AIBU to very nervous about what Reeves is doing to the economy?

[ProudAmberTurtle]

The data for the last financial year is out and, for the first time in British history, the benefits bill (£333 billion) was higher than income tax receipts (£331 billion).

This didn't even happen during financial crises like when the banks were bailed out in 2008-09, or during Covid when the government paid private sector staff's wages.

What's worse is that the government did not predict this and the benefits bill is projected to rise significantly over the next three years to about £390 billion.

In fact, from what I can understand, income tax receipts have always been significantly higher than the benefits bill, and there's always been an understanding between the two main parties since the 1940s that that needs to be the case for an economy to function properly.

I've worked very hard for more than a quarter of a century and always plan for the future, ie paying the maximum in NI so that my partner and I will receive the full state pension. For the first time in my life, this year the amount I'm earning in savings is going up at below the rate of inflation, even though I've got the highest interest rate available, because I've hit an income tax threshold (£50k) which means 40% of everything I gain in interest goes to the Treasury. This means my savings are actually depreciating in value.

AIBU to think this is just the start? That it's inevitable that taxes will have to rise even further and the state pension will be cut?

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/04/04/labour-welfare-bill-income-tax-revenue/

This is embarrassing to read.

My language is hardly appalling. You just don't like my reluctance to do politically correct. My language has never resorted to swearing. I think political correctness, left liberal right thinking is generally very very stupid. Well meaning is possibly the kindest description, but idiotic covers it.

Yes to the impact of austerity - which has driven over 20% of children into poverty. Really interesting recent study on this from the University of Oxford, which I’ll link. The two-child benefit cap and freezing benefits has an impact on both child health and education, meaning those short-term cuts have a much more damaging (and costly) long-term impact.

www.theguardian.com/society/2026/apr/13/uk-austerity-children-scarred-poverty-study-conservatives

I think that calling disabled children defective and using an offensive and outdated term traditionally used to dehumanise people with intellectual disabilities is pretty much the definition of appalling. I can't imagine what kind of person would think it was ok.

Iain Duncan Smith (of Centre for Social Justice fame) admitted at the time of the 2012 Welfare Reform Act that the benefit cuts within the act would be a net cost. Not only is cutting benefits costly but governments know it and go ahead anyway for what can only be ideological reasons.

It’s more an indicator and result of poor policy.

Mostly that jobs have declined and more people need benefits instead.

To go back to a real example you gave earlier, it’s more people stuck filling out Indeed forms a few times a week and often with declining MH as a result.

That’s a negative. What’s the positive spin for benefits being more than income tax?

Disabled children are their parents' burdens until they can't cope and offload to society. I worked in an asylum's summer play scheme in 1977. I hope that I made a worthwhile contribution. When we all pay the bill via tax, without having had a choice to actively be willing to pay by doing anything useful But I am not sure society can afford a large number of inadequately skilled people.

It is not my intention to dehumanise anyone.

Well I don't know. I've not made an argument either way.

Is it an indicator of poor policy? I'm not saying it isn't. That could well be a factor. We've seen some dreadful policy making over the past 15 years or so, really designed with an agenda in mind rather than the best interests of the population. Hence the remarkable rise in inequality. But we also live in a rapidly changing world with emerging risks and need to find ways of addressing that. Those ways can't involve putting people into destitution or making artificial distinctions between deserving and undeserving disability.

Disabled children are not burdens to be offloaded For someone who doesn't want to dehumanise anyone you're making a pretty poor fist of not doing so. I'm fairly disgusted by your rhetoric actually.

Fine words and an admirable declaration @ForWittyTealOP . We are clearly at the opposite ends of a political spectrum. So we will probably never agree on anything. In my view, we take responsibilty seriously. We pay our dues and tax to society.

FFS @ForWittyTealOP I have declared that I am happy to contribute to disabled children's care quite willingly. I pay all the tax asked of me. There's no money in my life hidden from HMRC.

Every parent of a very disabled child needs a break.

I’m not really looking at that last part, but that post re Indeed did stand out on this thread. It’s not good enough for people, especially not young people.

Job creation and SMEs incentives need to be more a priority to ensure fewer aren’t stuck doing that, they’ll decline either MH easily otherwise. Benefits greater than income tax is just showing the issue in figures.

The downside is on threads on here re young adult dc stuck at home.

How does job creation look? Genuine question. I'm guessing there's jobs in newish industries like renewable energy and technology but of course there's always AI waiting in the wings.
One thing is for sure: I wouldn't want to be in charge right now!

Yes AI needs to be considered too. And maybe we shouldn’t lift birth rate as fewer jobs in a decade or so.

I’d say tax incentives in answer to your question. But it could probably take more thought, just posting when adverts are on ;

Mostly I don’t think it’s the fault of the people stuck looking for work, especially young people, I think they’re being let down.

I wouldn't want to be young now. I think it's impossibly hard for young people; there are barriers for them at every turn. Student debt, huge housing costs, general cost of living.. it's a really tough world for them. My oldest wants to be a teacher - I'm not sure what to think about that!

She said it about herself too 😂 read her posts, many aren't nice.

@Papyrophile

So “rich pensioners hoarding millions”… immediately followed by “we don’t have millions” 😂

You’ve kind of ruled yourself out there. The wealth tax being discussed is for £10m+. It would affect the top 1%, of which you are absolutely not one 😂

Why not leave then if the tax regime annoys you so much? Genuinely? If the UK is a shit show and is getting everything wrong, why not up sticks and go to some utopia where you can count your money in peace and not be surrounded by scroungers? You’d make a great migrant i’m sure.

@Chocaholick

Yes, because PIP is for people whose disabilities significantly affect their daily living or mobility. Which in turn will mean lots of them are unable to work. But the fact that it’s not an unemployment benefit doesn’t change because of the fact that low numbers receiving it aren’t in employment.

There's a certain type of person who takes great delight in pointing out how few disabled people are in work as if that somehow proves that they're lazy or scrounging. They never ask why this might be, whether the barriers to work are insurmountable exactly because of that prevalent ableist attitude. The assumption that, along with disability, goes an inherent aversion to work is always there. It's almost as if they say it to feel superior!

How about bring back a lot of the production of "goods" that we've been importing from China etc for the last few decades?

Back then, when most industries were labour intensive, it made sense to offload production to countries where labour was significantly cheaper.

Now, not so much, as so much is automated, produced by robots or other automation, lots of factories in China now where there are very few "humans" on the shop floor.

Why can't we, in the UK, buy that kind of machinery and bring back significant amounts of production, giving jobs to our own citizens? Must surely be cheaper than the costs of shipping thousands of containers by boat across the World, especially now that diesel is so expensive and in short supply, not to mention, environmental impacts of emissions/pollution etc.

Fair enough that the UK workforce isn't cheap enough for stuff still made by hand, but I fail to see why we can't "compete" in terms of cost against all the stuff made via heavily automated processes. Even most of the "cheap crap" sold in the "centre aisle" will have been made by automated production lines etc so why not make it in the UK.

The government could incentivise new factories being built and new machinery to be bought as it would reduce unemployment and save a fortune in paying out benefits to the unemployed etc. There must be an economic "sweet spot" where the government saves money by giving grants etc to businesses wanting to restart production here, comparing the "cost" of unemployed, the benefit of tax paying workers against the cost of giving grants etc. After all, we've heavily subsidised/given grants to various industries in the UK over the decades, i.e. the car industry, so why not start a new "build it in Britain" campaign, to try to bring back more production in the UK manufacturing sector? Helps the huge balance of payments deficit too!

Nail on the head. Today's youngsters have it bad with all those things you say, plus the general despair at what the future holds in terms of AI, ruinous national debt only getting worse, probably no automatic state pension, etc. There's a lot of hopelessness about. A couple of decades ago, it was the "disenfranchised" young who had no hope for the future - the unemployed, those without skills/qualifications etc looking at a bleak future on benefits. Now that's extended to those WITH skills and qualifications, WITH jobs, who are working hard but still have no hope for the future. It's awful. And no surprise that those who have options to emigrate and work abroad are doing so in ever greater numbers!

Sounds good. I think with all this there may be some using a system but the bigger failing is those who do want to work but can’t. They’re stuck sending off a few applications a few times a week, their MH will plummet.

That’s on politicians and their policies. Everyone who starts a thread on here concerned their young dc can’t get work would prefer them to, and they likely would too.

Quite simply when UK industrial and commercial electricity prices are the highest in the world (4 x that of the US and 8x that of China) then there is no way any manufacturing is going to choose the UK to set up in.

I agree, and another factor is the often awful application/recruitment processes in use these days which are soul destroying.

Long gone are the days of sending off a hand written covering letter and a copy of your CV and waiting for a face to face interview.

Now it's a long drawn out process, having to laboriously enter information into online computer screen boxes (some systems don't even allow you to copy and paste!) so you can't even set up a template in word of sentences/paragraphs etc.

Then if you get through the initial application screening (often done by AI or computer algorithm), you get put on the next level, which can be various online tasks/quizzes/games etc - again automated, which can also take a long time. Some of the "games" are awful, i.e. there's one like one of the "The Cube" games where a dot circles the screen and you have to hit a key to stop it on a specific place - which is actually impossible to do - the "test" is how long it takes the applicant before they give up to test their resilience! Just awful!

If you get through that, then it's often a computerised "interview" - again with no other person, but just having to write or speak your answers to a series of pre-set questions.

And so it goes on. Some have 5/6/7 stages before you get to the final stage of actually speaking to a real person for a "proper" interview.

They all have different time spans, so you need to set up a spreadsheet of applications and stages to "manage" the deadlines, i.e. make sure you do each stage within the time allowed. Some of the deadlines are very tight, i.e. 24 hours to do the next stage after you've completed the earlier stage, whilst others are several days.

It's very easy to see why people become demotivated very quickly and lose the will to continue!

My son went through it twice whilst at Uni. First time trying to find a placement year position and second time whilst applying for graduate scheme jobs to start upon graduation. He didn't get a placement year job, but at least went through the process, made mistakes, etc., so it was a useful experience for him. Second time for a proper job, it virtually dominated his life for 3 months as he applied for around 20 jobs - he had "tasks" and deadlines virtually every day, which was hard as he also had tasks and deadlines for his degree course too!

I never believed/understood just how crazy the process is these days. Back in my day, it was just covering letter with cv and an interview, but now each application can take several hours just to get through the initial couple of stages, and often they don't even get a "no" response - just ghosted so they don't know if they've succeeded at a level and don't know if they're just waiting for the next level or have been binned. Then, sometimes, it's an automated email, many days or weeks later, saying "level passed" and the just giving a day or so to complete the next task/level!

It is now a soul destroying system. Recruitment agencies are truly the devil in disguise as they require applicants to jump through so many hoops, and I'm not even convinced some of the jobs are real. It's all now a very duhumanising process.

I actually think there’s a massive lack of imagination when it comes to job hunting

I’ve seen parents of teens whine that they’ve ‘sent off loads of applications’ and by that they just mean McDonalds, chain coffee shops, that kind of thing.

They haven’t put out ads offering to cut grass or walk dogs. They haven’t checked small local ads looking for part time cleaning. They haven’t popped round some smaller independent shops and cafes with a CV. There are a lot of jobs out there but they just seem to apply for the same thing everyone else will be applying for.

Also try the post office window. Elderly people wanting part time garden/pet/cleaning help tend to put cards in them.