Tories

I'd rather pay tax, and that tax be spent on healthcare, education, transport infrastructure, etc. I am happy to pay high taxes, but not if these important areas are being sold off to private companies bit by bit. That's not to say that the selling of these services is okay if I pay lower taxes, because people should have equal opportunities in these important areas. Children should not be raised less educated just because their parents do a job that isn't paid as well, and someone who is in constant poor health should not be disadvantaged because of their inability to work or choice to work in a lesser-paid area. Ideally, we'd spend far less on military defence, and we'd safeguard the above areas and constantly look to improve those services using money sourced from the public via taxes.

 

I'd hate to see us go the way of America, where medical facilities happily support prescription drug abuse because it keeps patients coming back to them and allowing a service charge for each visit. Well that's how it works in TX anyway.

 

LOL and what was the motive of that 'independent study'? The soil association exists to promote organic and local farming!

Suffice to say your 'facts' have been little more than Tory propaganda and generalisations which themselves are simply ideas based on liberal economic business models entirely unsuitable to be within ten miles of the universal healthcare system. Your 'empirical' evidence has been one study from an organisation that exists to promote local and organic produce, saying the NHS doesn't use local and organic produce and it would be absolutely brilliant if it did. Shockingly.

I'm going to give up Simms, you seem to spool out Tory party soundbites as arguments. You are entitled to your own opinion, so I will just respect that and stop. I think I did a decent job of stating my position but I feel this isn't going anywhere.




On a side note, I think the tax stuff should be moved to the tax thread.

 

You know full well that the facts are independant of the normative implications of the study. To write off fact as propaganda is silly. All you need to do is google NHS waste and look for yourself. A study showed that the NHS paid gym sessions lead to no greater effects than patients taking it upon themselves to walk, published in the british medical journal. Another study showed that £50,000,000 of NHS paid for drugs are being disposed of by care homes. The studys and evidence are there if you are willing to listen.

 

The Iranians will show you a study of how Israelis are naturally inclined to blow up Arabs at the first opportunity. The EDL will show you a statistic that says hundreds of black people are going to stab you everytime you leave your house. I'm not going to waste my time trawling the internet looking for random statistics, because every survey is conducted to support an idea and paid for by somebody. Without knowing who paid for it to be done and for what purpose statistics are absolutely irrelevant. I don't take studies at face value, especially when there are obvious conflicts of interest in their neutrality. Suffice to say that when an organisation supported by farmers that exists to promote organic and local farming produces a study that says the NHS would be better off buying organic, locally produced food, I don't exactly fall of my chair with surprise. You can make statistics say anything you like if you ask the right questions and choose the right criteria.

You can believe and think whatever you like, and I will do the same. I spent a lot of time writing several lengthy posts for which I received two line replies, and I have better things to be doing than going round in circles when you ignore the majority of my points in every one.

 

A healthy (no pun intended) political debate proving that no one has the ultimate solution and that nearly all surveys/studies have a bit of bias based on who commissioned them.

The NHS should be run a service to deliver a good standard of care. As a centrally controlled entity there is a lot of waste, as a private entity there is cost cutting to the detriment of services. What we need is a centrally controlled NHS with a focus on service delivery, with a business eye on the costs. There must be a way of ensuring the care is maintained while wasted costs are eliminated?

 

A total of 4000 cans are opened around the world every second * Ten babies are conceived around the world every second * Each time you open a can, you stand a 1 in 400 chance of falling pregnant.

 

The NHS is the most efficient healthcare in the world, its proven.

 

And also the most likely to die. A nice cold winter before the next election and he's home free.

 

The last General Election was the first one I could vote in, and I was so optimistic. It looked like the public had started to see why the Liberal Democrats were clearly the best of a bad bunch. I voted, and started to get excited. I watched the election coverage through the night and my frame of mind faltered as te results came in. I had never been so disappointed in the public. In the weeks after, I spoke to older family members and friends, people who were Labour voters at the previous election(s), and they explained that Labour had failed them and they were disappointed with how things had gone. So, they voted Tory. 'What?!' was my response. I'm still to this day astounded at the amount of people disillusioned with the Labour Party that chose to register their disappointment by voting Blue. It either says that this country is filled with fools, or that the electoral system is broken. The AV refurendum that we recently had would not have fixed the ridiculous two-party dominance we see today, by the way.

Politics in this country is a massive disappointment.

EDIT: Also, it seems that the older generations in my experience are fixated on military defence. They love a war, some of them.

 

The Tories have basically pandered to their own needs, made themselves richer. Glad to see the majority of people on here are against them.
Keiran are you now regretting that vote? the Lib Dems are just as bad as the Tories now, think they'll be lucky to get 2% next election.

 

According to whom? Raising the tax-free income threshold? Reinstating child benefits for many middle earners?

Are you over simplifying the 45p tax for high earners, because it's fairly conclusive that the 50p tax rate didn't raise much revenue.

Whilst people might not see reductions in corporation tax as affecting them directly, it's essential to demonstrate that Britain is a business-friendly place in the world, to encourage more companies to base themselves here, creating jobs.

 

That is soley down to the Lib Dems , if it wasnt for the coaltiona and the Tories were in on their own , there would have been NO relief on anything at all for anyone under 30k a year

And how can they reinstate something that hadnt actually been taken away ?

 

My Budget Analysis:

To be fair I think the 45% tax rate was a cop out.
Independent study has proved the the 50% rate actually collected less tax than 40% as business moved abroad and tax avoidance became more advantageous to people.
Abolishing the 50% rate would have been political suicide as people not understanding taxation economics are whipped into a "tax breaks for the rich" frenzy by the media.

From a growth point of view we already have one company in GSK pledging to bring back 1000 jobs to the country off the back of corporation tax breaks. Like it or not we have to compete with other European countries to make it cost effective fro business to run here.


In the grand scheme of things tinkering there and tweaking here makes bugger all difference. The whole tax system in this country needs to be reviewed and simplified. The more complex it becomes the more loopholes are generated allowing clever rich people to avoid it.
My proposal is as follows.

Establish an average figure which is required for a person to live (Lib Dem say this is £10K which I would suggest is fair)
Tax at a flat rate on income and income only, anything above that level. I would suggest this figure is likely to be somewhere between 20 & 30% to gross the same as current revenue Including the other forms of tax below.
Get rid of all other taxation, NI, Council Tax, Road Tax inheritance tax, capital gains etc. Every single person is required to do a self assessment based on their birthday stating exactly what they've earned in total for the last year from all sources and any difference from tax paid through PAYE is adjusted.

The only other Tax to keep would be VAT and other sales taxes.
VAT needs to be simplified. Food should be exempt not varied according to if it is considered an essential or not. Children's clothes as with adults should be taxed at standard rate. Fuel, Alcohol, tobacco and other highly taxed products should remain taxed at the rate they are with no more escalators or tweaking.

Get rid of tax credits, allowances and other fudging factors which probably cost more time and money to administer than they save. Do not let corporations get away with moving money to other countries to avoid tax. If they earn in this country they pay in this country.

Tax less, spend less administering it and people end up with more in their pockets, they'll be less red tape and there will be the same amount available to spend on public services.

 

The problem is Meister that you could reduce corporation tax to 5%, the big boys would still not pay it. You could reduce income tax to 5%, people would still go and live in Monaco.

There is a point where reductions simply lose tax revenue for no benefit.

I think the single biggest problem is tax avoidance by large corporations and wealthy individuals. This is then followed by idiotic new forms of taxation and tax breaks which successive governments introduce only for their own political benefit which are complicated and pointless.

Its all very well GSK saying they will bring jobs back because of tax breaks, but will they even be forced to pay it? It seems that once a company reaches a certain size the amount of people they employ becomes justification for their not paying any corporation tax. Gets on my nerves. Increasingly this country is supported solely by squeezing the middle class further and further since they can't do anything about it.

 

Do you honestly beleive that GSK only made that decision since yesterday, and that it hadn't been planned for months and the announcement was already agreed between the Gov and the company to take place today to help them out?

 

50% tax was not just aimed at millionaires as the press likes to make out but at all people earning 150k+.....anybody who has 3 kids, has opted for private education as local state education is not sufficient and didn't want to go down the route of religious education, paying heavily into a pension plan as the state can not fund retirement, has a private medical plan in place for the family, has a large mortgage which was required to buy a standard 4 bed house will know there is not much left over at the end of the month...

 

You talk like 150k goes nowhere. Less than 0.5% of the population earn over 150k. And the 50% band only applies to the earning over 150k, not the whole lot. If those on 150k can't survive then how are those earning average wages (about 25k) supposed to cope.

 

So what is the point of a 50p bracket for high earners?

And it's better to have rising prices, but more money in your pocket than higher prices and higher taxes.

 

if you have a family, living in/around London, then you will not be able to survive on 25k without help. Average rental for a 3/4 bed is approx 1.5k per month, average house price is 400k+ meaning a 300k+ mortgage which would be unobtainable on that salary level.

You missed my point - a large amount of the people that are disincentivised to drive additional revenue and earn more because of the 50% tax bracket are not millionaires as the papers would like to paint them

 

That doesn't make any sense. Do you know what "proportionately" means?

 

Right, so if people earning 25k get taxed 20%, then 20% of 150k is still 20%. That's proportinate.

Fairness is a relative concept, usually related to which end of the scale you are from. If you earn £150k, you might argue that it's unfair that you get taxed disproportionately, so that people who earn less than you can enjoy public services which you don't need or use.

 

I know what you are saying, but you are using the wrong words to say it.

 

Here's the story, as I understand it, and how it's been reported (I've got most of the more hidden facts from the BBC website):

- Labour brought in the 50p tax rate.
- The 50p tax rate didn't give the gov't as much money as anticipated.
- Osbourne set up an investigation of sorts to find out why this was the case, in order to give a clearer picture of why this tax rate didn't work.
- It is found out that total earnings above £150k declared in the first year of the new 50p tax rate had dropped dramatically, and the year prior's earnings over £150k were higher than usual.
- The stats, as well as anecdotal evidence (and so on), show that the reason that the 50p tax rate brought in less revenue than that was predicted was because those that earn over £150k were able to declare more earnings before the year that the 50p tax rate came into effect. Most people that earn over £150k pay their tax via self-assessment, and so tax avoidance is far easier (this rather simple technique of avoiding tax is one of many facets to an extrmeely complex subject).
- This lack of revenue has been used to justify the abolition of the tax rate. It is not being cut for idealogical reasons (not officially, anyway).

Looking at this, however, I have to say that the problem is not with the 50p tax rate, it is how easy it seems to be for people that earn over £150k to avoid paying tax. In addition to this, if one of the main reasons that the 50p rate is being dropped is because of this loss of revenue, and if this lack of revenue is being attributed mainly to earners of over £150k being able to shift their earnings to the year prior, it surely is not an adequate justification for abolishing the rate. This is because after the first year of the 50p rate being ineffectual due to the year prior having a lower tax rate, and those affected being able to still 'earn within that year' so to speak, the following year will not have that same problem, for the obvious reason that the same avoidance tactic cannot be repeated.

Of course, this issue is much more complex than this, but this train of reason seems to have been trotted out a couple of times as the big reason for the 50p rate not working the way it should, and it's plainly not a good enough reason. It does not follow that the rate should be abolished from that above line of thought. Not one jot.

Tax avoidance is the biggest problem we face in this area. And the current government won't do anything about it unless they want to risk their biggest funders/allies. Nor will most governments for the same reason. One of a myriad reasons politics is disappointing and impossible to correct without huge-scale overhauls. And even then greedy people will obviously still exist, and many of them will seek political power. It shouldn't be that financial power should translate into political power, but that's the world we live in.

Money rules. Don't let that fact drive you to do anything stupid.

 

you surprise me - thought most high earners would be PAYE. Number of ways round it, including cutting back on your working week with a pro rata salary, if you run your own business then it is possible to employ your wife/kids and spread the salary, stock options, offshore etc.

I fundamentally disagree with a 50% tax rate, but I do agree with stopping my childcare allowance and higher stamp duty for 2m+ homes

 

Agree with this 100%. Whilst I feel a little sore that we're not getting CA for our forthcoming baby, frankly, I don't need it and it's ridiculous that the state should be burdened to pay me for this, just because the Daily Mail readers will feel like they are being opressed, if someone takes away the money which pays for half of Ophelia's pony lessons or Hugo's cello class. I do think that the means testing could have been fairer, but hey ho.

As for stamp duty, it's only on the very elite of houses. I know people will say that it unfairly hits London, but then London is over-represented, nationally in terms of wealth. The reason people in Burnley aren't paying £2m for houses, is because they earn less money than city slickers and hedge fund managers. Whilst I'd like to be able to afford a £2m+ house one day, I hope that I'll also be able to pay the expenses which come with it, including stamp duty.