“Tax the wealthy” (RR budget) what does this even mean?

It will mean taxing people with the ‘broadest shoulders’, which is basically anyone not on benefits or who doesn’t work in the public sector. It will be taxing property, vehicles, lowering VAT threshold, more education taxes and removing some of salary sacrifice on pension contributions. By December, Rachel will have found another black hole and the cycle of the threats will begin again.

And then what? Given their majority there won’t be a general election. The leadership will just be replaced by even more incompetent people in the party who will make matters worse, as the Conservatives did repeatedly during their final years in office.

The Conservatives are a shambles. Everybody competent or sensible left under Johnson. Until they have a proper clear out of all the Brexit loons who are also completely economically clueless they are unelectable. Sunak at a different time could have been a decent Prime Minister but had run out of road by the time he took power plus was tainted by his support for Brexit.

Reform are an absolute joke, can’t add up, are funded by nefarious interests, also have a leader who is a proven liar and has deliberately made many of the UK’s current problems worse and has no experience of actually doing anything useful: another lazy public school boy who is a self-interested, economically illiterate moron and an extremely dishonest, dangerous one at that. He has no intention or capability whatsoever of uniting the country behind a coherent roadmap towards a successful future.

There’s no realistic prospect at the moment of any competent Government in the UK even when there is a general election. The Lib Dems are the only ones vaguely talking some sense on some policy areas in comparison to the others (a very low bar) and nobody has a coherent economic policy. It’s beyond a joke and the calibre of people is far, far too low, as is the educational level of a significant proportion of the electorate who are happy to argue like rats in a sack over irrelevancies.

Do We think she is going to introduce this new yearly property tax? I think that will stagnate the housing market. We won’t move if this is the case

Reform are an absolute joke, can’t add up, are funded by nefarious interests, also have a leader who is a proven liar and has deliberately made many of the UK’s current problems worse and has no experience of actually doing anything useful: another lazy public school boy who is a self-interested, economically illiterate moron and an extremely dishonest, dangerous one at that. He has no intention or capability whatsoever of uniting the country behind a coherent roadmap towards a successful future.
I tend to see farage as a version of Jeremy Clarkson, but minus the huge 'bison' head and without the football stuffed up his jumper.

Pretty much everything is taxed already, income, interest from savings, which depending how much you have might be called wealth! Businesses have been hit hard by recent tax rises, capital gains tax on selling assets, inheritance tax. Not to mention things like road tax, council tax, etc.

If you tax the better off more they will spend less which then affects businesses, if you tax businesses more that will raise prices which affects everyone eventually. If they tax houses it will screw with the property market, put people into negative equity and have all sorts of unexpected consequences. How many people could find the cash to give the government say 10% of the value of their home, even 1% would be a struggle for many people.

Cutting spending should be the objective, catch the tax dodgers big and small, catch the benefit cheats, catch the people working in the black economy. All these people are stealing from all of us that pay our taxes, they are not victimless crimes. So often on here these sort of crimes are dismissed as no ones business and you should just let people get on with it and don't report it.

Competence is a major issue - I do not believe that one member of the current cabinet possesses any commercial experience or acumen, and it shows.

This government are in hock to the unions and the backbenches - they could not even get through a GBP 5 bn rounding error of cuts from future welfare expenditure. Yes, they lied during electioneering - Sunak called it on numerous occasions.

There are no realistic growth prospects given that UK productivity is anaemic and Labour’s policies to date have proven anti-growth.

Reform’s recent rise in the ratings is is simply a consequence of Labour’s disastrous 15-months.

I am hoping that Reeves goes in hard on 26th November - the edifice crumbing sooner being preferable to death by a thousand cuts (if only).

You are not reading the room. Start your own thread.

They’re all liars. It’s pretty much the only qualification you have to have to become a politician.

My concern is their incompetence. Again, this applies to all of the UK political parties, not one of whom has put forward a sensible manifesto that would actually address the UK’s issues in decades, presumably because they know that our economically illiterate electorate wouldn’t elect them if they did so. Nobody is articulating what needs to be done and the electorate - who should be up in arms about this and demanding competent economic leadership - instead argue about trivial irrelevancies to the overall budget and apparently now seems to this Reform is the answer? Some people never learn.

Yes, Reeves is a bare-faced liar - it is on record.

She is self-pitying, too - with the crocodile tears.

A Chancellor in name only.

Indeed. She was told that her budget last year would quite obviously harm growth and which addressed none of the underlying issues in order to offset this, would create a doom loop of further economic decline meaning lower tax revenues meaning another hole in the budget due to rising spending and falling tax revenues. For someone who has an economics degree she seems to have a minimal grasp of even the most basic concepts of how an economy works.

The bond markets were prepared to show her a great deal of goodwill, recognising the difficult situation she inherited. What they needed to see, however, was a credible plan for how to improve the situation.

Prior to the election she constantly stated that the only way to fix the problem was to create growth. This was correct because the only way to raise living standards sustainably is to increase productivity not rob one group of people and redistribute to another, and these statements were why she was given a great deal of goodwill to give her time to implement the policies to start this process. She has, in reality, taken not one measure that will have any statistically significant impact on increasing growth and many, many measures that will reduce it further, and thrown away all of this goodwill in just over a year. Idiotic.

The solutions are obvious and some (like removing cliff edges in the tax system which have been shown to be harming productivity) are entirely within Government control and would have an almost instantaneous effect. For example, the IFS calculated that if you raised the higher rate tax threshold to £75k, abolished the withdrawal of the personal allowance at £100k and made the higher rate tax threshold 45% from £75k upwards this would be fiscally neutral in immediate cost and remove huge economic distortions, increase workplace participation, lower skills shortages and the need for immigration to fill highly-skilled roles, reduce emmigration of our highest tax-payers, and therefore raise overall tax revenues and reduce public spending costs significantly.

Yet she isn’t doing this. Why? It’s extremely disingenuous to tell us that she “has to make hard decisions” when she’s not even making the very simple, easy, obvious ones that would mean that the gap she’s created between tax revenue and spending would decrease substantially. And in terms of longer-term plans, without investment in infrastructure and education and removing self-imposed trade barriers she has no hope whatsoever of growth increasing. How does she think this will happen? Unicorns nearly as large as the ones Mr Farage has been feeding with miracle grow.

Why do we have to have such incompetent people in these positions with seemingly no ability whatsoever to see the big picture or comprehend the obvious behavioural effects and consequences of their actions? The doom loop will continue until we have some grown ups in charge and these certainly are not, but sadly all other options at the moment seem even worse. The doom loop will cease to be a spiral slide and become a sheer drop like jumping from a plane with no parachute if we end up with Reform in charge, with no hope of reversal. Depressing in the extreme.

That's what happens when you try and run an economy on an idealogical basis rather than a good basis that works.

Figures please for the existing liability and projected future liability for the next 20 years.

Luckily they are underwritten by the taxpayer. Unlike private sector pensions.

Indeed. She was told that her budget last year would quite obviously harm growth and which addressed none of the underlying issues in order to offset this, would create a doom loop of further economic decline meaning lower tax revenues meaning another hole in the budget due to rising spending and falling tax revenues. For someone who has an economics degree she seems to have a minimal grasp of even the most basic concepts of how an economy works.

The bond markets were prepared to show her a great deal of goodwill, recognising the difficult situation she inherited. What they needed to see, however, was a credible plan for how to improve the situation.

Prior to the election she constantly stated that the only way to fix the problem was to create growth. This was correct because the only way to raise living standards sustainably is to increase productivity not rob one group of people and redistribute to another, and these statements were why she was given a great deal of goodwill to give her time to implement the policies to start this process. She has, in reality, taken not one measure that will have any statistically significant impact on increasing growth and many, many measures that will reduce it further, and thrown away all of this goodwill in just over a year. Idiotic.

The solutions are obvious and some (like removing cliff edges in the tax system which have been shown to be harming productivity) are entirely within Government control and would have an almost instantaneous effect. For example, the IFS calculated that if you raised the higher rate tax threshold to £75k, abolished the withdrawal of the personal allowance at £100k and made the higher rate tax threshold 45% from £75k upwards this would be fiscally neutral in immediate cost and remove huge economic distortions, increase workplace participation, lower skills shortages and the need for immigration to fill highly-skilled roles, reduce emmigration of our highest tax-payers, and therefore raise overall tax revenues and reduce public spending costs significantly.

Yet she isn’t doing this. Why? It’s extremely disingenuous to tell us that she “has to make hard decisions” when she’s not even making the very simple, easy, obvious ones that would mean that the gap she’s created between tax revenue and spending would decrease substantially. And in terms of longer-term plans, without investment in infrastructure and education and removing self-imposed trade barriers she has no hope whatsoever of growth increasing. How does she think this will happen? Unicorns nearly as large as the ones Mr Farage has been feeding with miracle grow.

Why do we have to have such incompetent people in these positions with seemingly no ability whatsoever to see the big picture or comprehend the obvious behavioural effects and consequences of their actions? The doom loop will continue until we have some grown ups in charge and these certainly are not, but sadly all other options at the moment seem even worse. The doom loop will cease to be a spiral slide and become a sheer drop like jumping from a plane with no parachute if we end up with Reform in charge, with no hope of reversal. Depressing in the extreme.

Yes this level of lying, followed by the first budget which had a £70bn borrowing and tax hike.

And whatever next because that budget hammered growth.