To think that working people should get help too

[cantthinkofabetterusername]

I read today about another COL payment next year for people on benefits, pensioners etc. Now I completely agree that the most vulnerable in society need help and i don't begrudge them a penny. My AIBU is working people are struggling too! I work 30 hours a week, dp does 50 therefore we get no government help as we apparantley earn too much. In reality we're scraping by most months due to increasing bills and general cost of living, I'm aware I may come across as jealous, I'm not im just bloody frustrated that working people who don't get government help are seen by the government as not struggling

Going round in circles, the squeezed middle should have that buffer there already from their wages!!!! THEY DON'T - That is the problem.

Many of the those who are dead against the working poor receiving any help because ‘they worked their arses off to get to where they are’ fail to realise that if everyone was able to do the same then they won’t have anyone stacking the shelves at supermarkets so they can easily find their groceries, there’ll be no one keeping the hospitals clean so they don’t die from infection, no one to deliver their parcels so they’ll have to go out to purchase everything - but when they get to the shops they will be closed because they’ll be no staff.

they’ll also be no one teaching their kids, no nurses keeping everyone well and no childcare so they can go to work.

and as for the disabled, they’ll just have to rot!

@Winceybincey I am one of the people who worked they’re arses off, I’m also at the low end of the squeezed middle and a single parent to 2 dcs but I would hope that people would start to realise that what we see now is a result of low wages, zero hours contracts etc. not people sat around on their arses.
It all feels a bit like when people say about how little farmers make but then complain when the price of milk goes up.

If you are in the 40pc tax bracket then i don't think you can class yourself as a middle earner.

There is a big group of people between middle earners and "the rich".

I read on a thread recently where a couple worked full time and don't qualify for UC as they have 30k in savings. They are pissed off about it so we're asking for advice on ways to get rid of 30k (paying off mortgage was their idea) and then they would qualify for UC. So is the way forward? People deliberately making themselves 'poor enough' to get their 'share' of benefits?

It’s insane that so many are intelligent enough to do well in life but aren’t intelligent enough to put 2 and 2 together. The middle earners NEED the working poor just as much as the working poor NEED them, yet there’s so much hatred towards each other as to has it worse.

it isn’t possible in our economy for everyone to be a middle/high earner, if it was then life as we know it would end and we highly likely wouldn’t survive.

I do understand that everyone is struggling at the moment and it's difficult for a great many.

What I'd bet though is that the angry 'I don't get any help and I have to pay for everyone else' posters are quite likely to be the same ones who have been fond in the past of dishing out the 'work harder and cut your cloth accordingly, move house, get a second job, it's all about personal responsibility' advice to low earners, but suddenly because they're now being affected, it's all not fair and none of that "advice" should apply to them ................

Until very recently I was working 30 hours too as, like you, I had to fit it around the dc. Except i'm a single mum. Now imagine living of off just your 30 hour wage without your dhs wages.

Working people get benefits too, but I imagine as you're a two adult household you have the potential to bring more money in.

@Winceybincey sorry but I can't be bothered to answer your question as your a fantasist.

You claim in this thread you paying the 45p rate of tax and your putting away thousands for gifts for the most vulnerable this Xmas. But yet to quote you from another thread "The jump is insane but I can’t see where we can cut back. We have two toddlers and this doesn’t include nappies and wipes but the earlier shops included formula that we stopped buying in May. It’s mental." So which is it up 🤣🤣🤣

No, the OP was asking if putting the savings into their mortgage would count as a deprivation of capital.. not asking for ways to make 30k in savings vanish so they could claim.

Turns out, they can put their savings into their mortgage.

That’s my weekly shop hun, £170 a month it is now - increased from around £100. Very difficult to cut back on it indeed as we need it all. It is mental how it’s gone up.

but what’s your point?

Sorry £170 a week

I get UC and work full time. But feel free to be envious of my £16k a year. And at 37 hours a week, I’m more of a working person than you are, OP. I also get top rates of PIP because I’m quite severely disabled. Are you envious of disabled people too?

We didn’t get it!

@Woolandwonder, I did not get any money off of council tax bill. Only bands A to D got it.

They specifically said they wanted to know if it was classed as deprivation and go against them when they claimed UC. Despite having 30k savings, they thought they should be entitked to benefits. They were advised to pay off mortgage then wait 6 months so it didn't show on bank statements and go against them. My point being, are people now deliberately making themselves poor enough to be entitled to certain benefits? There are some genuinely shocking opinions about people who are genuinely in need (who they consider lazy scroungers and scammers) and so was interested to know what they thought of people who were not in need but were making themselves needy?

Comments like this are silly.

If you are the "squeezed middle" then your overall tax contribution is far less than you will take out of the system over your lifetime in services like education, healthcare, pensions. You are already a net recipient from the system. Only the top 25-30% of taxpayers are net contributors. So claims that you are funding everyone else are simply not true.

That's not to say those in the middle shouldn't have received more support. In particular, there should be support for childcare costs and for single parents who are currently penalised hugely by the child benefit, Council tax and income tax systems.

But to be a net contributor to tax and be able to claim you are "funding" anybody else you need to be substantially into the higher rate tax bracket.

Rather than direct your ire at benefit claimants, perhaps look at the Government that mismanaged Covid, created a Trussterfuck costing us £30bn per year plus a £60bn BOE bailout of pension funds underwritten by the Treasury (i.e. taxpayers) for a political stunt, and now claim that they have a mandate to do the exact opposite without having an election at any point.

And that's without even getting into the fact that they deliberately wiped 4% - compounding annually - from GDP for their beloved Brexit, created labour shortages, trashed the value of GBP in the process feeding higher inflation. All for no benefit whatsoever. If you want a better country and people to be struggling less then email your MP about why - unsurprisingly - that elephant in the room failed to even get a mention in the hour long statement today. £40bn of the £60bn of tax rises and cuts could be avoided by rejoining the single market, so to crush people's incomes by 7% in the next two years was entirely optional.

I think all the help for people on benefits and pensioners is divisive. Those on benefits and pensioners get 10.1 percent increase but those working full time, so 37 hours a week or more, get 3 or 4 percent. The CoL crisis is affecting everyone but it is demoralising for full time workers to receive only one third of benefit and pensioner groups. Better to give 6.5 percent to all.

Commonsense at last. Well put @BlackberriesArePurple. But no doubt @privacynotnow will come back with a 'I don't care what you think' childish reply instead of an intelligent and reasoned response

I'm getting a little fed up of seeing well off pensioners ( as part of my job role) who receive a disability benefit and are still getting this £150 extra payment. many of them have in excess of 50k in savings. Why give the disability cost of living payment to everyone? Some people on PIP will have good jobs or partners on good incomes and there are so many pensioners getting Attendance allowance with good private pensions and lots of savings. The help should be better targeted. Also things like these winter fuel payments going to all pensioners regardless of their situation. I'm all for needy people getting help but a lot of these people benefitting are far from needy.

However another truth is there are far fewer pensioner households in absolute poverty than working households.

My preference would be for the help there is to be better targeted. I know pensioners who are extremely wealthy, pensioners absolutely on the breadline and everything in between.

Being a single person and especially a single parent is the factor most highly correlated with poverty. If we want to increase productivity and growth then poverty needs addressing. One simple step towards this would be to amend the tax system so that single adult households are not penalised as they are now - being able to earn half as much as a two adult household before they pay tax, before hitting higher thresholds, before losing child benefit etc. Very simple to amend the tax code in this way. This applies to single pensioners also - who unsurprisingly make up the largest proportion of pensioners in poverty.

So why is nobody campaigning for this? A simple, easily implementable solution to a large part of the UK's problem.

Many other European countries apply tax on a household basis because it makes far more sense and is much fairer. We do this with benefits so the systems exist. There is no excuse for it. Of course, it wasn't even mentioned today.

The real issue is that anyone working full-time shouldn’t get benefits (other than child benefit which we all get anyway) - they should be paid a proper wage, rather than the government (meaning us really) subsidising their employer.

Means testing costs more than it saves, especially for a short term scheme like the energy support. See the child benefit debacle, utterly pointless and is a net cost to tax payers to have it means tested. So spending money on processing when that money surely would be better being spent on families whether you deem them to "need" it or not.

I can see both sides. We are only just treading water and not entitled to anything. Buffer went during Covid and haven’t managed to resave. We will have to start thinking outside the box. Currently self employed. Not entitled to help. Must somehow up game.