Salary sacrifice to be taxed

Of course, it's entirely normal. And probably mis reported anyway.

MPs are just normal people, they get elected on policy but there's no requirement for them to be experts on anything. They are representatives of the people.

It doesn't feel like the gotcha it's been presented as . Wouldn't all government ministers be briefed by policy experts in some form or another? Ministers are moved from one distinct portfolio to another potentially in short time. They don't have the luxury of time to get up to speed organically.

I don’t agree mortgage interest should be tax deductible as it’s so open to manipulation. I do think childcare costs should be

It’s very simple. As I’ve said multiple times here and on other threads we don’t need to reinvent the wheel.

Australia used to have a pension system modelled on ours. Like us, they realised several decades ago that this ponzi scheme would be completely unsustainable due to demographic changes. Unlike us, they reformed it.

They now have a means-tested system tapering the payment away for those who do not require it. Simultaneously, they mandated and gradually increased the levels of private pension savings (which was affordable for both employees and employers because they didn’t have to pay such high taxes to fund the state pension ponzi scheme anymore). The public there generally accepts that this is a good, robust and fair system and it works.

What we need to do is remove the opt-out from auto-enrolment so make pension saving for individuals mandatory (with a similar mandatory system for the self-employed unless they can demonstrate sufficient assets to self-fund their retirement already). This protects against future demographic changes (given the falling birthrate, this is essential: the problem with the ponzi scheme is not going to go away). Then mandatory contribution levels need to be raised, gradually, to ensure that the majority of people have sufficient funding for themselves.

Obviously it would have been far better if the Boomers who are now retired had implemented this decades ago when the problem was well-known and foreseen in advance, but they didn’t do so. They voted for tax cuts for themselves instead. So now the change will have to happen with a far less gradual pace but that’s entirely of their own making, frankly, and any gripes about that should be directed to the politicians of their own generation who failed to act at the appropriate time several decades ago.

This isn’t rocket science. Just like with healthcare, education, taxation, other parts of the welfare system, childcare provision, we know which systems work and which do not because there is copious evidence from decades and decades of them being implemented in other countries. We’re not feeling our way in the dark here, we have the evidence.

The problem is politicians in the UK refusing to implement evidence-based policy and instead wrecking the economy and deliberately making everyone poorer and poorer because they don’t have the backbone to articulate to the electorate the changes that need to be made. Primarily because, as we can see on this thread, a large proportion of the electorate don’t want to hear it and would rather stick their fingers in their ears and shout “Give me my cake! Otherwise it’s not faaaaaaaiiiiiirrrrr!”.

People in the UK seem to believe that things can’t get worse. They very much can. A lot worse. Over history the fortunes and prosperity of different countries have risen and fallen many times and there is no innate right for people here to have a higher standard of living than those in China, India, African countries, Afghanistan… we have this currently because of historic events. Other countries have Governments working extremely hard to ensure that they are the ones with higher living standards in the future. If we do not soon get a Government determined to and capable of doing the same then our living standards will drop like a stone in a pond and the UK public really needs to understand this fact before it is too late.

But it seems many pensioners don’t care and their view is “I’ll be dead by then and it won’t affect me so it doesn’t matter”. A disturbingly large proportion of them seem to have far less care for their children and grandchildren than any generation before or afterwards, a weird a supremely self-centred view on the world which has caused so much damage to our society and will continue to do so as long as their stranglehold on politics remains in place. Somebody needs to stand up to them finally and tell them enough is enough, but we have no politicians with the backbone to do so.

But we all know that NI is essentially just another form of income tax.

Perhaps the answer is for NI to be abolished altogether and for income tax to be increased to cover the shortfall. Then, anyone with an income would be paying it, regardless of their age.

Yeah I noticed the PP didn't comment on it , odd as it ran for 17 years a massive chunk of the life of a mortgage if you took it out in 83.
I'm not sure if the outcome of this though it would super charge the housing market and it's prices if brought in now. And of course the cost say £20bn ?

It was reported by Sam Coates of Sky News in his podcast. Not the kind of thing that this incompetent government likes to have get out into the public, but the journos got hold of it.

Only just seen you’d noticed this before me!

Yes, the dirty secret of the Boomers that is never mentioned when they bang on about interest rates on the half a peanut they paid for their house…

Most young people now would chew off their own arm for their mortgage interest to be tax deductible!! Can you imagine how that would transform things for many young families?

I agree with @Plantatreetodayon seeing this budget coming.

On pension tapering you’d need a system change that doesn’t have an impact on behaviour. It might be possible to do that, but with anything behaviour is a factor.

Aaah yes a Labour government who inherited the crap the Tories left us in!
Quantative Easing was just kicking the can down the road!

You are not rational in blaming a tiny portion of the population for the economic situation we are now in so I will leave it there.
I presume you mean Baby Boomers ?
Im not one BTW and its not really a description that has ever applied in the UK.

Never mind it gives you someone to hate I suppose 🤷

The Resolution Foundation?!!?

Hahahaaaaaaaa

I mean, I really just give up.

You’re telling me to learn about economics? This is my job.

Please explain how means-testing the state pension and tapering it away as they do in Australia so that no pensioner is left with an income below that which exceeds the net income of someone earning the average UK salary of £37,500 per year would create pensioner poverty?

It’s just crazy even to be having to have these discussions, rather than anybody discussing the possible solutions. Why are we being forced to continually refute nonsense which quite clearly contradicts established economic facts demonstrated by decades of economic data? The cognitive dissonance involved really is breathtaking, that people are this unwilling or incapable of accepting what is publicly available and easily accessible information in countless robust economic studies which are available online, including many graphs and visual representations to help the understanding of those who aren’t good with numbers or large data sets.

Every single time the actual economic issues that need to be addressed before anything can improve in the UK are raised it is met with the same self-righteous posts, the same Four Yorkshireman sketches, the same personal anecdotes (as if cohort analysis of national data is negated by one person’s personal experience or that of their particular family!).

I agree with PPs like @OneAmberFinch and @WildLimePoet, @Pandersmum and @nomas that the situation in the UK is probably irretrievable because the current cohort of pensioners are determined that their lifestyle won’t be impacted in any way to address the UK’s fiscal position which has largely been caused by their own actions and that everyone else should continue to subsidise even those of them who do not require any public subsidy at all to live perfectly comfortably from their own wealth. They will continue their stranglehold over the UK economy and to drag us all underwater until it’s too late and we have all drowned.

Lol. A lot of that chaos had a lot to do with a Labour Government as well, as I remember? And here we are again. Yes, interest rates were higher. But higher interest rates on a debt that was a much tinier multiple of your household income still equate to a much lower proportion of your household income overall than paying lower interest rates on a debt that is a much higher multiple of your household income. And this time not for a decade, but in perpetuity.

There was also significant inflation during that period which meant that people’s mortgages pretty much inflated away. This only works, however, if the inflation is accompanied by corresponding salary rises. In the 1970s and 1980s that happened. Now, however, this is not happening and there has been barely any real-terms salary increase for the last two decades in most occupations. On top of this people have ever-increasing costs for childcare (because now the vast majority of families have two working parents: workforce participation is at its highest level since it started being measured properly in the early 1970s, despite the Boomers claiming young people are lazy slackers - the evidence shows a higher proportion of them are working and a higher proportion are working full time, than their parents’/ grandparents’ generation who are now retired). Meanwhile we have had charges imposed on education, housing costs going up by many multiples in real-terms, the economy and growth unnecessarily damaged further by Brexit (guess who was the largest cohort voting for that?), and taxes at an all time high since before the Boomers were born.

Your false equivalences will not wash, I’m afraid. Even without an economics background a look at some basic graphs will demonstrate to you that the above are all established economic facts which are indisputable. The pretence that somehow the retired generation had life harder is simply nonsense. Their parents’ generation had it very hard, who actually fought in the second world war, but very few of them remain.

The people I am talking about are their children, who have been a generation who lived in a time of huge opportunity, rising living standards and economic opportunity, opportunities for social mobility, and simultaneously sold off and trashed the country’s public infrastructure and public institutions and stripped everything to the bones like a pack of piranhas, pulled every ladder up behind them and now have the audacity to blame everyone else for objecting to impoverishing further the subsequent generations in order to keep them in luxury that they have neither paid sufficient money to fund nor funded for their own parents or grandparents who were far more deserving because they were the ones who set up all of the infrastructure and institutions that the current retirees benefitted from and then destroyed for those who followed.

The absolute refusal to accept to take any responsibility for their own choices when they were the ones making the decisions, their continued stranglehold on politics preventing any change that’s not for their own personal benefit despite knowing damn well that they are the first generation in history to have left their children worse off than they were, is quite disgusting. Obviously there are exceptions, but a large proportion of that generation are supremely entitled and selfish and seem to have convinced themselves that all of the economic data is falsified and somehow everything they have extracted from society is the fruit of their own labour. I’m afraid that it is perfectly clear to everybody else, and an indisputable fact, that this is not the case and as a cohort they have an enormous debt to the rest of society which they are going to have to start to repay now.

Can you share any links?
I don't doubt it, the level of Labor incompetence is shocking, I hope they can grasp some basics, although party full of the likes of Angela (can she count??)...

All benefits and the cost of our welfare state are a huge problem
Including the large increase in numbers of some claiming them

The triple lock is only there whilst we have pension poverty. That’s why it was introduced.

Until a Government is prepared to make the very hard decision of reducing welfare spending the working population or anyone with , well anything, is bound to pay the price

Labour tried with the Conservatives paper on PIP and all MPs from other parties plus half the Labour MPs voted it down. That needs to be looked at again. For starters.

I think after this budget people will be more willing to agree that just increasing taxes on some is not only never going to be enough but also not an equal system.

Nailed it.

We need to introduce IQ testing prior to allowing people to vote

Yeah, let’s all look at the Resolution Foundation. The far left socialist organization. Let’s not look at anything unbiased.

How long would it take to remove pensioner poverty and at what cost ?
The triple lock seems a blunt and expensive tool to do so.

Your posts are very rude and by using language that demeans others you gain nothing but disrespect

You might want to do some research of your own regarding pension poverty
Standing back and looking at that without seething that some may have more than you and regarding that as unfair will allow you to see it with more balance

You could start with the Resolution Foundation and go from there

Until we no longer have pension poverty the increases still required to work people out of that are required. When we reach that stage then it would be fair to keep pension increases inline with other benefits as necessary.

Meanwhile we all know Labours modus operandi. No one must have really believed their promise not to tax workers. Anyone with a single brain cell could see this budget coming

Sounds great. Incredible huh

Thank you. I’d read this exchange again and been bemused because to me the posts seem to be perfectly clear, basic English so it’s reassuring to see that others understood the it all perfectly clearly and it is just this poster being disingenuous.

Except they are not referring to the few days in the 90s when interest rates rocketed.
They are referring to the 1970s when interest rates were 7.5% -17.5% for the entire decade
Look up the oil crisis, inflation, unemployment and the 73-75 recession.
Most people lived in relative poverty until the end of the 70s/ early 80s when living standards rose.

You don't know what you are talking about !

Nobody was talking about overseas pension funds. This thread is about UK pension funds and UK fiscal policy. You stated that the money in your husbands UK pension savings couldn’t be invested in the same stocks and shares as your funds in a UK ISA which is categorically wrong because he can transfer them to a UK SIPP and invest them in whichever global assets he chooses to invest them in. Not having done so and therefore receiving lower returns is entirely his responsibility.

Pretty soon the government will run out of things they can tax and they will just bring in a new law that will just let them raid people’s bank accounts when they need a bit more money.

Apparently, three consultants were hired this week to give Labour MPs some lessons in tax and economics. Honestly you could not make his shit up. We have glorified social workers and charity workers, who have never run anything in their lives or generated any wealth, making choices about the country finances. I bet Rachel from accounts was at the front row being educated by the consultants.

There has to be some consequence to this. This cannot go on. Parliament needs to be dissolved and Labour government booted out into oblivion.