General Discussion for politics in the UK.
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[email protected] appears to have vanished! We can still see cached content from this link, but goodbye I guess! :'(
If you're just trying to be a shit version of reform you'll just make people want the real reform.
They need to grow some balls and be a labour government otherwise I can see coalitions in both sides and I can't think of anything worse than a Bannock Farrage colab.
Seems almost laughable how the groundwork for reform is being played out like we just have to have our own little Maga period just like last time when we had to have Britain Trump.
Does anyone else have a viable plan to pay for our social services? This bill has been watered down to the point where it is not saving the public purse anything while the welfare bill continues to grow unsustainably.
I'm worried Labour are going to continue floundering and in-fighting until the next GE and then Reform will come in and make cuts that are a magnitude larger than what Reeves/the Treasury had been proposing here.
taxresearch.co.uk has a TON of viable plans, that would raise tens of billions, but politicians tend to pretend those options don't exist, because they'd annoy Rupert Murdoch
It's difficult because people in the higher tax brackets are already paying the lion's share of taxes in the UK and due to the laffer curve and expensive accountants it's hard to squeeze them. They'll say a load of BS about leaving but the real issue is the little things they can do is extra pension contributions and those sorts of things that let them avoid the next tax bracket. Fiscal drag is increasing the tax intake without the govt needing to enact any specific rises anyway.
people in the higher tax brackets
Translation: wage slaves.
Anyone in a income tax bracket is not the people the left is talking about. That is the effect of billionaires owned media distorting the conversation. And as a slave to that media High wage earners fall for it and distort the conversation every time.
Over the last 40 years. Post 79. The wealthy have taken a much larger % of GDP growth while paying much less often 0 tax.
They do this in many ways. But most often by running all their income through multiple corporations. Then taking money out as personal debt. Look at how musk funded his corporate purchases. They use the asset value of big corps. Tho gain such low interest. It is way lower then any tax bracket.
The media then argues fixing this prevents mum and pop businesses competing. While those very businesses are disappearing into debt scams like this. Purchasing the competition. Then pulling huge dept income from it before selling off all assets.
They don't even need to increase income tax, is the thing. They could just give HMRC an extra 1bn in the budget, and HMRC would bring back 8bn thanks to all the extra investigative staff. They could put VAT on all financial services too, that would raise a few hundred million.
But the main thing would simply be to charge CGT at the same rate as income tax. That closes all sorts of loopholes when it comes to avoiding IHT etc.
I always wondered why first homes were excluded from CGT because it creates perverse incentives in the property market where a home becomes an asset with better returns than any other investment
That's kind of by design. Every country has a kind of 'total value' that effects IMF loans, World Banking, and general status. The UK is "worth" so much more on paper because of the exorbitant price of property; politicians and homeowners want to keep it high for that reason.
It would increase rental supply if people couldn't turn (much of) a profit by selling houses that are too big for their needs. I get your point though.
That link just forwards me to twitter :S
My mistake, s/b .org.uk, not .co.uk
But thats the blog... probably more relevant to go to https://taxingwealth.uk/
Rachel's fiscal hole keeps getting bigger now Starmer's going to push her into it.
It's our collective fiscal hole unfortunately and the markets are reacting badly to Starmer implying he might replace her.
The only realistic option without performing any cuts is to increase the retirement age. Pensions are something like 50% of the welfare costs. Even then it probably won't be enough.
Successive governments have shown that they will not fuck with the boomers and older gen x retirement age or pension.
So any raises in age or means testing it will only apply to younger gen x and down and come far too late to actually help with the problem.
A hearty fuck off to that as it is as we paying for the older generations state pension and a younger age than we will ever get despite being a considerably smaller group.
If you want to do real change that will have a faster impact, means test existing pensioners. Except the government bottled doing that for even thr small amount of the winter fuel allowance.
Also can the triple lock and instead increase the pension credit. But again that will be bottled.
We need to stop calling them Labour.