'Taxes are the price we pay for a civilised society'

[Bargepole45]

Having just paid an enormous tax bill, I frankly am fed up with hearing this. There are lots of civilised countries that have a far lower tax burden than the UK. It's just a form of blackmail designed to make contributors believe that there is no other way other than to pay sky high taxes to subsidise people's crap life choices.

Have too many kids and can't afford them? No problem, the state steps in. Have a terrible lifestyle and don't look after your health at all? No problem, the NHS will treat you. Spent all your money with wild abandon and have nothing left to pay for your care when you get old? Don't fret, the state will fund the same care home as someone that has saved all their life.

Don't people understand that these 'safety nets' just facilitate reckless behaviour? We can have a civilised society where people aren't cushioned from all of their bad decision making. I say this as someone from a background where I didn't have much money and I am so fed up with people pretending that poor people don't know that an apple is healthier than a chocolate bar or that it's a good idea to actually attend school. It's insulting and disempowering to keep making excuses for people that simply aren't incentivised to make different, better choices.

The highest LHA rate in the entire UK is £704 a week in central London. In my area the rate is £150 a week, even though the market rent is £1200 a month.

There are many areas where housing benefit does even cover half the rent.

If you live in Chelsea and Westminster. How many people does that apply to? So because you’re angry with those unicorns your anger extends to the average person getting £600 a month in housing benefit?

The average UC claim in the UK is £730 a month.

That wasn’t what I was implying, don’t twist my words.
I was replying to you, speaking of a family member that gets PIP for anxiety alone (which apparently you know his full medical history and what it’s like living in his body) and inferring it was problematic.

I absolutely agree that anxiety is a horrible condition to have, I am not dismissing it and I have disclosed on this thread I suffer from anxiety as ONE of my disabilities.

My implication, what I was trying to say is that there isn’t hordes of disabled people on pip with anxiety alone, and just because it is listed as a main condition, it doesn’t mean that it is their only condition. A huge percentage of people who are disabled also have Anxiety and depression which goes hand in hand with living in an extremely inaccessible world, having to constantly battle for survival financially and health wise.

For some that suffer from extreme anxiety it is completely debilitating, not everyone with only anxiety is debilitated enough to meet the criteria for PIP, my comment was that for MOST people with anxiety alone, they wouldn’t meet the criteria. That doesn’t mean that some do, just that it is my belief and experience being an active part of the disabled community that it is not 40 odd percent of PIP claims

Excellent spot!

And handing out billions to people who decide to have children in the form of free nursery hours etc. isn't a strain? I realise that 'ageism' is considered acceptable by many on MN, but the solution isn't simplistic, we can't stop aging, we can stop breeding more than we can support ourselves.

I'm not angry with anyone getting the housing element of UC. I was pointing out that families on UC do not have extra entitlements to 4-bedroom houses in London. If you are not working and you do not meet the very specific requirements to get full LHA on a 4-bedroom house, you do not get it.

If you are working and you do meet the requirements, you will get the full LHA rate, and your entitlement will taper based on your income so that you are never better off not working.

I really find this ‘kids of different sexes cannot share rooms’ chat. I know so many people who aren’t entitled to any benefits where kids of different sexes share rooms. I know 3 teens in the same room. 2 girls and a boy. Parents can’t afford anything bigger. What are you supposed to do?

For what it is worth, what I would do, if I was in government, is create really good quality child care. I would recruit parents who weren’t in employment or education. I would give them the best quality education and qualifications in child care. They would need free childcare themselves to train. There would also be training in nutrition, building renovations and other skills. Rundown community centres and nurseries could be renovated and excellent quality child care put in place to enable people to work. I would do something similar for people who wanted to train to be social and elderly carers . Emphasis would be on high quality, qualified carers . There would be career and education development for child carers who demonstrated ability and commitment. It would be expensive and take a lot of tax but I believe it would strengthen society considerably. Certainly, it would be a better use of public money than royalty and trident. There would be no rich tax dodging though . Don’t like it, emigrate, like they’re always threatening to!

Agreed. We're in this mess because of austerity; more austerity is not going to make it better. We need to spend money.

If we have skill shortages, train people and not with meangingless 2 weeks' long skills bootcamps. No one can learn software development, networking, or cybersecurity in 2 weeks. Ask employers what skills and certifications they need, and give people on low incomes fully funded access to training courses and schemes to build the skills needed. Make some schemes full-time for those who are unemployed, and some schemes flexible for those on a low income who want to retrain into a better-paid role.

If we are short on people, not skills, ask why and fix it.

Why does no one want to be a carer? Are they paid what they are worth? Are they given the value in society that they deserve?

Why does no one want to pick fruit? Is the pay good enough? Are there transport links available? Is there wraparound childcare available?

In that situation I would be sleeping in the front room and giving up my room.

I'm still not sure why anyone thinks that PIP is awarded based on self-reported difficulties. For one thing, claimants have to submit medical evidence

I think it’s just because the press says so.

My FIL, who has a disabled grandson, came round a few months ago going on about “free luxury cars.” He’d read it somewhere, and just took it as given that if I asked for a free Maserati for my son, Keir Starmer himself would deliver one the next day.

They think the medical evidence is self reported as there is no physical test for depression like a blood test or xray.

So you go to GP a few times, describe depression, they agree you sound depressed, you fill out a form saying you are too depressed to go out at all and make a sandwich, and your gp is contacted and confirms they saw them 4 times this yeaar and they did describe depression and they get £700 a month for it.

I have no idea how realistic it is as a scenario. I suspect there is more evidence required than that.

So more spending and higher taxes? The tax burden is already at the highest for 70 odd years.

As is the gap between the rich and the poor. When constantly ignored and penalised, the poor eventually start cutting off heads (or rioting and/or voting against their own self-interests to fuck the rest of the country because how can it get any worse for them?).

I'm not saying we should tax the middle, but we should close tax loopholes, cut spending on the rich e.g private LL/MP expenses/UC top-ups benefitting multi-national, billion-pound companies like Tesco et al, and invest what we make from that into narrowing the gap, which would in turn share the tax burden out more evenly.

Can we add some apprenticeships to the list of things that sound useful but are not? Ones that offer degree level qualifications are a good idea, but then you get silly ones like apprenticeships for being a barista or bar worker. Drawing out a very low level qualification over a year (for a job where training would be days anyway), and paying the apprentice peanuts at the same time and not even the guarantee of a job at the end.

No one wants to be a carer because the pay is poor and the conditions are often just as bad.
Fruit/veg picking is usually seasonal and the pickers live on-site, whilst also paying for the privilege.

Exactly!

Goodness. Quite paranoid aren’t you.

If landlords were raking it in why are hoards of them leaving the market?

The gap between rich and poor in the UK peaked some years ago and is coming down.

Tescos profit margin is TINY.

Which ‘loopholes’ are you planning to close?

I haven’t a clue what MPs expenses are and it is totally irrelevant because they are such a tiny, tiny TINY part of the UK budget it would be like worrying about a grain of sand in a sand castle.

We used to be a rich country. We are now a country loaded with debt. We cannot afford a soaring welfare bill. Workers are skint. Benefit claimants are skint. 10% of spend goes on debt interest. people have to learn to live with less. Those paying ever higher taxes have learned to over the past few years at an increasingly rapid pace.

Investing to train people in the skills we need would be a great thing to spend money on. Over the long term it would more than pay for itself.

Lot of necessary jobs are very difficult to fill because the pay is far too low to justify the conditions. Often these roles are filled by either people who are undocumented - and therefore easy to exploit - or people who have come over on, say, a care worker's visa and then quit the moment they are awarded ILR (not blaming them). It makes you wonder: if we're all paying such whacking great amounts of council tax to fund elderly care, or if people's estates are being eaten up by private care home fees, then where is all the money going? The answer, I strongly suspect, is private equity. A LOT of things - vet surgeries, dental practices - are being hoovered up by private equity. This is how things become both much more expensive and much worse in quality at the same time.

The falling birth rate is why we have an aging population. People generally aren't having children they can't afford - birth rate is well below replacement levels now.

But overall this is a complicated issue not helped by the fact that successive governments (all of them!) don't have a sensible plan.

They want us to save for retirement, but also want us to spend now.

They want to get people off disability benefits into jobs that don't exist.

They wring their hands over housing costs but don't want to rock the boat and make serious attempts to fix the issue.

And that's before we get to the looming impacts of climate change and AI.

If you vote reform you are an absolute mug, They wont fix any of the above. the first thing they will do is sell of the NHS for privatisation and then more tax breaks for their rich mates. They're a bunch of racist imbeciles (and mostly now, ex-tories that created this mess for 14 years and now claim their gonna fix it. ridiculous!

I have a family member with extreme anxiety and depression, who has 2 documented cases of suicide attempts and medications spanning 20 yrs...and they werent eligible for PIP, its ridiculous that people think anyone with anxiety/depression/adhd etc etc can just stroll in and claim their incapable of work and get it handed over!

If you really think you'll have a better life on benefits than in work, crack on and resign.
Something tells me you won't...

It's not the case that everyone's work ethic has curiously vanished during the past several decades. Rather, industries like manufacturing create a lot of jobs, directly and indirectly, meaning you should have enough vacancies for jobseekers to fill. Now, with an economy based largely around finance/professional services, far fewer indirect jobs are created. Add to that the mass adoption of AI, which has wiped a lot of entry level roles from the market. We could force everyone off benefits tomorrow and a lot of them would turn to crime or die in the streets because there simply aren't enough jobs for them all to fill.