Tax increases imminent

[Iwishicouldflyhigh]

Heavy hints that taxes will rise in the next Budget after the recent climb down (as the ‘taxes won’t rise again’ was based on a 5 billion saving in benefits).

I can’t lie, I’m so pissed off about this. I don’t think anyone wants to see someone who is genuinely unable to work to be further penalised, but we all know there are thousands of people who could work but don’t.

this country is going to absolute shit . We pay more and more for less and less.

Dentists can cope fine. Set the fees at a level that covers the cost of administering it. The main benefit would be the reduction in scumbags not attending appointment or time wasting. I imagine A&E would quite a bit quieter if there was a £50 fee to pay.

Get the GP practices to open a bank account and buy a couple of contactless terminals.
And put a collection box for those without contactless to put in a fiver.
Once a month all the money is transferred to the NHS.

Unless you believe she came into politics to take benefits away from people (in which case I don’t think there’s much point engaging)

Reeves might not have specifically come into politics to take away benefits, but she has always had disdain for benefit claimants.

“We are not the party of people on benefits. We don’t want to be seen, and we’re not, the party to represent those who are out of work. Labour are a party of working people, formed for and by working people.”

Reeves 2015.

It's natural to feel angry. I think we all feel the impact of inflation, and the recent tax raise is making life even tougher for the middle class.

The UK government's biggest expenses are on social care and health benefits. Our aging population is a contributing factor, but it's also worth noting that refugees do contribute slowly to the spending in social care. I remember I read somewhere from Home Office stats that 1 in 5 new British citizens in the last five years were refugees, and these families are more likely to claim Universal Credit. The self-disclosed UC data also supports this, showing that there were 40% more Asian/Asian mix individuals claiming Universal Credit from Jan 23 to Mar 24(compared to around 2x% of other ethnic groups during the same period).

Perhaps one potential solution could be for the government to consider revising the terms of Universal Credit to be based on the number of years an individual has been living in the UK. It will also reduce the pull factor to attract economic migrants who are coming to the UK for social benefits.

I do sympathize with those who are struggling, and those who are fleeing from war but it seems that the current support is not enough to go around. And if the number of economic migrants reduce, those who are in need will eventually receive better help and support from local communities.

I used to live in New Zealand a number of years ago and you paid a small fee to see a GP or for things like physio. Hospital care and A & E were free. It seemed to work quite well.

I agree, the trouble is given that stat below we’re getting more and more demands. More debt and taxes. Sinking.

Ideas for raising cash - Inheritance tax increase -reduces wealth inequality.

Massive taxes on second and more home - as many local authorities are doing with council tax. Huge taxes on empty homes - break the housing is an asset model and return it to housing is somewhere to live.

ID cards for everyone so that we can get a better grip on the dark economy and the massive amount of unpaid tax in it.

Linked to that - no NHS services without ID. Charges for NHS services for everyone - small ones that can be taken from benefits if received (including child/pension benefits) otherwise too much money will be spent chasing it.

Unlock the pension triple lock immediately.

Hotel services charge for those in hospital more than 7 days for food bedding and social care this should reduce bed blocking and incentivise people to get a move on arranging discharge. If you have a paid carer then they should attend you in hospital not get paid for no work. This is what is done in other countries - families or carers provide social care in hospital.

Legalise marijuana and tax it like alcohol and cigarettes.

Also caused by successive governments inability to manage basic business. There are windfarms that are currently being paid to not generate electricity when they could be as the grid cannot cope with it.

Energy bills are nothing to do with taxation though, unless you blame the ineffective oversight which allows bonuses to be paid to private owners who do not invest in infrastructure.

I am absolutely fed up of a small number of PAYE tax payers getting constantly screwed. Yet business owners seem to be able to put most of their life expenses through their accounts to save on tax - right through to school fees I recently learnt.

I presume the people who don't want to pay more tax are also in favour of rejoining the Single Market, looser planning regulations and most importantly, accept that reducing benefits means that YOU AND YOUR FAMILY MEMBERS won't receive help when they need it.

That means YOUR elderly parents should pay for their doctors appointments and their social care regardless of the fact "they've paid tax all their lives".

That means YOUR child who has ADHD/ASD etc and is in need of a full time Teaching Assistant shouldn't get one.

It means accepting also that keeping people in poverty has costs regardless of whether they "deserve" to be in poverty or not. That child who doesn't get child benefit because "people shouldn't have kids they can't afford" doesn't, in most cases, actually die. They're just less likely to get good qualifications, to be disruptive in school, to have mental health problems, to commit crime. And all these things have a cost.

Quite and with our first past the post democracy we may have crossed the tipping point where those on the take will just keep voting for some and keeping it. We used to be a country that put states up for people who build factories and business now we give them abuse on twitter.

Each individual dentist surgery is a private business that has to do its own accounts. That works fine for private patients, but the reason it's impossible to get an NHS dentist is because the process of being paid for NHS patients is too onerous, slow and economically unviable. If the same model were introduced for GPs they would end up the same - essentially private.

Would you be ok with someone dying from a heart attack because they can't afford the £50 A and E fee?

I suspect those advocating this can afford the fees easily.

I think even a sniff of higher debt is enough to set them off, going by the last couple of days.

In a way it might be good to just try and see what happens. At least everyone will know if that something drastic is plausible.

That sort of emergency treatment would be free!

That sort of emergency treatment would be free!

@HPFA those families having multiple children that they cannot afford, cannot parent and who end up with poor outcomes are not going to change signficantly if you throw a bit more money at them.

When you come from a poor background what you have is a desperate ambition not to be poor, to escape poverty which motivates you to actually do what it takes to achieve something in life.

If you come from a background where all you have ever known, all you have been told by family members is that you are poor and vulnerable and that the difficulties you have is all someone else's fault then you are less likely to get moving, get working and get on with it.

We need to promote strength not weakness and incentivise people who get up and work, because many many people with lots of difficulties, lots of illnesses and mental health problems force themselves up every day and go to work to pay for others that don't. bother.

Charges for NHS services for everyone - small ones that can be taken from benefits if received (including child/pension benefits) otherwise too much money will be spent chasing it.

We are wedded to not paying for healthcare as a nation.

And I get it, I spend a lot of time chasing health appointments, attending health appointments etc for my DD. At one point she had 7 different specialists involved in her care with multiple appointments each month. I could afford a token payment to attend but many would argue they can’t and shouldn’t have to.

Have you not noticed most other European successful economies, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, who all have pretty good health systems. Why can't we move to the kind of system they have.

@Iwishicouldflyhigh the ones that worry me most are on stamp duty and income tax - apparently it’s not clear whether the latter will be affected but it’s not looking good. Particularly concerning being a single person already just about managing mortgage, car and all associated bills 😔. Also makes me personally even madder on the inside as I didn’t vote for them so just an angry nervous middle aged woman right now!

it goes further than Reeve’s personal disdain for benefit claimants. Before the election Labour promised a full review of PIP with the full consultation and participation of disabled people and their representative organisations to redesign the benefit and ensure a fairer, more transparent and sustainable benefit which would properly assess and support their needs.

What they didn’t say was that before that consultation had even got off the ground, and a full year before the results would be analysed, they would launch a media campaign to deliberately conflate PIP support with out of work benefits so that they could more easily introduce a cynical cut aimed at the most vulnerable, and designed to remove support in order to save money. All of this with absolutely no impact assessment and no thought for the consequences to disabled people.

In the frenzy of rhetoric about cost cutting and allusions to abuse of the system they also conveniently forgot to mention that the kind of support the cut would remove was for people with care needs whose PIP award enabled unpaid family carers who looked after them to claim carers allowance. Once PIP support was lost, carers allowance would follow and many carers would no longer be available as they would have to work or increase their hours to make up the shortfall. So the cost of this lost care provision would be passed on to social care, which costs considerably more to provide. So the savings made from benefits would be lost to the increased cost of social care.

The MP’s who have come in for much vilification in the press and media, were actually only doing their jobs - acting in the best interests of their disabled constituents and holding the government to the commitment it made to them. The real shame of the utter shit show that was the vote doesn’t lie with them. It lies with the government for not recognising that the rebel MP’s were doing what the electorate says it wants - listening to and acting on behalf of their constituents - and putting so much pressure on them to back down from doing what they knew to be right.

The NHS, and many other public bodies, need a root and branch cutting, there are far too many well-paid posts that have nothing to do with patients' welfare and more to do with ticking boxes for the current fads. Money isn't the issue in the NHS, it's how it's spent.

This.

They really can't legally. Of course, some do and get away with it but that's down to HMRC incompetence in not checking and challenging. But, lawfully, business owners really can't claim private/household costs against business profits for tax. The general rule is "Wholly and exclusively" for business purposes, so anything with private use, wholly or partly, should, by law, be added back and not claimed for.

The NHS is becoming more expensive because people are getting older. The proportion of GDP going into health is comparable to all other advanced countries - there's no obvious way of making it cheaper.

Immigration is generally accepted to boost growth rather than lower it so reducing it will mean bigger tax rises, not less.

Private pensions pay out a pittance and it's hard to see how younger people can contribute more when they're already paying out so much in housing costs.

The Foreign Aid budget has been repeatedly cut - most recently to pay for increased defence spending) and is a fraction of the costs incurred by our rising elderly population.