What other ways could Rachel Reeves have raised more money?

[Katypp]

As a former small business owner (thankfully former!), the additional costs would have crippled our company.
But according to some posters on MN, we should just have sucked them up from our profits and if we could not afford to do so, should not have been running a business in the first place. If only life were as simple as some (who clearly have never run a business) seem to think it is.

Anyway, I wondered if any other posters would like to contribute to a thread of suggestions of alternative ways money could have been raised. Specifics if possible, not general Tax The Rich type posts.

I'll go first ...

1. Restore employees' NI to the level it was before Jeremy Hunt tinkered with it last Budget. We've only had the uplift a few months so the pain would be minimal
2. Get rid of the pension triple lock and put pensioners on a level footing with other benefits increases.

I agree with all of this. Plus a beefed up CMS system to help tackle child poverty. Proper sanctions for people living a standard of life that isn’t reflected in their end of year assessments.

Because there's so many employers queuing up to offer jobs to disabled people. There's so many employers queuing up to offer jobs to people who jump out of their skin whenever the phone rings or have self-harm injuries that the customers can see.

Tell me you've never been mentally ill without telling me you've never been mentally ill.

We could align the income tax thresholds in the rest of the UK with those in Scotland? I'm not sure how much that would raise and also would be hugely unpopular as it is costly for the individual.
I think targeting benefits is a bit of a red herring in that the overall benefits bill is a tiny % of the budget it really wouldn't make much of q difference

Cutting overseas aid will mean more people coming here on small boats to escape the awful places they live in.

Charging for hospital stays will probably cost more to enforce than it will earn and will hit the poorest people hardest, deterring them from seeking medical care. Likewise, charging for GP appointments will cost money to administer and deter poor people from seeking medical care. We already see this with people who are just above the means-tested benefits threshold not going to the dentist or optometrist. Missed eye exams can lead to blindness through undetected glaucoma.

Define "essential". I need to replace my bras before January as the elastic is poking out...

This. They won’t pay up for the damage and loss of life in Valencia that their products have caused, so I would put it up to 95%.

"Targeting benefits", or more accurately "targeting benefit claimants" is a divide and conquer rhetoric from the plutocrats running much of the press.

Capitalism relies on a reserve army of labour known as "the unemployed" so that businesses can hire workers e.g. for Xmas and then discard them back to the dole queue afterwards. To get away with treating a portion of the workforce as disposable like this, the rest of us have to be trained to despise these unemployed people, otherwise we'd protest and demand a better deal for them. Another benefit to employers of a proportion of the workforce being unemployed is that it keeps wages down and deters workers from asserting their legal rights, for fear of being fired and replaced.

State benefits to work-capable working age people, whether they are in work or not, are a form of subsidy to employers. Top-up benefits are subsiding employers by making it possible to pay wages that are too low for workers to live on and offer hours that aren't enough to earn a living income. Unemployment benefits subsidise the employers by allowing them to benefit from workers' labour without having to pay them all year around.

I wish people would realise that working-age benefits paid to work-capable people are State subsidies to employers, not workers.

Hmmmm. OK, one bra is allowed. But we need to close these tax evasion loopholes.

Tax on deliveries - takeaways, Amazon, supermarket shops etc.

Exactly

Tax the rich.

Decrease income tax

Decrease NI

Going to end up costing the government more the way it is being handled

Increase CGT and also tax unrealised capital gains, but with a minimum threshold to scope out lower net worth individuals. We need to fund our public services sufficiently so taxes need to be raised but we should also be looking to address the grossly unfair distribution of wealth. We should not accept that some people can accrue many millions or even billions whilst others need to rely on food banks despite working full time jobs.

Stop the bankrolling of Ukraine.

Those dependant on the Welfare state is minimal compared to these large corporate businesses who have not paid anything into this country. Another clueless Tory,

Rejoined the single market and customs union. Not doing so is costing HMRC £40-45bn per year in taxes and that number will continue to grow year on year.

1. Tax gambling appropriately instead of giving it an easy pass
2. Get rid of Special Economic Zones and Freeport’s where companies are free to not pay tax and don’t have to abide by our laws
3. Bring in the tax on vapes in January rather than giving then and extra 2 years grace (if education can be taxed immediately why not vapes??)

4. Stop subsidising all the food and drink in the House of Commons and House of Lords. We already pay for the rest of their food and fuel, surely they can get p*seed on their own money

In my area there seem to be a lot of people working in restaurants/ sweatshops on a casual cash in hand basis where rogue employers pay no NI for their employees at all. When are they going to clamp down on this kind of thing? Also agree the welfare bill seriously needs to be looked at but I think this is coming as a separate announcement soon or maybe early next year ?

Most of the suggestions on this thread are so weird. While they might or might not have individual merit, the vast majority are so insignificant in terms of scale compared to the economy or total tax revenues that they are completely irrelevant. Do people really have no idea of the proportion of tax is raised from the various taxes, the overall size or the economy and tax revenue, and the amounts that are spent on the various departments of public spending?

There seems to be no sense whatsoever of scale or of the simplest ecoj in most of these comments. No wonder politicians find it so easy to snare ignorant voters with slogans and nonsense if this thread is representative of the general level of understanding of even the most basic facts about the economy.

Sorry, *simplest economic realities

So many depressing comments talking about trivialities.

I agree with that, as a working pensioner.

So what would you do?
Which of the ideas do you not find ‘trivial’?

^^ This!