If Labour raises taxes what will you think?

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Typing on my phone so not sure I can do a poll? But, if the government raises income tax or NI at the budget, will you think:

A - let’s get real, they had no other choice
B - those duplicitous / inept bastards

@Cattenberg do you know what margins Tesco operates at? 4%. Food retailing is fiercely competitive and we are the beneficiaries of an amazing choice of products at good value. Yes food has got more expensive. Blame the government for fuelling inflation with their national insurance rise and an increase in the minimum wage which have been passed on to consumers. Inflation was 2% in July 24 - its now nearer 4%

A, but I don’t trust them to spend it wisely so I still think it’s a bad choice. Most of the public services that require additional funding are so ineptly managed that we are throwing good money after bad. Everything needs a major overhaul rather than just pumping money in - most are corrupt at worst and inept at best.
I also think raising taxes when COL has already pushed many families to their knees is a really crappy thing to do, but they were never going to sort out the real issues with wealth and inequality because most of them are tied up in it so I don’t see what else they can do.

I just watched this and it is SPECTACULAR

I would pay money to see Rachel Reeves try and argue against the arguments Laffer makes

The majority shareholders of Tesco are investment vehicles, including pension funds managing public sector pensions.

Yes we can increase the tax Tesco pays. But then what about the secondary and tertiary impacts?

lower profit = lower dividend which ultimately shows up as smaller pension pots.

And then who’s on the hook for the shortfall?

Taxpayers in the form of more benefits to pensioners.

No, I did not know that.

But that's not what I asked...

Tesco is partly owned by The Vanguard Group (based in the USA) and Norges Bank Investment Management (based in Norway).

that they are a bunch of incompetent, hypocritical lying scumbags.

No they would just put their prices up.

So back to the old days when local retailers could compete with the corporations? That wouldn't be all bad - it might reinvigorate our town centres and most of the profits from the small retailers would go back into the UK economy instead of to overseas investors.

But local retailers would be taxed as well? NI increase was especially painful for small to medium businesses already operating on slim margins.

the reality of what you are proposing is that prices would rise for consumers and smaller / fragiler businesses would go out of business. And yes, that includes Tesco who would probably take a hard look at its more marginal shops.

I think what the socialists really want to do is just appropriate the money of people they don't like / class enemies.

That requires increasingly complex tax laws though, in order to target just the people you want to, since there's no consistency or logic to it.

It's what they did with those private schools which are charities - not the VAT increase, but the imposition of business rates only on those charities 'which educate children of mandatory school age'... but not any other charity (like a donkey sanctuary - much more important to the public good, I'm sure) whilst still expecting all the charity obligations to be met. Rigghht..

A government can pass whatever tax laws they choose - even if they violates human rights (the court case established the children's human rights were harmed but that the government was allowed to do it anyway, because... tax).

But socialist taxing and appropriation of property doesn’t end well.

Compare quality of life in the USSR with that in the US at the same time. The only reason for that was communism.

Look at Venezuela's self-induced implosion, caused by populist, socialist economic policy
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_in_Venezuela

Do you really want that for the IK?

Oh for goodness sake, what errant twaddle. Starmer is as far away from being a USSR style socialist as Liz Truss was. Labour is a progressive social democratic party now and has been since Neil Kinnock. Paying tax on school fees is hardly the same as bejng sent to a gulag in Siberia. Tsk.

Personally, I have no problem with large corporations being charged a higher rate of tax than small family businesses. I'd also make more of the small retailers exempt from paying business rates - I think this is one of the reasons we have so many empty retail units on our high streets.

I think you are getting a bit carried away.

But most of that ownership will be indirect- ie the shares are owned by mutual funds and pension funds which are managed by those entities but are beneficially owned by people with pension funds.

Key question: why are the breaking their manifesto pledge not to raise taxes, but are not breaking the triple lock promise?

That is all I need to know at this stage.

Look where getting rid of WFA got them. That’s your answer. It’s an obvious thing to do, particularly since it was a Tory policy, but the outrage (and not just from pensioners) over the removal of £100 was insane. Imagine what it would be like if the triple lock was scrapped.

COVID cost £400 billion
Energy subsidies cost £100 billion.

That works out to about £34,000 per household. So, taxes would inevitably be increased to recover those costs.

But, what about trying to reduce wastage as well? For example, BBC recently reported that an average of £145 per night per person is spent on asylum hotels, but they could be housed elsewhere for £23 per night.

Many other examples could be listed.

Part of the outrage with that, though, was where they set the cut off point and that it was linked to a specific benefit. I think if they’d set it at, say, £20k there wouldn’t have been quite so much.

I don’t think the triple lock going would be as much against public opinion in the current climate. I don’t know about Labour backbenchers, though.

I agree with means testing/scrapping triple lock pensions. I know there are some very poor pensioners but I also know many very wealthy pensioners. The people I know that are struggling are young working full time. The best off people I know are retired. I know it isn't as simple as that and there are many struggling pensioners but it isn't fair on the young either.

A very small part. The “freezing old people” rhetoric was verging on hysterical.

The VAT on school fees also includes VAT on SEND additional learning support.

Taxing disabled kids is pretty low if you ask me.

As opposed to....?

Crunch the numbers! Divide that profit by the number of stores. Divide it by the number of staff. Divide it by the number of customers. Then it doesn't look too bad and is comparable with much smaller retailers. People need to start being able to understand "big" numbers. If, instead of one huge chain, their stores were split into 10 different companies, each with a few dozen or a few hundred stores, the profit per company would be divided by 10, and then the numbers wouldn't look as newsworthy! The reality is that the "profit per customer" of Tesco is a tiny figure. As part of my economics study years ago, I picked Tesco for a deep dive analysis of their figures. I calculated that if, say, the Board of Directors, worked for a modest wage and didn't take any bonuses/share options, etc., the amount "saved" spread across their entire workforce was barely a pound per week!

The answer is to means test the state pension. Set the level pretty high, at something like total income of £100k (or £60k) to match the current cliff edges for workers. No pensioner with an income of £60/100k "needs" the state pension on top.

They should have started using a threshold such as that for the winter fuel allowance rather than their spectacular foul up last year!