To think the proposed NI increases for social care are unfair?

[shouldbeworkingmore]

I recognise that social care needs funding but think that this proposal unfairly targets the younger generations. Plus we already have income taxes by stealth as the thresh holds have been frozen & wage stagnation is likely to continue for the next decade.

In the short, accounting term, it was delivered as a win-win, but the back-loaded costs of interest payments, service charges etc have ballooned, and are stealing money from current operating budgets. Politicians as always try to over-deliver on the cheap at the beginning and assume they will be out of office by the time the true costs start to bite, so they won't be around to answer for their decisions. I'm not cynical, really, but I am old enough to have seen the cycle, cycle at least twice.

I am fairly sure that most long-established retail companies with extensive property portfolios built up over 50+ years did the same, and most have ............ evaporated.

Off balance sheet financing is what it used to be called.

everybody wants things,but not if they have to pay for it,money has to be found somewhere,so where does it come from,taxes usually,it hurts like hell,we all know that,other suggestions are welcome

Sadly @mogsrus, every bill will eventually arrive. It's more painful when you don't recall signing for it.

I think the government spends money on things that are not wanted by most people e.g. HS2

Very true. HS2 is a vanity exercise, that will achieve little except piling up the debt.

@OnlyFoolsnMothers
‘Why didn’t they’ (pensioners) ‘go to Uni it was free’.
Well, to go to University you needed very high grades, and very few people achieved those, unlike today, when all must pass and half gain A grades. Way fewer places were available; from my grammar school class only 2 or 3 went to University.

Also of course many young people needed to start earning, to help support the family. Many left school at 15/16 and would not be eligible for University.

So they have paid in for a very long time

Yes parents couldn't always support them, very different times

I'm only half way through the thread, but have seen several posters suggest that pensioners don't contribute towards the cost of their care. If someone is in a local authority funded care home, they are expected to contribute from their income. I believe that currently, they are allowed to keep around £25 per week, the rest goes towards funding their care. The only people who get to keep all their income are those who are self-funding anyway. I'm not sure how much more of their income some posters want to take.

@CalamityJaneDoe

I feel like, with the current housing crisis, inheritance should be capped at £20,000 per child. They should not be able to inherit the house but should be offered first refusal to buy the house.

The proceeds the government gets from the inheritance and the sales of homes should go straight into social housing.

This would solve two problems- social housing and the rich getting richer every generation, widening the wealth divide and further cementing class roles.

Why should people forfeit the property they have scrimped to pay for most of their working lives? My parents were very proud to own a modest house after working long hours and making many sacrifices. Interest rates were extortionate and they went without holidays or luxuries. When DF died and DM went into a home we had to sell the house to pay for her care. She never knew this but believed that she was leaving us a property.

@Xenia

There is far too much tax. I would prefer a small state and let people opt out of the NHS (with paying less tax for those who opt out)

We know. Thing is if you were seriously ill or had a terrible accident, you’d want to opt back in pretty sharpish.

@OnlyFoolsnMothers, when I went to university in 1974, only 5 or 6% of school leavers went. There were only about 50 real universities, and despite all that you read about A levels being the same as ever, they really weren't. Grades were "normed" so only the top 5% would get an A, regardless. If the pass mark that year was 85%, you would have needed 95% to get an A. And back then, there was a Scholarship paper to distinguish the very brightest, for which there was no set syllabus.

I showed my O level Latin papers from 1972 to my son's Latin teacher in 2010, (Catullus, Cicero and Scipio) and she reckoned it would have been a stretch for her Y12 AS level candidates.

I think Boris et al are suggesting NI increase so that when everyone goes NoNoNO unfair etc he'll shrug and say Oh well, if no one wants that then we'll have to raise tax...... and everyone will be relieved instead of whingeing and ranting about a tax increase.

Why should people forfeit the property they have scrimped to pay for most of their working lives? My parents were very proud to own a modest house after working long hours and making many sacrifices. Interest rates were extortionate and they went without holidays or luxuries.

Yes, and that's why they had a house. And I have the same instinct, to go without and leave things to my children. But when we do that, the end result is that people end up with tremendous good fortune due to an accident of birth, while further disadvantaging those who happened to be born to less well off parents. Very often those unearned inheritors then use their wealth to deepen the moat that keeps out the less advantaged - recent decades have seen huge growth in inequality.

Even if your parents weren't able to leave you a house, they left you their love, the role model of their work ethic and the massively better life odds that come with being raised by healthy home owning parents in one of the richest countries in the world.

That's a pretty decent inheritance.

I am fairly sure that Xenia would accept there not being an opt-back-in option without incurring a swingeing penalty cost.

@OverTheRubicon

Why should people forfeit the property they have scrimped to pay for most of their working lives? My parents were very proud to own a modest house after working long hours and making many sacrifices. Interest rates were extortionate and they went without holidays or luxuries.

Yes, and that's why they had a house. And I have the same instinct, to go without and leave things to my children. But when we do that, the end result is that people end up with tremendous good fortune due to an accident of birth, while further disadvantaging those who happened to be born to less well off parents. Very often those unearned inheritors then use their wealth to deepen the moat that keeps out the less advantaged - recent decades have seen huge growth in inequality.

Even if your parents weren't able to leave you a house, they left you their love, the role model of their work ethic and the massively better life odds that come with being raised by healthy home owning parents in one of the richest countries in the world.

That's a pretty decent inheritance.

But why bother to scrimp to buy property if you then have to leave it to the state? If I thought that would happen I would sell up and tent and enjoy my retirement.

The people affected would be those who are worried for their children and grandchildren - because unless and until there's (a lot) more social housing, inheritance is the only chance they'll get to have a secure home.

That’s all very nice and heartwarming as long as you keep whitewashing out the many other, generally already less privileged people who won’t inherit this unearned housing wealth because their parents and grandparents have none to leave, but are now being asked to subsidise the future inheritances of others through an NI levy.

Do those who don’t inherit not also have the chance of a secure home? Or at a minimum, not to have to shore up someone else’s chance while reducing their own ability to save?

@Ritasueandbobtoo9 We have a local GP service contracted out to virgin and it knocks spots off our local NHS GP. We also have a couple of contracted out specialist services that are rated very highly.

@JassyRadlett

The people affected would be those who are worried for their children and grandchildren - because unless and until there's (a lot) more social housing, inheritance is the only chance they'll get to have a secure home.

That’s all very nice and heartwarming as long as you keep whitewashing out the many other, generally already less privileged people who won’t inherit this unearned housing wealth because their parents and grandparents have none to leave, but are now being asked to subsidise the future inheritances of others through an NI levy.

Do those who don’t inherit not also have the chance of a secure home? Or at a minimum, not to have to shore up someone else’s chance while reducing their own ability to save?

We are recently retired and have subsidised the inheritance of others for over 40 years. We did not inherit property or a share of property as it all went to pay for DP’s care homes. Chances are our DC won’t inherit either.

@Pottedpalm Why would people sacrifice the salary they have worked very hard for just to pay taxes?

@Pottedpalm families have the option to care for their own loved ones as in other cultures.

We are recently retired and have subsidised the inheritance of others for over 40 years. We did not inherit property or a share of property as it all went to pay for DP’s care homes. Chances are our DC won’t inherit either.

Can you clarify how you mean you’ve subsidised it? For me making this about NI to facilitate a very low asset cap, when many of the beneficiaries in the next two decades are of the demographic to have profited most from the asset-driven net worth boom, makes it more of a direct inheritance subsidy than we’ve yet seen.

It’s not about properly funding or reforming social care, it’s about protecting people’s assets and inheritances at the cost to a subset of the tax paying population who are less likely to have acquired asset wealth to the same degree.

NI is already a regressive tax. Increasing it for an asset protection scheme would make it even more so.

I’m not in the group that thinks inheritance should be abolished, but given the vast unearned wealth that has accumulated in property over the last thirty years, taking still further steps to ensure that wealth is hoarded and sequestered rather than increasing inheritance tax on those estates to help fund social care is thoroughly inequitable.

And before the ‘you’re just jealous’ group start bleating, I stand to have a significant inheritance if my parents don’t spend it all first. That will be very nice, im sure, though I hope it’s not for a long time. But given the relative privilege I was born into, I’ve already had a good boost up in my life. I should certainly not expect to inherit their full estate - totally unearned and untaxed.

@Pottedpalm, you wouldn't be sacrificing your property to the state, but to cover your own social care. Not the same thing.