time when they country is in serious trouble, says everything.

Part of the problem is that ‘people are sick of experts’ and politicians etc do a good job of doing them down when they present something that goes against their ideological belief

I’d go further than that and roll employer national insurance into personal taxes as well so that there’s proper transparency over what people are actually paying.

From an employer’s perspective they do not care which part of the taxation is classified as their tax or the employee’s tax. All they look at is “what will be the total cost of me hiring this person including all salary, taxes, pension contributions etc?”.

Effectively - as we saw last year - employment taxes levied on employers are paid by the employee. If you raise the employment taxes on the employers they can still only afford to pay the market rate for the individual so this results in lower salary rises in future until the money is recouped, or reducing any pension contributions that they give to employees above the legal minimum, or not hiring new staff and increasing workloads for existing staff instead so they work more hours for free, or if none of that recoups the money then they make redundancies. The employee is always the one that will pay because the employer cannot continue to operate if they make no profit.

the 15% NI charge to employers is therefore also in everything but name another tax on employees. All of this should be rolled into income tax so that the electorate can actually see how much they are being taxed. The marginal tax rates at certain points in salary scales already exceed 100%!! This has been shown in independent economic studies to be one of the main drivers of low productivity and growth in the UK (therefore falling living standards). These studies were even reported in The Guardian for goodness sake, so hardly right wing propaganda or whatever, they are economic fact. You can see in HMRC data the bunching of taxpayers below each threshold where punitive marginal tax rates are imposed at various levels with withdrawal of child benefit, the imposition of student loan repayments, the withdrawal of the personal allowance and childcare funding, and the much too high withdrawal rate for universal credit for those working in low-income roles which makes it not worth them taking on additional hours.

All of this results in lower economic participation, skills shortages, higher immigration needs, lower tax revenue, lower productivity, higher welfare bills and lower growth. And higher inflation as well.

This is all entirely within the Chancellor’s gift to fix immediately in this budget by removing the cliff edges and there is robust evidence that within months this would give the UK economy a huge boost and actually raise tax revenues.

Instead, her proposal is to introduce more cliff-edges and more totally illogical, irrational variations in marginal tax rates that will create perverse incentives and harm economic growth further by screwing around with applying extra tax charges to pension contributions. This will, quite obviously, exacerbate these already clearly-evidenced economic effects and make the economy tank further.

You really couldn’t make it up.

Then wants wrong with asking policy experts to come in ? Frankly I would say it's incompetent if they didn't.

If it's not a gotcha what's your issue with it ?

That’s irrelevant to the point - we can harp on about the past and hate the world for it but we need to look forward and the situation we are in

europe is on the down and current policies aren’t helping. We’re not the superpower anymore and we need to stop acting like we are

How far are you @222days off retirement? Because some of your posts - like this one - make you seem about 12.

You’re right, they’re not experts on anything. Most have never had real jobs, or done anything of note that would constitute financial and economic success.

If you think it’s a gotcha or designed to be, then your bar is so low that you’re trippin’ over it.

Ben then it doesn’t surprise me. The people who elected these parliamentarians are not the sharpest knives in the drawer either.

This could be a good solution and potentially cheaper to run
It would also mean everyone that earns pays into it. Which isn’t the current case
It would also mean, in theory, everyone gets a full state pension and the need for pension credits is abolished. Again a reduction in the cost of administration although possibly offset by an increase in pension costs.

It was alright for the Boomers though, huh? How many of them campaigned against MIRAS?

Did they refuse to use the tax deduction it if it was apparently such a bad system, or campaign against it?

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