Where would you LIKE to see cuts made?

[Rosieeo]

I recognise that people are going to vote for certain parties because if another party gets in they might lose some benefit/possibly jobs etc. Or because they have a deep-seated hatred of one side, for whatever reason.

But (and you can correct me, I know very little about politics) the country is in debt and some cuts have to be made, regardless of who makes them.

So where would you be prepared to see cuts being made?

Just to cheer you all up, public sector retirement (at least in the NHS and I suspect elsewhere) is already 65 for new entrants.

I wonder how many people would actually be affected by limiting public sector pensions to 50k? I suspect you could limit them to 15k and still not touch 85% of the workforce.

In our area you can aply for government funding if you are on benefits for a free laptop worth £300 and also for your children to take part in outside school activities.

I'd like to lose that new department set up to oversee MPs expenses. Employs far too many people and costs £80m.... I bet the average company with 650-ish employees doesn't pay anyone £80m to check expenses claims

Next, I'd move several large Whitehall departments lock-stock and barrel out into the regions, freeing up acres of massively valuable real-estate which could be sold off, reducing wage costs (no more London weighting etc.) and at the same time making the country less London-centric

How much do we actually need to cut anyway?

According to this graph (page 5), a national deficit of 50% of GDP would be about what we had in this country since 1975; GDP in 2009 was £316,837 million; erm, exactly how many noughts are there on a billion?

swallowed why is it that when anyone disagrees with you you have to resort to insults? You called me a bigot on a thread a couple of days ago based on nothing but who I planned to vote for.

Anyway back to the point.

I am 100% for a fairer society, but the sort of tax thresholds you are talking about wouldn't be fair. We should be looking at moving towards a simpler tax system, a flat rate if possible, rather than adding more levels of complexity. People should be rewarded, financially, for working hard and climbing the career ladder, not penalised.

We could easily start to plug the gap if everybody paid what they should. Starting at the bottom with the people working cash in hand, and the boot-fair and ebay traders who aren't declaring their income, right up to the very top.

There are just too many loop-holes and legal ways to avoid paying tax. There are directors who take dividends so they don't have to pay NI; companies "employing" their wife and paying her just under the tax threshold; the self employed writing things off to tax that aren't a legitimate expense, and making "losses" year after year.

I would like to see a tax-free personal allowance around the level of the minimum wage, and nothing else. Tax everybody on their turnover and don't let anybody claim for anything. It would be very easy to understand and cheap to administer, plus if everybody paid their fair share we wouldn't have to make cuts elsewhere.

BTW my own "gold plated" civil service pension is going to be about £4600 a year. So you can freeze them at £5k each and it won't make a blind bit of difference to me. DH has never been able to afford to take out a personal pension so that's what we'll be living on. Pension age is already going up to 66-68 and some of us have been working since we were 16, not 25.

chil1234 they've been doing that for decades. Sadly they consider that London includes the South East (a huge area covering from Kent to Hampshire and up to Oxfordshire), so all of us poor sods living in the South of the country have seen our jobs move to the North. Great idea on paper- not so good when you are mucking about with people's lives.

what the hell is trident?

Trident is the nuclear weapons programme. Or work experience for secondary school pupils. Think they mean the first

No, that wasn't me saying that it was another poster. You are confusing me with someone who was a political troll.

The NHS needs a massive overhaul, possibly introducing charges for some services or some sort of compulsory insurance. There's so many of us living longer, often with complex medical conditions that the prinicples which applied in the 1940s can't possibly be maintained now.

We should also be looking at massive changes in the public sector. There are thousands of non-jobs (I know - I do one ) - partnership managers, vision managers, walking co-ordinators and loads of daft initiatives which should be cut immediately. This equally applies to government departments, quangos and committees.

We also need far fewer public sector organisations - get rid of county/districts and go unitary with far fewer councillors.

CTF
Trident
ID cards
NHS electronic patient record project
Stop paying bonuses to civil servants
Phase out final salary public sector pensions
Means test child benefit
Means test winter fuel allowance

I'll be back with more ....

I'd cut trident, CTC and WTC for those earning over 40k, child Trust fund, raise retirement age NOW to 66, and add a yearly increase every 5 years till it's around the 72 mark.

I would freeze public sector pay for those earning more than 30k, cut quangos. Raise income tax by about 5% for all but the lowest earners. Get rid of EMA, but allow kids over 13 to work PT if they want (good experience).

Get rid of expensive managers in the NHS, get doctors and nurses to run the place, they know it best. Stop expensive and pointless new initiatives in schools, scrap the NC, let teachers teach! Like wise ofsed and league tables. All kids go to their nearest school, if it's a bad school, parents can help to improve it, and LISTEN TO THE TEACHERS/TAs instead of government who have NO experience of school environment except as a student.

Like the idea of paying full fees for over most higher ed, but totally free for courses in sectors where there is a shortage in the job market, they have something like that in France.

I also think it's a good idea to make people on JSA do some kind of social repayment, ie charity work, or work fair, unless they are studying/training, and there should be a limit on the studying, as I know of people who use study/training as an excuse for years on end. However, I suspect this would cost more.

Yes to tax on airline fuel and people on JSA doing social replayment.

You couldn't really have no one in the public sector on over £30k as most professionals are paid more than that so you'd have inexperienced or rubbish people that couldn't get a job in the private sector doing jobs like designing roads and bridges, overseeing build of schools, agreeing large developments of new homes, negotiating contracts for rubbish disposal, programming computers that hold the child protection register etc etc. Would you cut pay for firemen too? I think they get that much.

Moomaa, I think salizchap meant freezing pay for those earning over £30K, not cutting out all those jobs altogether.

Raise pension age to 70.

Stop child benefit being universal.

Cut back on NHS leaflets and health promotion.

Reverse free prescriptions

Raise tax.

freezing pay over 30K in the NHS would mean a helluva lot of unhappy 'advanced practitioners' who effectively are worth their weight in gold.

Over 40K it's all managers and you could cull the entire lot as far as I care.

I am left wondering why the politicians haven't been truthful with their expected cuts really, given most people understand or are even in favour of some quite strident cuts.
We aren't stupid, we know harsh times are ahead. Thing is their priorities aren't the same as ours (ID cards, CB, Trident)

What could be done to bring the housing market back down to what it was 5 years ago?

"Over 40K it's all managers?" what? are you referring to consultants as managers?

What about GPs as well?

trident

child trust funds

new initiatives for schools - have none for a couple of years and save millions on printing costs alone

make it impossible to be on jobseekers allowance for too long - make people take jobs if they are able to.

Elvis I agree with you about declaring incomes but would just wish to point out that as a family who sell a lot ono ebay via an ebay shop we have been registered since long before we had any opbligation to be: not everyone is playing the system

Trident. Pull out of Afghanistan. Personal taxes on wanker bankers' bonuses and the super wealthy (the top 1000 on the rich list have seen their incomes go up 30% in the last year (!!!), when unemployment has soared to 2.5M. That's obscene, and makes me furious).

And 10% cuts across the board in the public sector, NO ring-fencing. As soon as one area of public expenditure is ring-fenced from the pain to come, all other areas will suffer disproportionately.

It's the audit culture in the public sector that really pushes the budget up. Get rid of all the managers who exist just to audit what is going on, and all the expensive red tape that ties front-line workers up. Trust front-line professionals to get on with their jobs, rather than having two back-room (and better-paid) managers per person hanging over them watching what they do.

Given that the worst culprits in respect of the audit culture are the NHS and education, they should NOT be ring-fenced.

Oh, and I totally second scrapping bloody ID cards, and all other intrusive surveillance into our personal lives.