The Labour Government

[bluethrunthru]

We should wait for the OBR report, although as you suggest it’s easy to conflate different issues here, and for that reason I don’t think the report will be definitive on the £22bn figure.

The Treasury report suggests that there are genuinely unfunded spending commitments which total £2.6bn this fiscal year. Naturally this figure should also feature in the OBR report. But given that most of the 22bn figure relates to differing assumptions around public sector pay, the OBR won’t be able to state what level of pay award should have been budgeted for, and in turn how large the shortfall in projected spending would be, because that’s a political decision.

There's £7.6bn found today

Home Office criticised for billions of asylum overspending

The Home Office is criticised for submitting spending estimates on asylum it "knows to be insufficient".

www.bbc.co.uk

 

[Quad]

Only £3k per year can be gifted to other people to avoid inheritance tax if someone dies within 7 years. Eg, Mrs Smith gives her daughter £20k in 2024 then pops her clogs in 2025, 17k of the gift would form part of her estate.

Of course there's ways around it such as trust funds but technically this is UK law.

If someone deliberately gives a house away and moves into care at any stage in the future without paying for it the 7 year rule doesn't apply, it can be any number of years.

We went though it with a solicitor as she got will in place and power of attorney in place

Luckily she still sound of mind it’s day to day management she can’t do

She could give some away and then that person gets the interest , guess that’s a way of lowering your assets

 

[Quad]

It's a dilemma, when my mum died my Dad was 85, me and Mrs H and my sister looked after him but it was hard work, cooking, shopping, having meals with him everyday, getting him up in the morning, spending time watching football or just TV with him, it was a full time job and I was running my business as well.

He lived for 3 and a half years until July 22, he left his estate to me and my sister, if he'd gone into care it would have cost around £175k, it would have made our lives easier. It's not just about money though, you do your best for your loved ones, I'd have never left him on his own, he was so lonely after my Mum died, they'd been married for 65 years.

I get some people don't have the choices we did but it's awful the hard work that paid for houses, pensions and savings is taken away whilst others on benefits all their lives get the same treatment FOC.

Just for the looney left on here I'm not talking about genuine people on benefits, just those who are too lazy to work and come up with all kinds of excuses.

What a perfect post this is what most hard working family’s want

 

[mexico1970]

They’ll need to declare it as earnings mate. Whether they do is another matter.

Polish fella who moved back to Warsaw, might have gone out of business and I have forgotten how to spell his name because it had too many consonants in it.

Or the money spent on the driveway can be traced by contacting James Flaherty 3rd field on the left somewhere in Wiltshire.

 

[Quad]

Tax the living fuck out of the likes of Shell and BP and cut the energy costs for everyone. Isn’t that what a Labour government should be for. Fuck this timorous Tory lite shit.

What happens when bp and shell move stock markets and not uk based

 

[Alan Harper's Tash]

If people were serious about reducing the welfare budget, they’d be looking at abolishing working tax credits. Who thought it was a good idea to subsidise wages in a capitalist system? It’s a madness.

Also, getting energy costs under control by upping our renewable energy percentages would bring down peoples’ energy bills exponentially and also bring prices down in shops.

The welfare budget has been stripped to the bone already. The harsher you make benefits to be given just means the truly needy will be the ones that go destitute, whilst the real “scroungers” will still milk the system.

In general, disabled people downplay their disabilities, whereas those that claim to be disabled shout theirs from the rooftops. Having outsourced decision making to private companies, the claimants that shout their disabilities are more likely to get their benefit than those that are more restrained in their interviews.

 

[Roachy]

Tax the living fuck out of the likes of Shell and BP and cut the energy costs for everyone. Isn’t that what a Labour government should be for. Fuck this timorous Tory lite shit.

Totally agree, you can throw twats like Tesco into that gang as well.

 

[Chippy_boy]

A bit like IHT-if your estate is say 1.2million and you are the sole survivor in the marriage for example-and you leave it to your children: you have a tax free allowance of 1 million. You pay 40% on the remainder-so, in this case a tax bill of 80,000-that's hardly preventing your children from getting a 'leg up'. I'd say its a very good deal-the real cost is on the super wealthy-and thats why they want you to be angry about proposed rises in IHT-because it affects them for a change.

That's the status quo today, which I am broadly in support of. Let's see what happens to it in October.

I might make, somewhat unrelated, another observation. Sorry this goes on a bit...

Governments always overestimate the amount of money any particular tax change will rake in. Why, because they don't take into account the behavioral changes people make in response to it.

Look at e.g. the Winder Fuel allowance. Labour say they can remove it and save £1.5bn (or is it £2bn, I forget). But then people realise that they can still get it if they claim pension credit, which they have never bothered claiming for previously. The bill for unclaimed pension credit is WAY more than £1.5bn. If only a fraction of pensioners start claiming it, then no money is saved.

Another example: Reducing tax relief on pension contributions to basic rate - another thing they are considering. At the moment your earn £100 and pay £100 into your pension and no tax is payable on that £100. Doesn't matter how much you earn (apart from very high earners who get no tax relief to speak of) that same rule applies. So if you pay 20% tax, you get to claim £20 back. If you are a 40% tax payer and you paid 40% tax, you get to claim £40 of the hundred back etc. Seems fair enough. We want people to save for their retirement so everyone gets to save into a pension without paying tax on their contributions.

So Labour are first of all lying by saying this is "unfair" that the better off get more back than the less well off. Plainly it is not unfair at all, it is merely a system whereby your pension contributions up to £60k per year are untaxed. The "rich" get their £45 back and the "poor" get their £20 back because that's how much was taken from their pay in the first place.

Now, Labour are considering reducing the tax relief to a flat 25% or 30%. They imagine this will bring in a couple of billion in tax savings from the better off, since the government will only have to give a proportion of the 40% or 45% tax back. What they are not considering is that people will just think fuck it, what's the point of putting money into my pension - which will be taxed at 25% when I take it out at retirement - if I am only going to get 25% tax relief putting the money in in the first place. So they will stop paying into their pensions and it will generate zero tax savings. Worse, Labour will have to give back to the lower paid group MORE money than they took off them in the first place. It's an idiotic idea.

Finally, and too much to type in detail, but tax receipts went down when the top rate of income tax was raised to 50% and went back up again when they were reduced back to 45%.

 

[metalblue]

Tax the living fuck out of the likes of Shell and BP and cut the energy costs for everyone. Isn’t that what a Labour government should be for. Fuck this timorous Tory lite shit.

Energy costs are going up for everyone. Fuel duty will almost certainly be part of Reeves budget, obviously the promise to “not raise taxes for hard workers” isn’t quite the pledge it would be (in that scenario). Moreover it will increase inflationary pressures as costs get passed on, unless retailers go back to margins of 6p per litre rather than the 12p they take now.

Reeves doesn’t have a lot of room to wiggle, it’s much harder being in power than just criticising from the sidelines that they’d be accustomed to.

 

[Alan Harper's Tash]

Energy costs are going up for everyone. Fuel duty will almost certainly be part of Reeves budget, obviously the promise to “not raise taxes for hard workers” isn’t quite the pledge it would be (in that scenario). Moreover it will increase inflationary pressures as costs get passed on, unless retailers go back to margins of 6p per litre rather than the 12p they take now.

Reeves doesn’t have a lot of room to wiggle, it’s much harder being in power than just criticising from the sidelines that they’d be accustomed to.

We can invest in the energy market and reduce our need to buy as much on the international market.

That seems more sensible than adjusting duties slightly.