AIBU to want spending cuts rather than more tax rises?

I certainly agree that stopping accepting any refugees at all would be cost-effective - immediate deportation to a 3rd country, and no asylum ever given would very quickly stop the flow.

And using even a proportion of the £8billion we spend on asylum seekers annually to support people in their own countries would help far more people in a far more significant way.

We do need to be a bit more mindful of what it's spent on though: it's very hard to prevent money being siphoned off.

£8billion a year.

For context, our entire defence budget (for the UK - a G7 nuclear power) is £62 billion

Not to be sniffed at. The annual benefit bill is over £300 billion a year. I reckon start there.

@Cel77 pakistan is a nuclear armed country why are we sending aid to them and how does it help us ?

Only 32% of people on Universal Credit are working, and many of them will only be working part time.

The triple lock for pensions is ridiculous now. It would save between £ 10 to £ 15 billion in less than 4 years.
It's not on your little list but shpuld be imo.

Something called diplomacy and keeping the peace, especially because they have nuclear capacity. Diplomacy is a very fine art as it keeps this world resonably safe. Take the buffer away and it could all go terribly wrong. For all of us. Countries don't contribute foreign aid because of bleeding hearts, they do to keep their own people safe. Life you.

Wow so they may nuke us if we don't give them money ?

Exactly a huge amount of money poured into care goes into private profit.

I know someone who owns care homes and boasts regularly how its made her a millionaire. Her staff are of course paid minimum wage.

Well quite. It's pretty insane to be borrowing money each year - which we have to pay interest on, every single year in the future, until we bring our debt down to zero (roughly when hell freezes over) - in order to give it to other countries.

Going back to the very fair point another poster made about the net redistribution effect, I think your situation is a prime example of it. A lot of welfare and inequality metrics are based on gross income and don't fully capture the fact that unavoidable living costs are heavily or almost entirely state-funded for lower-income households, while higher earners have to meet the same costs entirely out of their post tax income.

There might be something wrong with your budgeting if you can't afford luxuries.

We still hand out £13billion per year in aid every year, which surely needs to stop as our standard of living falls. We're at 22 currently, and dropping rapidly.

worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/standard-of-living-by-country

Croatia only hand out $50 million of foreign aid per year. Less than 0.5% of what we give away, despite Croatia being higher than the UK in the standard of living index.

The UK has out-of-date delusions of wealth and international responsibility.

Nope, she's simply taxed more than lower earners and given fewer handouts.

Obviously the more you earn the more you are taxed. Also if you earn a lot you don't need help. 🤷 You can have my kids DLA but imagine you don't want the disabled kid.

Cutting public services to the bone and replacing them with the private sector has cost us an unimaginable amount of money. Look at the figures about water or rail or gas or electric. Look how much care homes for children or the elderly cost. It’s an absolute scandal. It doesn’t matter if the public sector costs a lot if it means millions of people are in stable work and public services are of high quality. If we can keep what little cash we have circulating in our own economy instead of being siphoned off at either end I think things would be better.

Every single person on mn who receives benefits or has a family member than gets them believes they are entitled to them and they couldn’t possibly change their circumstances in any way so that they could contribute back at all. It would be interesting to see what you would get from the state in Sweden or France or Germany in the same circumstances - I bet we would all be surprised.

I guess if people genuinely don’t understand how much tax high earning paye employees pay and think it’s just 20% it makes some sense of why they think they should just keep paying more.

If I was earning as much as some of you lot do why would I be jealous of people stuck in a benefits trap when much of it ends when the children are adults? But weird really.

I don't see how the state pension remains sustainable without eventually means-testing or tapering it. Scrapping the triple lock is tinkering around the edges of a much bigger demographic problem.

The alternative is to keep raising the pension age until we reach the fairly dystopian point where a significant proportion of people are physically incapable of working until they qualify.
Both solutions are shit.

You're getting huge amounts of hand outs. Given your DC's disability, you are incredibly lucky that you live in a country where you don't have to bear that cost yourself! Unlike every country (including the UK) in almost every other time in history. And unlike almost every other country still now.

You clearly have no idea of the cliff edges that mean that someone can end up with less money to spend, despite working and contributing more.

That's not fair, and it's not sustainable.

What will your disabled kid do when all the kids who can work decide that the UK holds no future for them?

Honestly, I personally don’t begrudge you (or anyone else) benefits to help pay for disabled children. You have a hugely difficult job and I am in admiration of anyone dealing with the day to day realities.

However, don’t be so dismissive about the challenges currently facing middle earners, also trying to support their families (and other peoples through taxation).

Whoopee how lucky am I. 👍 Well I would hope that like any other caring country there will be support for him although it is not yet clear what lies ahead for him yet. How abeist you are btw. But for the grace of god you don't have a disabled child or be disabled yourself. Attitudes likes yours make me tempted to apply for PIP for my deafness.

I'm genuinely curious about this mindset. I've been a British citizen for quite some decades now, but perhaps I've retained a more pragmatic attitude about these things from the culture I grew up in.

If your standard of living and the welfare state you rely on ultimately depend on a healthy economy and people paying large amounts of tax, wouldn't the logical response be to actually want the economy to prosper and high earners to do well, and for there to be more high earners, not fewer?

I am not dismissive and I have sympathy for you and all who are struggling as well as those on UC. I would quite like to work more now my child is about to start school but trying to get him in for a full day is going to be a battle. The extra help we have recently has been great to fix repairs to our house that he has destroyed like kitchen cupboards etc. I don't have as much sympathy for those who call themselves middle earners who aren't and who are ablest.