Which taxes should Burnham put up?

[Toohotforwork]

It seems pretty clear that in the Autumn we are in for another massive tax rising budget. Starmer has done of the ground work to show what we need to spend and how there isn't any money, I'm sure the "blackholes" were co-ordinated with the new team for messaging. Labour don't have it in them to cut the welfare bill and to be fair the Tories didn't either - so I can't see that changing.

Which taxes would up increase to fund the country properly?

Personally I'd go the easy route and put 1 or 2p on the basic rate of income tax. It would break the manifesto but one short sharp initiative has got to be better than death by a thousand small increases.

I think the care proposals of getting rid of inheritance tax and replacing it with a 10% charge on everyone is very sensible.

Equalising income tax and capital gains tax seems an easy win as well.

We hope he reverses that national insurance for employers and up the tax for wealthy

It doesn't matter "why" we have the huge debt. What matters is that we do have it and it is costing a small fortune in interest. Labour wanted more lockdowns and more costly support schemes, so they'd have caused even higher debt/interest. Most other developed countries also spent huge amounts during Covid on various lockdowns and support schemes. The problem with the UK is that we don't have a cohesive plan to grow the economy which is the only way out of the debt/interest problem that's dragging us down. Tax rises will make things worse (as they have done).

If I have time I'll see if I can find numbers later but there's a heck of a lot between the London airports and places like Manchester, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Belfast, apologies for any I've missed.

The aviation industry in the UK has been an soft target for taxation for years and is already loaded up by ever increasing Air Passenger Duty.

Yes I do accept this is the case. The solution isn’t in-work benefits and top-ups. The solution is to cut welfare to the bare minimum thereby releasing the handbrake on the economy.

Just look at places like Singapore and Hong Kong. Absolutely booming because of low taxes.

We’ve had such a big change in employment. Even in the 90s people could live happily on the wages from normal jobs, they weren’t rich but happily working and buying houses and going on holidays. Those jobs now don’t pay enough to live, they are often harder and more pressured and don’t have the respect that they did previously. Young people see futures where they can choose to go on to benefits and live a limited but passable life, or work hard and live a barely more passable life. Making work pay, be desirable, allow people to live a reasonable life. We have to drive up productivity, get more people into work, help people stay in work if they are struggling, retrain people into careers that are future proof, improve wages for essential services. Tax increases have got to go for the top and leave the middle and bottom alone.

More tax for the top you say? Who are the top and how much more should they pay?

The top 10% already pay 60% of all income tax, and experience marginal tax rates of 62%. Yet low to medium earners pay some of the lowest income taxes in Europe.

About 10-11% of commercial flights and about 6% of passenger journeys. But more importantly, a £200 tax a return journey would disproportionately hit Scotland, NI and the regions.

Thanks for digging those numbers out, saved me the bother.

Agree with your point about the hit on the regions.

some domestic flights are also very short - for example Westray to Papa Westray has a flight time of about one and a half minutes.

This is very true

The hit on the regions is one I’d live with. We should be reducing flights anyway. It wouldn’t be a 15 billion hit to Edinburgh, would it? There’s a trade off for everything. Green, money raising, hits the rich, slight penalty to regions.

Yep, some of the services to/around the remote areas of the UK are considered so essential that they are tied a Public Service Obligation (PSO) and are at least in part governement funded..

Can't see any logic in slapping a potential £100 tax per capita on those routes,.but "aviation bad" etc

www.gov.uk/government/news/government-boosts-regional-air-connectivity-with-43-million-to-fund-flights-to-london-from-dundee-and-newquay

In addition, by making flights more expensive (could increase for international and decrease for national) you’d encourage more people to take additional holidays in the U.K., which would boost the economy.

Also, id make sure none of our subsidies go to people who don’t deserve it. We give between 2-11 billion in subsidies to oil companies. I’d crack down on companies that pay ludicrously low taxes, like Amazon, working internationally to do this if at all possible.

Problem is if you start making flights ex-UK more expensive (e.g. by increasing long-haul ADP) travellers start to find imaginative work arounds, often involving connecting in Europe onto foreign airlines.

Great for foreign operators such as the likes of Air France, Lufthansa and Emirates, pants for those operators such as BA and Virgin who actually pay some tax in the UK and employ lots of UK taxpayers

NHS would need to send out appointment letters to arrive before the appointment for that to be the case

If they want to spend the time and money getting to Charles De Gaulle via Eurostar to save £100 a head, let them.
They won’t, if the tax is reasonable.

It's the "if the tax is reasonable" that's the issue...people are already finding work arounds even with the current rate of APD on some tickets on some Long Haul routes

HMG do seem to be determined to squeeze the life out of UK aviation plc....now I know many find that idea an attractive one but if it continues then it means job losses and less income tax for HMG..

They are on a tightrope.
Trying to balance the environment with the economy.
They should get off the fecking fence and go with the economy.
Heathrow 3rd runway, HS2 to, and across, the north, more nuclear, etc etc.

According to AI

AI Overview

The UK is transferring sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius to resolve a long-standing geopolitical dispute and guarantee the long-term operation of the critical joint UK-US military base on Diego Garcia. Al Jazeera +1

The primary drivers for the decision include:
International Pressure and Law: The International Court of Justice and the United Nations ruled that the UK's detachment of the islands from Mauritius prior to Mauritian independence in 1968 was illegal and a violation of decolonization laws. By agreeing to transfer sovereignty, the UK avoids further costly and damaging legal defeats in international courts. The Guardian +1

Securing the Military Base: The UK and the US required long-term, legally secure access to the Diego Garcia airbase, which is vital for operations in the Middle East and Asia
. Under the agreement, the UK retains a 99-year lease to operate the base without the threat of global tribunals challenging its legitimacy.
House of Lords Library +3

Let’s also remember that China has huge interests in putting military bases in that area, has huge influence in Mauritius and also sits on the ICJ (which has no power to impose its rulings).

Yes, that's what I said - UK debt shot up after the GFC and also during COVID.

Why is it better to look at the total Government budget and borrowing data and what is it better for? The simple point I was making stands with the figures I used. The points you're making may be better made with your extra data but I can't see that you've used it to support your assertion that welfare spending needs to go down. One of your graphs makes it look like welfare spending has vastly increased but when you look at the units it's actually barely increased at all and the increase is within the realms of normal minor fluctuations.

Cutting welfare would be disastrous and would just force up spending on health and social care. Individual welfare recipients are already receiving less and less in order to hold welfare spending unchanged so people are in the position where money paid out to help with the extra costs of their disability has to go on food and bills, meaning they can't look after themselves properly and get progressively more ill and disabled as a result. Welfare is an investment in the health of the nation.

We are growing at a comparable rate to other European countries but yes there are fewer net contributors. Productivity is much higher than in decades past though so this has helped a little. It would have helped a lot more if the people at the top hadn't taken vastly more than their fair share of the productivity gains.

My son has just got a job no problem. In fact he was offered 2.

It does matter that people keep misrepresenting the UK's problem's as having been caused by "the spiralling welfare bill" when this isn't the case at all because they then go on to conclude that they can be solved by cutting the welfare budget which would be disastrous and totally ineffective.

And does any developed country have a cohesive plan for growth? Very hard to make one when we have no idea which jobs AI will destroy and which new ones it will create. And yet we are growing at a comparable rate to other OECD countries. Very few economies at our stage of development see high growth rates.

So why then do we now have so many more people taking more than they put in than we did in the 1970s? The percentage of net takers is predicted to reach 60% by 2028/29. Do you think that is sustainable?