To worry about the Tory plans after this budget

[bobbywash]

and I accept the election may derail all of this but.....

The chancellor has said an additional 30bn worth of cuts needs to be made in the next parliament for their figures to work.

Now bearing in mind the ring fenced NHS budget and the (wavering) commitment to the education budget and pensions. Where the heck are an additional 30bn of cuts going to come from.

Is there anything left to cut

Even the institute of fiscal studies is asking where the 10 million unaccounted for cut is going to come from. That looks like the end of the welfare state to the rest of the world

yeah reading it, it's looking pretty scary

Spending cuts planned for 2016-17 and 2017-18 would be "twice the size of any year's cuts over this parliament", said Mr Johnson, if the £12bn of cuts already announced and the Chancellor's hoped-for £5bn of anti tax avoidance measures failed to materialise.
But, ahead of the election, the IFS said it had been left "guessing" how these cuts were going to be achieved, said Mr Johnson, admitting that the lack of detail was "frustrating".
"You're going to have to do things like further big cuts in child benefit, or really substantial cuts to housing benefit or significant cuts to disability benefits," he said.
"He's announced about £2bn [of cuts] and we know nothing about where the further £10bn are coming from."

Don't like the idea of the cuts to disability, personally would like to see some ring fencing around that area, yet even on this thread you have people suggesting they don't want there taxes paying money to private landlords, and the proposed child benefit cap that was a topic on here was generally supported by the left wing as well.

You know, not one of my siblings has noticed and yet they all earn salaries over 500,000. Interesting.

And really, Eds they have not, in any meaningful way, or in real terms born the brunt of anything.

the poorest lose

I think the point for me is that I'd like the Chancellor to spend a bit more time explaining exactly where billions of pounds of welfare cuts will actually come from, rather than one sentence saying it will happen. Pisses me off that he spent more time on petty jokes than actually communicating that. So we don't know whether or not there will be cuts to carers' allowance or not, but presumably it's only going to be working age benefits so they all must look quite vulnerable.

Dawn - are you serious, your siblings earn over £500k!

Hillingdon

Political sound bytes and anecdotes are allowed if you support the opposition.

Yes, I am.

I think there is no party who represents me or my family. However I don't want to be in Greek situation where are economy has been ground down to nothing. Labour is a crowd pleasing bunch of idiots and the Tories are too self serving I hate our political choice

Dawndonnaagain, can we assume that your family don't want to help you?

Starting from the premise that to balance the books we need £30bn what really strikes me is no-one seems to be talking tax.

Whereas £30bn is a huge proportion of the welfare budget (excluding pensions), it's not actually that much tax.

If you applied a 1.5% wealth tax to the wealthiest 1% of the population, it'd raise the £30bn. If you wanted to lessen the impact on individuals you could make it 0.7% on the top 10%.

This sort of tax whilst it would be a shock wouldn't have a massive impact on people's lives as the poorest within the 1% have at least £3million.

The 1% affected by the bedroom tax (high proportion disabled) have had their available income cut by up to 33%. The poverty this created is huge and it has raised so little money (as these were some if the poorest in our country BEFORE the government took a large chunk of their money).

As for the claim that the richest are bearing the brunt as they pay a higher proportion of tax, as this government has only reduced taxes for the wealthy, surely this just means they have increased their share of the wealth (and thus have done best out of the last 5 years).

If we want to balance the books without massive harm, rather than cutting our limited welfare state, we just need small tax rises for the very wealthy.

grovel I don't do begging.

You know, not one of my siblings has noticed and yet they all earn salaries over 500,000. Interesting.

Anecdotes from someone who really doesn't like anecdotes from people whose neighbors are working the system.

If you applied a 1.5% wealth tax to the wealthiest 1% of the population, it'd raise the £30bn. If you wanted to lessen the impact on individuals you could make it 0.7% on the top 10%.

By "wealth tax", do you mean just taking 1.5% of net worth?

Genuine naive question.
If Tories can't stretch a budget they've had for awhile and won't dump nhs etc how do you expect labour et al to find more cash without spiking taxes?
I haven't decided who I'm voting for yet btw

The issue is Handsoff, that proportionally the wealthy contribute more to the public coffers and take out less. Wether you like it or not there is a fine line between a willing tax payer (even with aggressive tax avoidance schemes) and a 'brain drain' -hate that term, France tried it and had an exodus to London and they are now reversing the policy.

The real elephant in the room is the cost of housing, our economy has been built on this over the past few decades, yet how many middle class home owners are willing to take a personal hit.

Dawndonna what tax rate would you like to see your siblings pay?

No idea, emotions but one is a Tory who disagrees with this government, one is a of a socialist bent and the other I have no contact with. They agree with me and funnily enough would be willing to pay a tad more.

I asked the question on a quieter thread but it's been missed, hoping someone here might know.

If the personal tax allowance is being raised, doesn't that benefit people who claim taxable state benefits?

It has no effect with regard to jsa/esa/dla/pip and carers allowance, Ptolemy but I know nothing about wtc/ctc. It may be that it's not enough in the wage packet, as it were, to have any sort of knock on effect either way.

There are 63 million people in this country. Everyone of those is worthy of consideration in the budget and from all Govts. Just because someone is not on the breadline doesn't mean they are unworthy of support and breaks.

The role of Govt is to deliver for the majority the best possible outcome.

Without a strong ecomony everyone suffers.

I agree the government has to deliver the best outcome, well in my view the best outcome is to raise income tax for higher earners to 42% and avoid making more cuts.

Oh the higher income tax bracket should be raised to catch those earning over 50K as it should be if it had gone up in line with inflation over the last few years.

Unfortunatly Labour will raise taxes and waste the revenue gained on something worthless to the majority, and the Tories won't raise the tax as they see it offending their front line voting demographic.

Things are difficult enough already without screwing more people in to the ground. Foodbanks had not existed in my lifetime (that I was aware of) and are now a part of everyday life. In an educated society, that is just wrong.

Dawndonnaagain - you shouldn't need to "beg" your own family to see your need and help. Especially the sibling with the "socialist bent"......if they are happy to pay more why not start close to home? Am shocked that people so wealthy will ignore a sibling who is struggling so.

BMW They are unaware of my financial situation and that is the way I wish it to stay. I am not their responsibility. I am shocked at the people who feel that the state should shirk responsibility.

IFS says poor suffer most

ptolemy not really
because they've cut tax credits much harder. I stopped paying tax a couple of years ago (gained a tenner a month) but my tax credits were frozen and my childcare tax credits cut by £80 month.

I've just looked it up (yes, I realise I could have done that in the first place - sorry!) but it says here that carers, JSA, ESA are taxable, so I'd have thought that means that even though the benefit of the rise in personal allowance is going to be small for some benefit claimants, it does exist.

With that in mind, I'm not really sure it's fair to say that the budget has done absolutely nothing to help the poorest.

Meglet, tax credits are tax free, and they were far too generous (apart from the childcare element) so they needed to be cut. It might be better to be thankful that no one has to pay tax on tax credits in the first place.

With that in mind, I'm not really sure it's fair to say that the budget has done absolutely nothing to help the poorest.
Thatcher made all benefits taxable. It doesn't mean we see a difference in real terms. It does go up every April, but it's usually a matter of pennies.