Rough' tax rises on the way

[Violashift]

What does this even mean? I can't take much more. Not with the rising energy prices and the absolute mess up of the mortgage interest rates rising.

How will people survive? Already we have not had pay rises and now we will all probably be taxed more.

I feel at the end of my tether. It's really affecting my mental health.

Wow. You are incredibly lucky, I hope you realise that.
I am a teacher, UPS3 so salary £41k. However I am also a single
Parent and a carer for elderly parents. Don't get a penny in anything to help and am already on my arse with payments.

As a higher rate taxpayer, but not one who’s too far into that bracket the very first thing I’d do if it were increased this much would be to go part time.

As for the value of houses and cars, the former is just what people are able and willing to pay and they would tumble if taxes rose to these levels. The latter? Many will be company cars. Neither of these represent a source of cash you can access at will to fork out more tax.

It makes a MASSIVE difference. The word “track” lends itself to be easily bent into “43 billion on an app”, whereas “test” includes all those stupid lft tests people did multiple times a day and after touching their post. It may seem like such a small difference, but like I say - words have meaning and the incorrect ones perpetuate myths.

and I’m no apologist for the waste of money. I only wish I’d had the sense to apply for a few dozen BBL loans myself and then fuck off to Brazil. 😂

Seriously? WTF? You do know where new pensioners come from don’t you? And while we’re at it, you do you know where babies come from?

People were ordering loads of those tests because they were 'free' there were loads of threads on here about it, surely these fools must have known it would have to be paid for eventually.

No chance. People didn’t think of that.

Ffs I’m not an idiot.

if the government have screwed over people in mid life (like me), I’m not going to then vote for them when I get older because I’ll remember how they screwed me over

This is not about paying for bloody LFT. As per the Gov's own figures the total cost of ALL testing and isolation was £15bn, £223 per person. Around 700 million were LFT at about £5 per test IF the Government paid VAT on them (which is highly unlikely). That makes a total of about £3.5bn on LFT. That's it.

The latest round of serious language about "rough tax rises" did not exist to this extent before Truss was elected. When Truss was elected the Treasury had £30bn MORE than it expected to have, because of increased tax revenues as a result of fuel and energy price increases (mainly).

That money has been wiped out PLUS another £50bn. In the last 3 months.

They are going to try to spin this as us paying for the pandemic but those costs had already been baked in to the books. This latest round is going to be us all paying, hand over fist, for Truss and Kwarteng's little jolly - which came supported by the ERG and TPA.

An ERG that has forced Sunak to put Braverman in post, despite her breaking ministerial code and resinging 6 days previously.

This is not because someone ordered too many LFT when they didn't need to. Getting us all to blame our neighbours for our countries troubles is classic diversionary tactics and it is bullshit.

"if the government have screwed over people in mid life (like me), I’m not going to then vote for them when I get older because I’ll remember how they screwed me over"
I've been around a while, and I can tell you that in my experience whoever is in government they screw you over/make daft decisions. But this particular lot have been spectacularly good at both.

No, it’s because we printed a trillion pounds in 14 years. That’s a number with a lot of zeros.

£1,000,000,000,000

Half of this was printed to pay for Covid.

At the same time tax burden is at its highest in 70 years and the nations productivity at a low.

Truss, as crazy as her is executional style was, didn’t cause this in 4 weeks.

People keep swallowing the line that the Ukraine and Truss caused it. No, 25 years of bad government caused it.

We weren't badly governed in the 90s and '00s, one could argue we weren't even badly governed under Thatcher, i might not have agreed with all of it at all but the UK did ok.

We have been badly Governed since the Tories got in, with Austerity that lasted far longer than it should off, no one continued it for 10 years, we should have stopped in 2014/15 and started investing, government led.

Then they gave us Brexit, which stalled governance and is still ruinous for the UK economy - no one but a fool would start from the premise of wrecking trade with our nearest, richest and largest trading bloc plus look what it has done for x border immigration.

Furlough cost close to £70 billion.
www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-60924286.amp

Not massively more than the £56 billion Truss and Kwartang spanked up the wall in a couple of hours and much more useful.

It would be less if they hadn't written off the fraudulent claims.

It seems they could afford the true cost of furlough, as far as I'm concerned the furlough was covered. It's the tory hubris we are paying for.

Yep. Furlough was effectively a bribe to companies to not sack their staff.

Many firms did well out of furlough because they had lower costs to pay and could still generate income. Many companies that needed furlough were service based companies but I wonder how many took the furlough option as they could see a 20% saving in staff costs and never intended to sack anyone.

I also read that only 25% of the workforce was actually furloughed.

Yep. Anyone on a zero hours contract got nothing.

OP, I know that this is from the Daily Mail, so you might want to take it with a pinch of salt, but they say that this is what increases we can expect to see. I hope it’s not as bad as you fear.

@Grumpybutfunny

My priorities would always be
Education
Health
Defence
emergency services
Including fair pay to retain the best staff in these sectors.
What is left can then be divided amongst the other things that are nice to have in a western society but we really can't afford.

What about Social care? One of the problems for the NHS is the crisis in social care...

It's time for reform of something's being extras provided by the government that you pay for if you want them. So say remove refuge collection from council tax the you can pay the council X for it or a private company Y

Refuse collection is a public health issue. Nobody wants to live next to the people who can't or won't pay for that service separately - and if they actually can't afford it what happens then?

I'm very much from the Asian view point that social care comes down to families. For me and my husband we wouldn't want to live if we couldn't be independent. So we are happy to pay for a cleaner (currently do anyway), send the washing out, have food delivered etc. I would be happy for DS to do little things for us as we age if we can't manage say pick up heavy parcels from ikea etc but if we can't be independent we won't be here.

Who wouldn't get rid of their rubbish!!! Just make having a refuse contract mandatory taken off at source so pay or benefits. Not having one is an unlimited fine. Make it a simple automated job of say you provide evidence by X date or the computer removes it at source and you don't get to pick (removes the most expensive one as a deterrent).

I'm very much from the Asian view point that social care comes down to families.

But people are living longer, with more complicated health issues. People can't always provide that level of care - or can't provide it long term. Carers already save the government over £130 billion. People also have to move away for work (remember 'get on your bike to where the jobs are...'?).

It is not always practical or safe for family members to provide care. We're not only talking about booking a Tesco delivery every week. We could be talking about 24 hour care for a parent with dementia, who gets up multiple times in the night and can't be left alone.

And what about people who don't have family, or whose family already have caring commitments elsewhere? If my parents needed care today I couldn't provide it as I work full time and have a school refusing 9 year old with suspected ASD, who I spend pretty much every hour outside of work (and sometimes during work) dealing with. DH and I are already crumbling from that.

Who wouldn't get rid of their rubbish!!!

People with chaotic lifestyles, mental health problems, addiction issues. Or if it was a choice between eat or pay for your rubbish to be taken away, what would you pick? How do you pay if your benefits have been reduced for some reason - perhaps because your application has been denied and you have to go through the appeal process, or you've been sanctioned, and we all know sanctions are not always applied fairly?

Perhaps the last twenty years were an aberration built on printing money and now we are returning to the mean. Globally, at least in the West

That's literally how it was recorded and they said as much in writing on screen as they reported the deaths

People don't want the truth though. And they don't want to spend time actually understanding economics and what governments are really doing.

All they want to do is live high on the credit hog, go on holiday, buy new cars and watch Strictly.

Then when it all goes pear shaped it's about rage and soundbites and blaming whatever or whoever is convenient and easy to point the finger at.

The bottom line is that for years as a country we've been living in a really unbalanced and (financially) unsustainable way. And now we have to go cold turkey then there is going to be a lot of unhappy people around as they finally realise they are not as rich as they thought they were.

Ain’t that the truth!?

Who wouldn't get rid of their rubbish!!! Just make having a refuse contract mandatory taken off at source so pay or benefits. Not having one is an unlimited fine. Make it a simple automated job of say you provide evidence by X date or the computer removes it at source and you don't get to pick (removes the most expensive one as a deterrent).

Instead of all that, why not just have the council do it, paid for with tax money? Sounds a lot cheaper and more efficient to me.

We can also look at the excess deaths - 140,000 in England & Wales, March 2020 - June 2021.

Of course some of them will have died from things other than Covid, but some people who died from Covid would very likely have died from something else in that year - flu perhaps. There will also be people who have had Covid and will die in the future from it's long-term effects. It's going to be nigh on impossible to know a precise number.

'I'm very much from the Asian view point that social care comes down to families'

Different cultures do things differently. From what I see this is expected of women in the Asian culture. There are more 'family traditions' usually at, imo, the detriment to women. In Western culture women have been expected to work for a long time now and of course want to. It has given us more freedom and we won't/don't want to do it all.

Something needs to be done though because it is inherently very unfair that someone who has worked and saved all their lives has to pay full whack whilst those who haven't don't have to pay and their relatives have the easy choice of someone else doing it.