The autumn budget should cut benefits before increasing tax

[Leett]

There is talk of Labour breaking their election pledge and increasing income tax by 2p. I doubt they'd do that because voters will revolt. However they need to do something with the state pension due to increase by 4.7% next year.
I really hope they cut benefits / pensions before the deciding to increase taxes.

you want to cut one of the worst pensions in Europe? you want to decrease some of the worst benefits in Europe?

good for you. I hope you never ever need a safety net, or in your old age when you have paid in all your life, to be hung out to dry (or choose between heating and eating) by younger people who have no empathy or imagination.

Slow fucking handclap

Approximately 34% of people in receipt of universal credit are in work. So no, not “most”.

Sorry we just missed a war

That would have reduced our numbers

Did I say I was blaming the recipients, some of whom take funds they don't need, just because they can?

that should be cut to zero. i don't have kids so i don't care how many kids it affects adversely.

Smaller or more efficient homes are cheaper to heat. Not all choices are fun ones. That's just life.

Joining the ridiculous over dramatic comments gang are you?

So you’re not really depending on benefits to live then. It won’t matter to you that much to see a bit go but the ones who depend on UC etc can go and fuck themselves. Gotcha.

Of course it won’t. The total tax take is about £1tn. Tax Amazon and Google more and Donald Trump will double our tariffs. Any tax gained would be lost to the economy 10 x over. Such a stupid, ill informed idea that people happily turn to because they hate the truth that if they want better services you cannot make ‘someone not me’ pay.

If only.

Tbf Labour isn’t the party for this. MPs need to feel they are Labour which means tax, spend and state support.

State Pension as we know it now was founded by the National Insurance Act of 1946. It’s payable from the National Insurance fund which pays all other contributory benefits and makes a contribution to the NHS. It was, and always has been legally defined as a contributory state benefit, to fit within that framework. NI is a fund everyone pays into - it doesn’t ring fence anything. When you retire your state pension will be funded by the current workers paying NI, as has always been the case.

And you’re advocating voting Tory if you want a council house ? Who do you think reduced the social housing stock by introducing right to buy ? Your comment about paracetamol makes no sense by the way.

Are pensions really getting a 4.7% increase? My mum is on Pension Credit and certainly doesn’t need the increase.

With established I think earlier on in the thread that we are going to have very little use for manual labour going forward in the workforce
Unskilled uneducated people are going to have very tough difficult lives ahead of them.

So actually, those that can afford to retire probably aren’t gonna be in the category of the lower working classes, And they will just work until they die as they always have.
The difference being that previously they did actually work.

What is really means is that there are lots of people who would rather someone else pay more tax than cut their own benefits.

But not everyone will be as fortunate.

But that simply isnt true. Plenty of teachers /nurses, pretty much all the jobs are with one employer - HM government! And plenty of people who have families, caring commitments or other ties cant just look for a new job at the drop of a hat?!
Not to mentiom, the job market is actually pretty stagnant at the moment.
You could argue pensioners could also choose to for eg move to a cheaper area to make their money go further. But nope pensioners must not be expected to make any changes to their lives!
If it were so easy to just 'get a new job' to earn more money people would, wages have been suppressed in the UK for about twenty years!

Do you know why we have one of the worst state pensions in Europe? Because we have a totally different state pension system to Europe!

If I lived in any other European country except NL and Switzerland I would pay for a state pension via my employer, and my employer would pay in too. There is no such thing as a separate occupational pension in these countries, the whole lot is paid to the state, and the whole lot comes out from the state.

So if I retire and get say £800 state pension a month and £1k occupational pension a month, and someone in Spain gets £1,500 state pension a month, you compare £1,800 to £1,500 and you are doing better than the Spanish pensioner. So many people compare the £800 to £1,500 and cry about how unfair it all is. These people are fools.

The triple lock was introduced in recognition that the state pension had fallen to one of the lowest in europe, and by 2010 had fallen to just 16% of average earnings. This was as a result of the state pension increase having being linked to RPI from 1980 onwards. (By comparison, in 1979 it had been equivalent to 26% of average earnings). The explicit intention was to increase the state pension gradually over a number of years to a more equitable level.

Even today, the full new state pension (which only about half of recipients qualify for) is only around half of the national minimum wage. The median average salary for full time workers in 2024 was £37,480, and the mean was £45,836. Given that the full new state pension was £11,502 in that year it represented between around 25% and 31% of average earnings, depending which average you use.

It is generally recognised that, while workers have the ability to increase their earning capacity and potentially make career progressions during their lifetime, no such ability generally exists for the retired.

Well, considering that her user name is Imscrewed70 and she mentions being old there's a chance he's too old/sick to work himself or worse.

You can scream about fathers all you like but we know fathers often don't step up. But the answer to that is not to force those holding the fort into further penury.

Exactly. There are loads of excuses on this thread. For someone who gets nothing but their own wages at the end of the month and pays for everything themselves it's sickening some people's attitude.

'And you’re advocating voting Tory if you want a council house ? Who do you think reduced the social housing stock by introducing right to buy ? Your comment about paracetamol makes no sense by the way'

I was being sarcastic. Saying Garbaage was surely a hint

I will get my state pension 7 years after I was told I would get it, there you go. Me losing 7 years pension will save you money. You really dislike older people don't you?

Quite. This is a country where your retirement is based on your input over your life. All decisions we make. It is completely fair. If you don't save for your retirement over your working life, don't complain you don't have much money when you retire.

Oh F off