At the heart of today's Budget was the cut in the top rate of income tax to 45% from 2013. The arguments are set to run for days about how much this will cost; a lot depends on your opinion of what today's Budget Report calls a "behavioural response [that] has been larger than expected." Slashing tax for the richest will reduce their taxes by £3 million, but the government expects that this will be nearly balanced by a £2.9 million reduction in tax avoidance.
Most progressives will have been astounded that a Chancellor who told us in his statement that "I regard tax evasion and - indeed - aggressive tax avoidance - as morally repugnant", then went on to reward it with his most controversial policy.
In the same speech, he also made some mystifying remarks about 'simplifying' the taxation of pensions. Translated, what this means is that the extra personal allowance for older people is going to be abolished for people who reach their 65th birthday after April 2013; for existing pensioners it will be frozen. Each year, pensioners will have to pay a higher proportion of their pensions in tax. As Conor Ryan has pointed out, new pensioners will lose £259 a year, a shade under £5 a week.
Obviously, Nick Clegg bases his claim that this is a 'Robin Hood Budget' on this measure. It's true that this increase benefits low paid workers as well as the rich; but it doesn't benefit the very poorest, who have no (or next to no) earnings. And it doesn't benefit people earning less than the current personal allowance (£8,105).
Even though there's going to be measures to partially offset the gains to the richest, work by the Resolution Foundation and the Institute for Fiscal Studies shows very clearly that people with above average incomes will gain substantially more than those with below average incomes. The Resolution Foundation's example of a £500 increase showed that, of the estimated £2.6 billion cost, £1.9 billion would go to those with above average incomes, £0.6 billion to the bottom half.
The cost of the increase the Chancellor decided on will actually be £3.3 billion - but there are many better things this money could have been spent on. Remember that next month one of the worst changes from previous Budgets and the Spending Review will come into effect. Low paid working families with children who rely on tax credits will have to work for 24 hours a week instead of 16 - 212,000 couples will lose up to £3,870 a year if they cannot increase their hours. Cancelling that change would have only cost £500 million and it would have been much more strongly targeted on working people with the lowest incomes.
Or we could have reversed the planned £1 billion of cuts to Disability Living Allowance or the freeze in Child Benefit... or half a dozen other cuts that will increase poverty much more than the personal allowance will reduce it.
This was not a Robin Hood Budget - but the Sheriff of Nottingham would have been proud of it!
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Both my wife & I at the request of the Pension Service paid in a great deal of extra contributions to achieve the 40 years qualification period for a full pension, which was then dropped to 30 years and now one, so no need to pay it in the first place. We feel like we have been mugged by the state and millions more are in the same boat. To add salt to injury, if as a newly arrived immigrant and I worked just one year, I would be entitled to the better pension of £140.
Can our Conservative MP’s justify this situation and why they still deserve our vote after treating their core supporters in such a cavalier and appalling manner? .
Open Letter to our Towns Tory MP’s.
I will receive my state pension in about 18 months’ time it will be at post budget rate of £107.45 a week, the same as my wife will who being a women, (we have a traditional marriage) over 60 already receives.
As we understand it the freezing of age related tax allowance will cost us each £328 a year in extra tax to pay on our private pensions, so a £756 loss to our joint available income.
Well, I have just listened on the wireless to the odious Chancellors George Osborne’s justification of this attack on pensioner’s fiancés which will raise him £3.5Billion in extra revenue from our pockets. He said it was to help pay for a more generous Peoples State Pension of around £140 to be introduced in 2016.
First; The old Unemployment Benefit was designed to support those at the bottom of the ladder when they lost their jobs. This would allow them a basic guaranteed level of cash for them and their families WHILST LOOKING FOR WORK. And here is the core problem. We have millions who have never worked; some who left school with poor levels of education and 100,000s of non UK citizens who steadily take from the system with little or no input to its funding through tax. When this system (like the NHS) was set up, it NEVER allowed for the massive volume of long term and "Non citizens" claiming.
Secondly; It is well known and accepted that the UK follows every rule, law and dictate from the EUSSR 100% I think it would be fair to say that the majority of UK citizens now see full "union" as non beneficial to the UK. We pay £50 million a day into a pot that seems to benefit everyone but us. We should therefore step out of the "inner circle" and simply stay in the EU as a "trading partner"; this would allow us to enjoy business and trade links without pouring cash into central european coffers that the trough eaters love so much and keep our £1.5 BILLION yearly saving to look after our most vunerable here.
Tory policy always worked on the principle, that when
you give the working class money, you give them power,
which is partially true.
Knowing this they do their utmost, too keep us in the doghouse.
and again they are succeeding.
The money men have never had it so good, even through
this recession, buying up land/ property, ect,ect, at
knock down prices.
We the working class are the only losers.
The labour party helped to put us in the position we are in now.
We need a new party, a peoples party, it should be called the
sensible party, due too the fact many polititions, have a good education
but have no common sense.
wes
The Torys are the same old dog, rehashed under a "green" banner (yes Osborne's subsidising of fossil fuels was SO "green"...eyeroll) and Labour have forgotten the people they came from to represent. Unfortunatly I have only been able to vote once and believing things may actually be different, I am ashamed to admit I voted LibDem - now I see their cowardice and backstabbing in office I wish I went somewhere else. Unfortunatly the remainder of running parties are either too focussed on one policy to be effective in Government as a whole (eg UKIP, Greens), hold values abhorrent to my own (BNP), or don't have any relevence to me (Plaid Cymru, SNP) or run in my constituency (Monster Raving Looneys etc). For me, until you found your common sense party (you would probably get lots of votes if you stuck to true common sense!), it is Independent all the way. At least then there is a chance my MP will care about my constituency and not pleasing their party whips.
These scheming bunch of crooks so influential that their meetings, held in secret, are protected by the Official Secrets Act, strange that, when you consider that, Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron, Clegg, Goldsmith, Miliband (both of them) Merkel, Sarkozy and Gore, are also Biderberg members, and that Bilderbegs formed the EU.
The question is, who owns the Bildebergs and therefore the world's most influential politicians? Goldman Sach, who else?
Consider this, has Osborne banned tax havens, or the scam of registering corporations abroad to avoid paying taxes on profits, dream on.
His corporate chums will be delighted that the minimum wage as been frozen so that the state will continue to subsidise the wages of the supermarkets' part time, employees, and all the other companies jumping on the part-time minimum wage scam.
Democracy has almost been extinguished in Britain, along with our lawful Constitutional Rights, and Common Law.
Have to go now and practice touching my forelock, as befits a 21st century English serf.
worked very hard, and long hours, in often very
dangerous conditions, little H and S in these days,
In the building trade, working as a joiner,as i did
there were no power tools like now, all hand cutting.
I can remember scraping the frost off heavy timbers
to mark them, then cut by hand, working in hail rain and snow.
We worked bloody hard, for anything we get now.
Do not underestimate what we contributed too this country.
wes
Tax is a blunt instrument to deal with issues. We need to completely overhaul the banks, not tax them or tax rich people and hope that'll sort the mess out. Tax is the easy way out. I'm sure 'the bankers' would be happy to pay 60% if it meant they could carry on gambling copious amounts of money knowing that if they lost everyone's money they'd still be bailed out...
Margaret Thatcher even took away my school milk when I was a kid.
I don't know who she gave it to though.
I do agree with you on this one.
wes