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.

YABVU

Honestly, “everyone” should pay - it’s your entire family tree I’m blushing for, frankly, never mind your mother. Are you one of those who thinks people scraping by on benefits - including those who’ve only a state pension - are feckless drains on society & thus deserve some income docking. After all, disabled people are likely to be social care service users & the fact just being disabled costs them an average of £583 per month doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be chipping in, right? (That was 2019, btw, anecdata suggests Covid’s hiked that up pretty dramatically…)

As for “it’s so unfaaaaaaaiiiiiiirrrrrrr” Unless you can come up with a solution to time [apparently] being linear, yes, if you are 30 you will (probably, there are no guarantees as to its duration) pay the increased NI rate for longer than your 60 year old colleague. But young people were spared The Poll Tax & don’t (won’t, let’s face it) have to pay anything like the staggering highest Income Tax rates of the 1950s/60s (a gradual drop down to 90%, from the 99.25% high during WW2). And the (elderly) people whose care costs The Young are contributing to have themselves contributed to the costs for their elders & The Young will need paying for themselves at some point - & not necessarily in their dotage, either: look on the bright side disgruntled people, maybe you’ll find yourselves severely disabled & be helping to pay for your own care after all!

Nobody's suggesting actually killing off the elderly, but in a society where death's become something to avoid at all costs there'll be consequences

I think there does need to be a recognition of the reality of living longer but again people don't like discussing it.

The narrative that the older generation fought it the war and are the poor of society needs to change- it’s working families that are struggling, it’s the younger generations fucked over.
Who wants to pay for better early years funding….*tumbleweed!

@MarieVanGoethem

Honestly how can you have read the thread & posted the below

Honestly, “everyone” should pay - it’s your entire family tree I’m blushing for, frankly, never mind your mother. Are you one of those who thinks people scraping by on benefits - including those who’ve only a state pension - are feckless drains on society & thus deserve some income docking

🤦🏻‍♀️😆

But well done for the excellent contribution!

Ever increasing house prices are not a good thing

No, they're not - and neither was the insanity of the stamp duty holiday which created yet another bubble so that many who overpaid will find themselves in negative equity when the next recession hits

Never mind though; it poured yet more money into the pockets of party donors house builders, and that seems to be the important thing

@MarieVanGoethem please read the thread and add an intelligent contribution. OP is not suggesting those surviving off the state pension pay!

This does rather read as though the OP thinks they'll never get old

@RubyRhubarb where have I inferred that?

In general I think NI should be phased out and income tax raised to replace the government income lost. But change would have to be phased in, you can't shift overnight from a system where workers pay extra taxes to one where the burden is better spread, as it would be unfair on certain generations, who had had to pay for their parents and grandparents care, but now won't be helped by the younger generations.

Having said that, there's nothing obviously unfair about tax varying according to age, as (nearly) everyone gets a turn to have each tax rate.

@ILoveAllRainbowsx my mum agrees with you.

I absolutely agree that raising NI is not the most appropriate or fair way of raising these funds.

As others have pointed out we still have a massive issue with huge corporations like Amazon not paying the correct levels of tax - why not go after them.

I also agree that those past retirement age should contribute too. It’s not only the elderly that require NHS and access to social care, my daughter is on a waiting list for a brace that we have been told could be as long as 5 years which will take her above the 18 years old deadline for free NHS treatment - it’s a problem that affects us all so if we are expected to pay it should be all of us not just the young contributing.

[quote shouldbeworkingmore]@DGRossetti how much have wages risen by & how do they compare to 10 or 20 years ago. [/quote]
It's not that simple. It's the rate of rising. This is free-market economics 101. Shortage of staff=need to pay more=need to raise prices=need to raise interest rates.

Anyway, it's less a question of how much people earn, and more a question of how that gets parcelled out. My son is paying far more from his wages on housing than I ever did in the 1980s.

@Puzzledandpissedoff I don't actually understand why people celebrate house price increases so much & I say that as a homeowner, it benefits very few.

@IveGotASongThatllGetOnYNerves

I really don't get the argument that pensioners aren't paying for social care. The money we pay is spent on the social care needed by others now. The people needing the care paid all their working lives and that paid for the care of those who needed it during that time. When we are old and if we need care, it will be paid by those working and paying taxes at that point. We all pay for those older than us then in turn are paid for by those younger, who are then themselves paid for by the then young workforce.

We should all really be providing now for our own retirement if at all possible, that way reducing the costs to only those who genuinely cannot provide for themselves.

The issue is that those requiring care now benefitted from a lower age of mortality for their parents/grandparents generations and weren’t living in an ageing population so bore far less of a financial burden.. They benefitted from free education, lower house prices etc and are now benefitting from medical advances resulting in a longer period of retirement of any previous generation. Meanwhile younger generations are overburdened and being shat on from great height while being told to suck it up.

Blueleah
It unfairly impacts the young because no doubt the extra tax they’re paying won’t be funding care by the time they need it themselves. It unfairly impacts the poor who don’t benefit from having a threshold on care costs because they have no assets anyway. It unfairly impacts those in the north where houses are barely worth the £80k threshold, so if they spend £80k there’ll be nothing left. The only ones who benefit are wealthy families who can pay £80k and still have some assets left to pass down. And call me crazy but I don’t think we should be implementing taxes that only benefit the rich

I’m not sure much more needs to be said than this. I’m all for higher taxes for better services if the burden is spread fairly. But over and over again it’s the young and the working people being shafted, and then not receiving the benefits of their efforts when it’s ‘their turn’. I’m relatively privileged and hardly ‘young’ - early 40s - but even I’m under no illusions that the pensions and retirement status quo will still be in place once I reach my 60s. Why should those younger and poorer than me, who know full well that the goalposts will be shifted again, buy into this?

We need to scrap the triple lock (should have been done years ago), raise inheritance tax and close as many tax avoidance loopholes before fiddling with NI. And stop caring what the Daily Mail thinks. I’ll potentially lose out from this (my elderly parents own a London home worth £750K+) but it’ll be fairer.

But when it came out of the older person- assets people complain....

I'm not sure whether answer is but I agree with a tax to support disabled adults.

@DGRossetti I just wondered what the real gain was & agree with you re disposable income.

The narrative that the older generation fought in the war

is utter bollocks. But a great example of a general malaise in societies fact checking radar.

@shouldbeworkingmore

Its how you wrote the post, or how I read it - or both

You write:-
I recognise that social care needs funding but think that this proposal unfairly targets the younger generations.

and then say 'we' as though you are part of the younger generation
Plus we already have income taxes by stealth as the thresh holds have been frozen & wage stagnation is likely to continue for the next

@OnlyFoolsnMothers
Who wants to pay for better early years funding?

God I wish this was even a thing. It would solve so many problems further down the line. But, as you say, tumbleweed…

As a Chartered Tax Advisor I’d love to hear your ideas for “going after Amazon and Starbucks etc”. It’s an international tax landscape. We can’t just decide to introduce taxes on these companies without thinking if their international footprint. France introduced new taxes on these companies. In response the US doubled the import duty on french wine. France was left with a net deficit from introducing these taxes. The UK is doing its bit globally to address the lack of tax paid by these companies in e.g. the UK but to think we can wave a wand and just take more tax from them - dream on!

How about it going onto council tax? As it’s local authorities who pay for social care. That way it would charge everyone, including the elderly, according to their means (council tax bands are based on house value.)