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.

I don't? I think it is a fundamental part of parenting to provide for your children. Not to have children knowing they will live in poverty then complain they are living in poverty.

I couldn't have taken DS to work with me, it's steel toe cap boots and hi-vis vests. Not safe for babies or small children. I couldn't get childcare either so had to quit work.

All us pensioners should just go and die after working for 51 years …shouldnt we.
We dont deserve anything at all .
We should sit in a cold house, freeze, not eat and just die.
Even though we worked , paid tax and insurance.
Now we dont deserve to live at all.

What about the scrounging mothers with their 4+ kids reaping in child benefits , free meals for the kids , universal credit etc etc.
The idle scum on their arses all day , wont work , young , fit and healthy but have money for booze, fags and drugs !

People in this country are absolutely vile to older people , they begrudge us living.
So some of us have arthritis and other health issues , but eh ho, we will die to please you vile lot 🤬🤬🤬

There wasnt even such a thing as child benefit when i was born ‼️

Must just be the tone, but you remind me of a parent at my daughters school whose answer to the country’s problems was ‘state schools should be banned because poor people shouldn’t breed’

Taking away what others need isn’t the answer, we need to grow our economy, not force people to cut essentials like food, heat, and, you know, schools 🙈

Wealth taxes are a false economy as has been discussed and proved many a time.

How do we grow the economy without any cuts and no one’s lifestyle being negatively affected

Of course you deserve to live. But you also reap what you sow. If you've not saved a pension then you are the whims of the state.

How? How do we just grow the economy, but maintain ever increasing expenditure? What does that look like?

Agree
people are utterly vile about the elderly and I find it’s an absolute
shame on this country !!!

The longer people are allowed to take more than they give back the more they feel entitled to do so

And society descends into anarchy if you cut benefits so people can no longer afford to live.

£100 a week to pay all bills and food? And you want that cut?
Most mumsnetters have a shit fit if they have £200 disposable income a week after savings bills and food!

This one who posted and you answered absolutely hates pensioners and old people.
She is the same in every post about them, putting them down, moaning about us having any pension at all let along basic.
I am really hoping she never gets to be a pensioner …or one thats gets the lowest money like us , then starves and/ or freezes to death and has loads of bad health issues 🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬

There are quite a lot of ways to raise money by tinkering - eg annual value based tax on any property that is not occupied as a main home for more than 200 days a year (so catches stand alone air bnb properties but not those renting out a spare room or renting to someone as a main home plus all the wealthy offshore owned flats etc in central London), increasing the rate of income tax by 2% but cutting NIC by a corresponding amount so that the increase falls on pensions and unearned income rather than wages, but it is just tinkering - we have to scrap the triple lock.

Someone above suggested taxing gambling winnings - the problem with that is that you'd need to grant relief for gambling losses and most gamblers lose more than they win so that wouldn't be a money maker.

But it is part of the wider issue. Why should those that are not self suffient and reliant on the tax payer have such strong opinions on a pot that they take more from than they contribute to. A healthy person on an higher than average income with two children costs the tax payer more than a single vulnerable unemployed person. If we really want to open up these discussions about cuts and self suffiency everyone should really take a look at themselves and their own cost to the country rather than stamping their feet and demanding more.

RTFT
or do at least a modicum of research on this before you come up with same old same old havent got a clue

RTFT

Thanks.

Unless you were born before 1945 there was the Family Allowance, which turned into Child Benefit in the 1970s.

And no, I don't want pensioners to die. But I don't want kids to go hungry either, whether their parents are feckless or not.

What are you on about? I've been posting on this thread since the start. Are you sure your not a sheep?

What people never seem to realise is that most benefits including state pension go back into the economy as the bulk of it is spent in this country or go to the exchequer in the form of income tax and vat.

By not attacking the poorest first. I was upset about the VAT on school fees, but like a lot of us with kids in private, we’ve accepted it now. work the top, not the bottom. Gov working in Partnership with more businesses should create more jobs.

So it's fair to pay £36 each for a ticket but someone on benefits pays £3 is it? Of course it can be cheaper but why so much cheaper? We have to pay a ridiculous price to subsidise people like my neighbour who can't be arsed to work

I think the adjustment from NI to being all tax over a period of time so earned vs unearned income differences would boil down to employer NI contributions (not insignificant) would be helpful. It does seem like a relatively easy way to raise some additional funds.

My personal (I know not popular) opinion is that we should also increase the scope of what falls under inheritance tax so that the vast majority of estates have to pay it and that there should be a commitment to ring fence a significant portion of that revenue stream to fund social care/elderly hospital care. With an aging population there is a huge need for that funding and it’s not realistic for the working population to fund it all. At the moment some people lose a lot of their assets to fund social care and others pass down everything. If almost everyone had to pay inheritance tax on their estate it would ease the burden on all the living people and the cost would be you lose some intergenerational wealth. Obviously you do need to look at how you manage it for things like farms, small businesses etc and it’s not as simple as just that but it seems like it would be something that would be possible. In the end if I leave my kids £20k instead of £25k or whatever it may be a bit galling but it’s surely better than so many people constantly struggling and increasingly poor public services.

You’re basing this on making comparisons with people who have kids and those that don’t.
It’s the kids that are the higher cost burden in the short term ( not their working parents ) after which they become a cost benefit and without which the country wouldn’t survive.

You are ignoring @Ccsvs point that all healthy people should work and pay into the system.

Anyone who doesn’t when they can are a drain on the public purse

I’m not deflecting from Labour, I’m making a point - it was the Tories who designed PIP and they completely overlooked the fact that allowing claims for self identified MH and spectrum disabilities with no requirement for official diagnosis would massively increase the bill for PIP. They have consistently kicked the can down the road and tinkered around the edges instead of doing what should have been done years ago - reforming it and tightening up eligibility.

To answer your question I don’t think we should necessarily go back to the previous system of only compensating physical disability but at the moment there are not enough checks and balances to make sure that claims for MH and spectrum conditions are genuine. PIP has to comply with the Equality Act 2010, so has to consider claimants who have no formal diagnosis. I think this is madness and should be corrected - at the very least a lack of formal diagnosis should be the exception rather than the norm.

Medical evidence is another area which could be improved upon. At the moment the onus is very much on the claimant to provide sufficient evidence for the claim, despite the claim form specifically requesting the details of the HCP’s involved with them. Following up with these HCP’s should be the norm, and at the moment it’s not. I also think the extra cost of most physical disability is quantifiable in everyday living, but where extra costs lie as a result of MH or spectrum conditions is less clear. Maybe another area that needs looking at.

And as I’ve said upthread, the quality of assessment and decision making needs to be looked at closely because if it were made fairer and more transparent, the astronomical cost of appeal tribunals could be significantly cut.

maybe they shoudl make the big corporations pay their bloody taxes. Old article here but still relevant
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/oct/16/uk-lost-out-on-2bn-in-tax-in-2021-as-big-tech-shifted-profits-abroad-claim-campaigners - And yet no-one cares. Potentally £2 BILLION in lost taxes from tax dodging corporations in one year.

This in the context of the NHS habing a potential shortfall of £4.8 billion over the next ten years. Never mind Brexit helping to pay for the NHS (as if!!), just getting Amazon and Google to pay their taxes would probably fund the NHS shortfall and more

https://www.health.org.uk/reports-and-analysis/briefings/how-much-funding-does-the-nhs-need-over-the-next-decade

That sounds like a person I've seen on Mumsnet! It's actually quite a common (scary) belief.