to think that if you used to moan about the Tax Credits system....

[ThatVikRinA22]

that you have a lot more to moan about now?

I always used to wonder why people bemoaned the Tax Credit system - it enabled me to go back to work, it helped me pay for child care that made working worth while - it really helped me when my children were younger, before TC i used to work, but most of my wage went on child care.

Up until this government got it, we still got a small amount of TC, - it helped hugely.

Yesterday, i got the renewal through. Ive not had any payments for months and so i rang them to ask why they had sent a renewal through that made no sense - it said we should get about £4k but then deducted £4k.....

so i rang them.
Now, if your household income is more than £26k (with one child still at school) you get nothing.

if our household income was 26k, we would be unable to pay our mortgage, or eat. I have no idea how they think that people with families to support, who pay mortgages and rising bills, petrol costs etc can afford to live on that?

my wages look good, but by the time ive paid into the (rapidly declining) pension, £200, paid petrol, £250, mortgage, £685, council tax, bills and food, and im trying to support my eldest through university by paying for his food, there would be a serious serious shortfall if we had only my wage alone.....

i have said on threads before that i couldnt understand people moaning about the TC system.....

Is it a case of you dont know what you ve got until its gone?

That's a good example of why it is so laughable they are called tax credits. They are nothing to do with the negligible tax you pay and everything to do with a massive state hand out.

Another factor was that Gordon Brown fudged the inflation figures by highlighting CPI which doesn't include housing costs rather than RPI which does when he was boasting about controlling inflation. This meant housing cost increases went unchecked as they weren't captured by the inflation target.

Housing costs are absurd and sooner or later a correction must come.

Or alternatively people's expectations are absurd and sooner or later a correction must come.

^That's all very well but because tax credits were introduced (amongst other things) its pushed prices up dramatically.
Give everyone a hundred pounds extra, mr shop/LL will think oh I can charge an extra hundred pound because they can afford it.^

Yes exactly. I find it strange how rarely someone points this out. Housing benefit just increases rents. Tax credits and other wage supplements surely just increase prices.

If these supplements were taken away, then prices would have to reduce eventually, because the people charging the rent/selling the goods would find fewer people could afford the prices they were charging.

Of course, there would be a painful period in the meantime, before the prices reduced, where prices were still at the old level based on supplements being available, and yet the supplements had gone. This would be painful both for the consumers (who would find they couldn't afford what they used to) and for the landlords/shopkeepers (who would find they had fewer tenants/customers).

That painful period is what we are in at the moment.

@Domestic.

Your whole argument is based upon some superior morality. About what we should do rather than what we CAN do.

And something I learned very fast back in the days when I was a single dad with two kids to feed, no tax credits (no such thing), no maintenance and trying to juggle a full time job. Morals do not put food on the table.

So you can take your high moral ground, give it a cuddle and feel more superior than me. Convince yourself I'm a right wing Tory who doesn't care about anyone else as long as I can keep counting my pennies.

Unfortunately the reality is that the taxpayer cannot afford all the things we're currently trying to fund. The only reason we've been able to do it to date is because we keep borrowing money every single month.

Personally I think those who protest that we shouldn't use household budgets as an analogy for the economy are simply afraid that people will start to understand the idea that you cannot keep spending more than you earn forever. It will catch up with you as it has done. So you make it sound more complex than it is. The reality is quite simple:

"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery."

@Domestic.

Your whole argument is based upon some superior morality. About what we should do rather than what we CAN do.

And something I learned very fast back in the days when I was a single dad with two kids to feed, no tax credits (no such thing), no maintenance and trying to juggle a full time job. Morals do not put food on the table.

So you can take your high moral ground, give it a cuddle and feel more superior than me. Convince yourself I'm a right wing Tory who doesn't care about anyone else as long as I can keep counting my pennies.

Unfortunately the reality is that the taxpayer cannot afford all the things we're currently trying to fund. The only reason we've been able to do it to date is because we keep borrowing money every single month.

Personally I think those who protest that we shouldn't use household budgets as an analogy for the economy are simply afraid that people will start to understand the idea that you cannot keep spending more than you earn forever. It will catch up with you as it has done. So you make it sound more complex than it is. The reality is quite simple.

"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery."

niceguy2, please demonstrate how the multiplier effect occurs in an ordinary household that has cut back on its spending. t.i.a

income top ups were availible before working tax credits.

before 1999 we had family credit(started in 1986) then we had working families credit.
in 2003 it changed to wtc and ctc

we also had one before 1986 but i cannot for the life of me remember what it was called.
how old are your kids niceguy?

I like that expression niceguy2. Plain and succinct.

You are proposing that we reduce expenditure to 19 and 6 by taking money away from the poor.

Please explain why we cannot raise income to 20 and 6 by taking away from the rich.

In your own time. Nice, simple explaination would be fine.

and reality is crashing down. Blame Labour. They brought in the ridiculous system that allowed companies to reduce their wages and caused such a huge rise in the cost of housing!

Orwellian when i was signing on in the late "90s i remember applying for jobs that were paying 55 pounds a week and/or £1.50 an hour.
My rent then was 48 pounds a week.

Inabeautiful - I can answer your question from my own pov. Because I don't believe that the government should be involved in income redistribution any more than the bare minimum and that taxes should be as low as possible. I think individuals spend their money far better than the govt can. Hope that is simple enough

I've never agreed with Tax Credits.

Things were perfectly fine before they existed.

Having kids is a lifestyle choice, and not one that the taxpayer should be forced to fund!!!

sugar things were not fine its why we created many of the suplimentry benefits in the 50's.

Yes they were fine!

My grandparents raised 10 children on little money and without bloody tax credits!

All they got was basic child benefit.

The taxpayer is not there to pay for luxuries, birthday and christmas presents etc.

And you can bet your bottom dollar that every single claimant on this thread buys their brat an expensive christmas present with my money!!!!!

What in your opinion is the bare minimum londonone? Would you consider it acceptable for housing costs to be reduced by asking families to share houses?

What odds you offering Sugarmouse?

sugar how old are these 10 children now?

Yes I would

I was working 30 hrs a week until recently, was given a promotion with a lot more responsibility This equates to 38 hrs a week.
My wages went up by £35 a week, my tax credits went down by £35 a week, exactly the same.
Not only that, it meant that I crossed the threshold for Child Tax Credits (no longer get) and only get Working Tax Credits. I don't know if this affects me financially, the different tax credit situation.
But I do wonder why I'm working for more hours and less money, have to pay DS's travel expenses on top, previous job I left work in time to pick him up.
Can I go back? Could maybe explain to work, eek. Do I have to prove something to tax credits?!

So let me put it this way and see if I get agreement from niceguy2 et al.

A government breaks down the barriers to social mobility (sic) by breaking up big industrial and social institutions. At the same time convincing people that they should take control of their own lives and financial affairs. Pensions, health insurance, ppi's, mortgages, and shares are made more "accessible" to those many millions of people who before thought that such things as private pensions and home ownership was not for the likes of them. not surprisingly many, many people took advantage and bought the idea as well as shares, pensions and, mortgages.

Now you say that in fact many of those people were foolish when they did that because the only way that this new found social mobility could be afforded was to offer top ups in one form or another to to the wages of the working class, or to reduce owning any of the trappings of the well off to that of a gamble.

So now the gamble has run it's course, houses, pensions private more than state, ppi's, health insurance, the banking system has been seen to be nothing more than a gamble that is flawed by being built on the premise that as long as the good times roll no one will notice the flaw. All the while real wages, have not kept pace, earnings are way behind cost of living and other countries. This to was a deliberately managed policy, after all we needed to keep wages low to attract all these new high tech business in to the country. The ones that have by and large come taken huge amounts of public money to set up, and then gone.

So here we are, those that will suffer the worst were sold a pup to begin with, they will lose the houses they never should have had, the welfare state that has been dismantled to make way for all this private provision will no longer help them, pensions will be worthless, or will count against you as a result of means testing, this whole sorry mess engineered in order to make profit and the rich in to mega rich. To reduce this countries ability to maintain and control how our society looks after it's self.
And it is all the fault of people claiming benefits introduced by governments as far back as the 70's to make up for the fact that the people were being underpaid.You may be right, this whole con may well be the fault of those who bought in to it, but by and large that would not be the poorest as even they were excluded from this bright new world. It will need to be recognised that in order to be bought in to the scam it had to be sold to them in the first place, you cannot blame Browne for that. Thatcher started it, she told sid to sell gas shares, she brooke up large employers, she started the reduction of the role of the state. But I suspect it wont matter much to those some on this thread who are quickly comming to realise your truth. They were lied to, they should never have got above themselves and it is all their own fault for not seeing it.

I don't have to feel 'morally superior' to you or anyone else, nice guy, to think that what you are preaching is simplistic moralistic BS. And astonishingly superior :D like all comfortAble right wingers who think they did it all through their own brilliance, and now get to sneer at those 'below' them.

And by the way I've never claimed a benefit in my life and I finished my (unpaid) overtime today at 9 15 pm. Starting again at 9. I get the strong impression you'd like to lump me in with the overspending shirkers, not that it matters at all...

I'm a single parent myself; not poor..but I have been. Despite a reny bill to make your eyes water I budget all I possibly can every month to save for the house I want to buy for me and my kids. I dont even get my hair cut more than once a year any more :D Clearly an advocate for spend spend spend!' And yet...I don't need to feel good about myself by ranting about the 'irresponsibility' of others.

So take your silly 'I dragged myself up you lazy lefties can learn a thing or two' and stick it somewhere, er, nice :)

The personal superiority 'arguments' of the mumsnet righties are increasingly hollow boasts or rants about (Ffs) the 50s.... Yeah but of a different economic landscape then, but let's just skip over that in favour of a spittle flecked rant at the low paid.

It all comes down to how they are rich now, and so should you all be, plebs.

Who said it was about anyone being rich. You are obviously not badly off,
There is nothing to stop you donating money to charities like shelter and food banks etc. why do you need the government to do it for you

I do donate, not that it's any of your business... But strangely, I am not as well off as the uk and its various non tax paying companies.

I would have thought that was pretty obvious. I don't really see why out of my taxed income I should be making up for the govenment's refusal to tax companies who use infrastructure paid for by the taxes of you and I.

And I don't see why I should be subsidising those who have multiple children, for example. We both have different things we are unhappy subsidising, therefore if we had control of more of our money, we could decided how to spend it.