To want a budget which puts young people and families first

[HFJ]

In advance of an upcoming budget that will likely hammer working people (again, despite the rhetoric), I’m consoling myself by imagining my own budget. You’ll notice a theme. This is because I believe young people and families are the future, deserve to have hope, aspirations and goals. Please feel free to contribute.

1. The first 5 years of young people’s full time earnings to be tax and NI free. This would enable all to save for a house deposit, rather than only the few who inherit. Imagine the incentive to work hard!
2. No increases to any tax that primarily affects working age people, including fuel tax (because working people need fuel to go to work)
3. No stamp duty for young people and those with children under 18. This enables them a fairer chance of buying property rather than have to compete unfairly with cash buyers
4. Complete removal of the pension tax free cash allowance. This is because 100s of 1000s are poised to take their 25% lump sum and plough this into the property market (tbf I think the gov has got wind of this, hence the landlord tax changes)
5. instead of massive increases to NHS budget (which does not really benefit the young or families), a £10 charge to see the doctor, so people start to take ownership for their health
6. Removal of the free prescription for over 60s. Instead, use this money to bring back the school nurse and perhaps even school dentist visits

Any other ideas?

So according to you we should just ignore the ones who carnt and leave them to choose between heating, food or prescriptions! Shame on you

Totally agree with this one. Increase personal allowance to £20k before basic rate tax kicks in this would give those starting their working lives a chance to build up savings to get themselves established with housing and transport. Then increase the 40% threshold to £65k which would then encourage some professions eg doctors to remain as full time employees.

I agree - it's normal to be in a house share in your early 20s. I was in house shares on and off into my mid 30s due to moving around for work and being in expensive cities. Expecting your own place (as a single adult) at 24 is unrealistic unless you are in a cheap place or on a high wage and that's nothing new. My older relatives went from sharing a room at home to sharing a room with a work colleague then getting married. People have much higher expectations these days - student accommodation has en suites as standard and that's a very new change, halls all had shared facilities when I was there.
A budget focusing on balancing the books would be nice, rather than ideology and future vote winning. Relatively speaking the mid & lower earners pay less tax here than in Scandinavia - if we want a high service country we have to have high taxes all round. And yes to a copay model for the NHS - that's how most of Europe does it.

No it hasn't. Most inherited wealth is house prices that went up through no effort at all on the part of the owners, (some even had tax relief on their mortgage payments) or interest and share price increases on savings in ISAs, which are tax free.
Or the really rich with trust funds.

So according to you we should just ignore the ones who carnt and leave them to choose between heating, food or prescriptions! Shame on you

Err, where did I say this? Blanket free prescriptions for the over 60s will be gone in the next decade though.

They will increase the age

Increase it so that people aren't taxed like they are now and then given benefits to top up their income.

I very much doubt that

Schools should be at least partly funded on how many classes they need, rather than how many children.

It would have to be done over a period of time, but we should recognise that employEES NI is just another word for tax, so it should gradually be incorporated into income tax. This would also mean that pensions and income were taxed at the same rate.

Even better if employERS NI could also be moved into income tax, but this might be more tricky to sell.

I would like to see any benefit aimed at children, eg child benefit, paid in a non-cash way to try and ensure that the money goes where it's supposed to go.

And another thing (!), at present you can take 25% of your "pension pot" as a tax free lump sum, it could change by one or two percentage points without causing a massive sudden change in pensioners' behaviour.

Ooh looks like national minimum wage is going up 70p an hour.

Ooh, prices will increase for all of us and there will be fewer jobs available.
Ooh, more people will be on NMW than ever before, making many qualifications even more useless.

This is only to be celebrated if other changes are made in line with this. I doubt they will be.

THIS 100000%

I am in the middle, and qualify for absolutely nothing. Yet the constant increase in the cost of living is making me POOR. Like what’s the point?!

It would have to be done over a period of time, but we should recognise that employEES NI is just another word for tax, so it should gradually be incorporated into income tax. This would also mean that pensions and income were taxed at the same rate.

Would also stop the “I paid into my pension” nonsense.

Not sure about that. If it pays an electric bill or food shopping for the family isn't it not benefiting the children?

Also fewer hours available for employees.

Is there a shortage of minimum wage jobs? I thought lots of companies were struggling to recruit? It does mean my appraisal was pointless again this year and I will be earning the same as the person who started last month even though I've been there for years.

I would like to see a budget that prioritised support for those that needed it most. Its extremely blinkered and (likely self serving) of you to decide the criteria should be based on age and family circumstances, and not on means and needs and to have decided that inequality is based on age rather than wealth. If we adopted your first idea for example, you could have a young man in his 20s taking home considerably more money for doing the same job as a women in her 40s, say, because by your rationale, his age alone means he needs more money. Even if he has no responsibility and is supported by a wealthy family, while his colleague may have children to support. If your idea is to bring greater financial benefit to families, then you must surely see how flawed that is for starters.
I completely agree that we need to address child poverty as urgent and that this will benefit society as a whole. But I don't think we need to be dreaming up flawed schemes on the back of a fag packet. The child poverty action group has some excellent well researched aims already that they lobby for with government and I shall continue to support those.

Are you going to come back and defend your opinions @HFJ ?

Part of the problem is that NMW jobs often come with zero hour contracts used to abuse staff but hailed (by the employer) as the best flexi option available.

I would like to see a budget that prioritised support for those that needed it most. Its extremely blinkered and (likely self serving) of you to decide the criteria should be based on age and family circumstances, and not on means and needs and to have decided that inequality is based on age rather than wealth.

There is intergenerational inequality & it’s harder for young people to build wealth. Targeting wealth means targeting older people…

1. My young person doesn't pay for anything (child)

1. I pay for her foreign holidays

4.she doesn't drink coffee but if she did I'd be paying

1. She can kick me out if she wants but she'll then need to start paying for everything and making all her own meals.

It's funny because I have a child under 18 I can buy a house stamp duty free according to the op but another will have me chucked out because I'm over 50

Applying NIC to ALL income would make a massive difference. As it is, it's just a tax on wages. It makes no sense that NIC is applied to only wages, when it's not applied to other forms of income, particularly investment derived income, and income from property renting, capital gains, etc.

We used to have different rates of income tax depending on different types of income, i.e. how we ended up with higher rates of tax on "unearned" income as it was called, such as royalties, etc.

I'd hope that Reeves will be tackling this gross inequality. Perhaps start by applying NIC on ALL incomes at the 2% NIC rate currently levied on wages over the higher rate band, so it's not too much of a shock in one go, and then maybe increasing it by a percent or two each year going forward. Would bring in massive amount of tax revenue and wouldn't hit the "worker".