There's nothing inevitable about this tax-raising, growth-choking Budget: I should know - "hiking tax will damage growth whereas overhauling a failing welfare system would boost it. Since the pandemic something has gone badly wrong in our welfare state. According to the Centre for Social Justice, a million people may soon earn more from welfare than they would working full time at the National Living Wage. For some time now, about a thousand people are being signed off from having to look for work every day, the majority for reasons of mental health. Recently that number has more than doubled, turning a festering problem into a crisis. The result is that we are torpedoing the country’s finances and destroying our national work ethic. There is an alternative: returning the working age welfare bill to pre-pandemic levels would save £47bn a year in real terms by the end of the fiscal period. Not a single tax rise would be necessary and headroom could be more than doubled. Sadly after failing to get much smaller welfare reforms past her own backbenchers, the Chancellor has made a different choice. All over the world, countries that are growing faster than us generally have lower taxes. The rest of us are stuck in the economic slow lane... Just look at the devastating impact of the tax rises in Labour’s first Budget: 180,000 fewer workers on payrolls following the employers’ National Insurance hike. Family farms and businesses being forced to sell up. Businesses are talking of moving abroad instead of investing at home. I expect the tax rises this time will be less overtly anti-business. But they will erode incentives to work, save and invest – the very thing a dynamic economy needs. Instead they will fund a bigger public sector as the private sector’s share of the economy shrinks. That, in turn, will make markets even less confident we can repay our debts... the IMF, the World Bank and the OECD all advise that spending-based consolidations harm growth less than raising taxes. The Chancellor should listen, or we will remain stuck in a low growth trap."
Alex Wickham on X - "Possibly the most important line in @TomMcTague Andy Burnham interview: ‘“We’ve got to get beyond this thing of being in hock to the bond markets,” he says. As such, he is open to working with the Liberal Democrats and even, in future, Jeremy Corbyn.’"
Mark Wallace on X - "We’re literally in hock to the bond markets because this country has run a deficit in every year since 2000/01."
Maybe he's going to fund all the deficits by printing money instead of borrowing
Labour's tax lies impoverish Britain - "Six months ago, Sir Keir Starmer proclaimed that as the economy had improved, he was substantially U-turning on his decision to cut the winter fuel allowance. Chancellor Rachel Reeves, meanwhile, insisted after last year’s Budget that she would not come back with “more taxes”. Just as the pre-election pledge to avoid taxes beyond those set out in Labour’s manifesto was replaced by the dishonest narrative of a “black hole” in the Treasury books, these claims have been dropped. Ms Reeves now tells us that “the world has changed”. Precisely how it has done so is less clear; the war in Ukraine and in Gaza both began well before Labour took office. An alternative story is that Britain’s borrowing costs are higher because Ms Reeves and Sir Keir have shown that they are both unable and unwilling to control spending, and pursuing policies on net zero and workers and renters rights which are diametrically opposed to creating the sort of high growth economy they profess to desire... Where Margaret Thatcher worked to turn Britain into a shareholder society, Ms Reeves appears set on turning it into a benefits state. The current plan is for a 2p cut in National Insurance paired with a 2p rise in income tax – which, vitally, is paid on a wider range of incomes, and by those above state pension age. Crucially, however, this 2p cut will not be offered on earnings over £50,270. The result is that some 8.8 million people will find their tax bills on this tranche of income rising with no offsetting reduction. This is not only absurd – those on such a salary are not “rich”, and adjusted for inflation fall well below the higher rate threshold Labour set the last time it was in office – but dishonest, breaking a manifesto pledge."
Labour simply cannot cope with the reality that the Tories had already spent all the money - "Some Labour MPs are now openly calling for Starmer to stand down if the Budget goes down badly with the public and/or financial markets (both of which seem certain). Yet what would any Labour replacement for Starmer do differently? There’s no more money to spend, no more tax to raise, and the deficit can’t carry on as it is. The chances must be high that whoever replaces Starmer will not last until 2028-29, and Labour will end up changing prime ministers as frequently as the Tories did. The reality is that Labour MPs based their whole political careers on the assumption that Tory governments spend too little and things will be made better by spending more. They were simply unequipped, philosophically or emotionally, for coming into office after the Tories had already spent far too much."
Badenoch accuses Reeves of cowardice over stealth tax plan - "The Institute for Fiscal Studies has warned that the number of people paying higher-rate income tax will top 10 million for the first time if she goes ahead with the stealth raid on workers. Freezing the earnings threshold when workers start paying 40 per cent – currently £50,271 a year – would drag 790,000 more people into the higher-rate band, taking the number of taxpayers to 10.1 million for the first time, according to the think tank. It would mean that over the course of this decade, the number of people paying the higher rate will have risen from just under four million to more than 10 million."
Left wingers mock those who think taxing the "rich" will hit poorer people. But they are ignorant as usual
Lee Nallalingham on X - "📈 Labour are about to raise your taxes and they’ll tell you it’s because they “have to make hard choices.” But remember, these are the choices they made:
✅ £15 billion on asylum hotels
✅ £13 billion a year on foreign aid
✅ £12 billion on Net Zero schemes
✅ £10 billion on welfare for foreign nationals
✅ £7 billion importing Afghans
✅ £6 billion subsidising social housing for non-British residents
✅ £4 billion on welfare for people with “anxiety”
✅ £600 million looking after foreign criminals
✅ £250 million translating NHS leaflets instead of expecting people to learn English
And now you get the bill. I think we’re all pretty clear on where Labour’s priorities lie - and it’s not with tax-paying, law-abiding British citizens."
Basil the Great on X - "🚨BILLIONAIRES SAY NO TO UK INVESTMENT "It takes 30 years to do a 9 month project" "Around 25% of the UK is on social benefits" "The Government is Socialist""
To boost UK productivity, ordinary workers must bear more of the tax burden - "Britain enjoyed the fastest growth of GDP per head, the broadest measure of productivity and living standards, among the Group of Seven major advanced economies between 1992 and 2016 and it outpaced the US and other G7 economies even more emphatically from 1992 to 2008. Since 2016, however, Britain’s per capita GDP growth has slumped, still marginally above Germany’s but well below all other countries in the group, including Italy, France and Japan. Why this sudden collapse? Until this question is convincingly answered there can be little hope of restoring Britain’s economic prospects or rebuilding the fiscal basis for a properly functioning welfare state. The great financial crisis in 2008 and the Brexit referendum in 2016 are obvious causes of Britain’s economic decline, but blaming these irreversible events is an unproductive distraction. More useful is to ask why the financial crisis harmed Britain so much more than other countries and why Brexit magnified this damage to the extent it did. Unfortunately, three of the most plausible explanations are almost unmentionable in Britain’s present political debate, which focuses instead on irrelevant panaceas such as railway and airport investment that have little or no bearing on productivity growth. US productivity is far higher than Britain’s, despite the appalling state of US infrastructure. The first politically incorrect explanation for the enduring damage to Britain from the financial crisis and Brexit is simply that global finance and pan-European services are the economic activities in which the country has the clearest comparative advantage. These two sectors were the main growth engines of the productivity golden age that followed the creation of the EU single market in 1993. In today’s Britain, by contrast, global finance has become a pejorative term and bankers are still labelled “greedy”, fomenting opposition to any expansion of finance. The politics of European integration has become almost equally controversial since the Brexit referendum, disadvantaging other major sectors where Britain had a clear comparative edge: pan-European business services, culture, education and scientific research. A second political transformation has magnified and entrenched the damage to UK productivity from Brexit and the 2008 crisis: a cross-party agreement to finance the expansion of the welfare state by taxing “the rich”, while reducing the contribution from “ordinary working people”. This fiscal transformation happened mainly under the Conservatives, perhaps with the subliminal intention of ultimately bankrupting the welfare state. The result has been a paradox at the heart of Britain’s budgetary problems: while the share of total taxation in GDP is now at its highest level since the 1940s, the rate of income tax and national insurance paid by “ordinary working people” earning average earnings is the lowest in postwar history, according to Tax Policy Associates. As a result, the top 1 per cent of UK taxpayers accounted for 29 per cent of income tax receipts in 2023-24, compared with 11 per cent in 1978-79, according to Institute for Fiscal Studies data. This shift in tax burdens may or may not be socially desirable, but it obviously discourages the expansion of industries that pay very high salaries: not just international finance and business services, but also technology, pharmaceuticals, media and other high-productivity sectors. The third neglected explanation for Britain’s productivity problem is the most important in the present budgetary context: a necessary condition for strong productivity is decent economic growth. If demand is crushed by overzealous efforts to control borrowing by raising taxes in a weakening economy, productivity growth becomes impossible — and public finances just lurch from crisis to crisis. All of which suggests a conclusion for this month’s Budget. Chancellor Rachel Reeves is doomed if her fiscal rules crush economic growth in the short-term and damage productivity in the long-term. The alternative is to encourage short-term growth and the expansion of high-productivity sectors by avoiding immediate tax rises and instead legislating now for an increase in the standard rate of income tax from 2028 or 2029, the only revenue source large and reliable enough to maintain the confidence of bond investors. The key to restoring both fiscal sustainability and productivity growth is to expand Britain’s most competitive businesses instead of relentlessly taxing their owners and employees, while recognising that a universal welfare state can only be financed in the long run by taxes on “ordinary working people”"
Tax the Rich as a way for HENRYs to go forward : r/HENRYUK - "Totally agree with it. Like he says, the wealthy become a black hole which sucks up the money. YOU will NEVER be part of that group as YOUR wages MUST fall to keep providing THEM value on investment. if THEY are offshoring and avoiding tax then YOU have to pay more for services or see YOUR services reduced. YOUR housing is expensive, not because of population growth but because Blackrock and Chinese investors are buying up everything. They will never leave. Where are they going to go? Dubai? Or as it will soon be called "The radioactive zone". Every time the rich SAY they are going to go to Switzerland or Dubai etc, they always come back because their kids friends are here; their wives like the shops and theatres and bars etc. Why do you think the Saudis and Qataris have been coming to London for decades? Why should YOU or I pay more taxes while OUR jobs are offshored or WE are made redundant or have to cover 2 or 3 peoples jobs so THEY can get greater "shareholder returns". I hit that £150k+ prior to COVID and DURING, but with wage collapsing in the UK & even more work either being offshored or cheap "high skilled" labour being brought in to provide THEM more returns; that has collapsed. And now with this Russia thing...THEY are expecting US to want to fight to protect THEIR palaces and investments and houses while THEY will fuck off to Dubai or South America or India to avoid THEIR kids having to fight to protect THEIR assets. And then THEY bitch and complain like little children that no one wants to work overtime for free in THEIR companies and that people will leave at a drop of a hat for another job giving THEM no loyalty or won't cancel plans with friends and family to stay at the last minute to do a job that will make THEM more money, while THEY will turn around and fire YOU the next day or if you get ill. And if THEY leave? Fuck em! WE are paying for them, WE are paying for the Police Services and Roads and civilised society that THEY take advantage of while THEY avoid tax. The Duke of Westminster, a family that has done shit all for 1000 years inherited £10 billion and paid NO tax on it. He did NOTHING for that money. His dad did nothing for that money. His granddad did nothing for that money. But YOU guys seem to be happy for YOUR chances of hitting £150k+ and for YOUR kids chances of doing better to be devastated because YOU think the game isn't rigged against YOU... ONE of you might be lucky but MOST of you won't and like I said...even if you DO hit the £150k, theres a very good chance that you'll be fired or made redundant because THEY have decided that you earn too much"
UK suffers second highest fall in wealth of any major economy in 2024 - "In December, a Henley and Partners study estimated that 10,800 dollar millionaires had left Britain in 2024, with departures expedited by the government’s decision to scrap the non-dom status along with other tax rises in its Autumn Budget."
Time to tax and mock the rich even more, and celebrate when they leave
We only have ourselves to blame for our once-great nation's sorry slide into poverty - "Let me spell it out using figures from the Centre for Economics and Business Research. On current trends, our standard of living will fall behind Lithuania in five years’ time and behind the Czech Republic in six. The deadweight of taxation and debt have pushed us steadily down the league tables, from 12th place at the beginning of the century to 24th today. If nothing changes, we will fall to 46th by 2050 – a middle-income nation. Along the way, we’ll be overtaken by Romania, Georgia, Turkey and Moldova. Moldova, for Heaven’s sake. This is not some statistical trickery, some prestidigitation with numbers. We can observe the immiseration around us. We see it in the closed pubs, the boarded-up shops, the profusion of charity and low-budget outlets. We hear it in the resigned tone of young graduates sending out unanswered job applications. We feel it in the judder of unfilled potholes under our tyres. We learn it from friends who are leaving for higher salaries and lower taxes in the UAE or Australia or even Portugal. None of this is inevitable. It is the direct result of choices we have made – and, depressingly, that we continue to make. People respond to incentives. If you put up their taxes, so that they keep a smaller portion of what they earn, they will be less productive. Likewise, if you hand them money unrelated to what they produce, they will be less productive. There may be other arguments for redistributive taxation; but there is no world in which it does not damage growth. Similarly, if you have regulations that inhibit risk-taking, privilege some sectors over others, or prevent companies from acting in the most efficient way, those firms become less productive. Again, some regulations might be necessary – those that prevent pollution are an obvious example – but let’s not pretend that they boost the economy. These are not radical, left-field ideas. They are basic economic orthodoxy, demonstrable in theory and proven over and over again in practice. Yet, at some point in the early twenty-first century, we (in common with most of Western Europe) gave up on them. We claim to want growth, but our revealed preferences tell a different story. We want growth only insofar as it does not mean cutting benefits, or lowering the minimum wage, or building on the Green Belt, or charging people to use the NHS, or allowing skilled immigration, or raising the pension age, or embracing imports. In other words, we don’t really want growth. Cushioned by generations of accumulated wealth, we struggle to imagine the dirt poverty to which we are condemning our descendants... This year, we will spend £303bn on benefits. It is hard to convey quite how vast that sum is. It is not only bigger than last year’s defence budget; not only bigger than last year’s NHS budget; it is bigger than both combined. Yet there is no willingness to curtail this expansion. Indeed, Labour seems set to add a massive new driver to the growth of welfare by lifting the two-child benefit cap. That is why taxes are going up. What would a Chancellor genuinely committed to growth be doing? Here are some of the authors’ ideas, all of them researched and tested following input from five former prime ministers, nine former chancellors and numerous Treasury officials and business leaders: A flat tax, collapsing the various allowances, deductions and rebates and folding in National Insurance, making administration cheap and simple. Scrapping inheritance tax and stamp duty and reversing the changes in non-dom rules that have pushed wealth-generators into emigration. Raising the pension age in line with life expectancy and removing the triple lock. Limiting the budget deficit and bringing down the national debt. Liberalising the labour market and reducing the minimum wage relative to the median wage. Scrapping the unaffordable aspects of net zero. Freezing sickness benefits in real terms, so that any rise in the number of claimants would mean a fall in the value of individual payments. Easing planning, and removing anti-landlord regulations... The growth of the state does not simply mean that we get progressively poorer, as money that could have been usefully invested is instead diverted into public-sector salaries and pensions. No, it also means that the people who are net beneficiaries of state spending become more numerous until they form an electoral block on reform. Leave aside, for a moment, the vast number of Government employees. Disregard, too, the wider body of rent-seekers and contractors who derive their income indirectly from the Treasury. Look purely at the number of adults claiming benefits... Our big budgets are health and social security. If you don’t want to cut them, you don’t want to cut spending. Politicians are reflecting their constituents’ complacent and contradictory attitudes. A poll this week showed that 58 per cent of us oppose any cuts in public spending while 67 per cent oppose any tax rises. We don’t just have a politician problem; we have an electorate problem. How entitled we have become. Ours was the country of Adam Smith and David Ricardo and Margaret Thatcher, the country that introduced the world to free contract, secure property and open markets. Those ideas made us the richest nation in the world. Yet our generation cares nothing for them. We choose to disregard our fathers and disinherit our children. We choose mediocrity. We choose penury. Shame on us."
Britain is doomed under Starmer and Reeves, says Ryanair boss - "Michael O’Leary hit out at Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves ahead of the Budget later this month, claiming that planned tax hikes will derail any hope of kick-starting growth... The airline boss said the only growth that Labour’s policies are likely to foster will be in “people fleeing London”, particularly after Ms Reeves said she will target those with the broadest shoulders. Mr O’Leary said he had supported Labour’s growth agenda prior to the general election but lost faith after the party bowed to pay demands from the unions. He said: “I have very little time for Rachel Reeves or her Labour Government. “When they got elected, they said the cupboard was bare and that we’ve got a £30bn black hole to fill. But the first thing they do is find big pay increases for train drivers who are already vastly overpaid.” The Ryanair boss said he is especially concerned about further increases in APD after Ms Reeves introduced a £2 rise for short-haul economy flights during her first Budget. This is due to take effect in April 2026. While the London market may have the resilience to withstand higher taxes, he warned that regional cities will see a reduction in flights as airlines target cheaper markets. He said: “If APD goes up again in the Budget, we and other airlines will pivot more capacity into economies like Sweden and Italy that are abolishing environmental taxes.” As a result of Labour’s approach to taxation, he said that none of the 300 new aircraft that Ryanair is taking from Boeing will be based in the UK."
Reeves to ban luxury cars for benefit claimants - "The latest figures show that there are around 50,000 high-end models from manufacturers such as BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Audi leased out under the scheme. Numbers have increased dramatically in tandem with a surge in sickness benefits claims, particularly for mental health conditions, following the pandemic. Last month, ministers revealed that annual taxpayer transfers to Motability had risen 10 per cent year on year to an eye-watering £3.1bn... a senior cabinet minister insisted that Ms Reeves’s decision to turn on the spending taps would reap economic benefits in the longer run. Peter Kyle, the Business Secretary, vowed there would be no return to “the failed policy of austerity” ahead of what is expected to be a tax-raising Budget."
Destroying the economy is better than austerity, apparently
The Motability scheme is the apogee of Britain’s fake economy - "The proposed changes will add further unneeded headwinds to an already struggling industry, which includes retailers as well as manufacturers, and according to one industry insider, may end up adding over £6,000 to the average cost of a new Motability vehicle. This is a serious problem in an era when Motability accounts for over a fifth of all new vehicle sales. It seems remarkable that a scheme that is supposed to offer affordable leasehold vehicles to the disabled could account for such a vast chunk of the new car market. Partially, it is a result of the steady shrinking of the total number of new vehicles sold each year in Britain; now down to less than two million. This is a result of regulations making smaller, cheaper vehicles harder to produce, while the median new vehicle price has risen steadily over the last ten years, costs at the bottom of the price range have risen far more dramatically. But the other reason that Motability accounts for such a large percentage of the new car market is that the scheme only offers brand-new vehicles. There is no option for recipients to choose a used car... In some ways, it’s heartening to hear Britain’s beleaguered car sector sticking up for itself. For years, it has all but cheered along as a succession of well-meaning but ill-thought out policy ideas to laid waste to the industry, including legislation that will soon outlaw petrol and diesel cars; overwhelmingly the most popular product. All of this is a great summary of how the British economy works now. It’s not consumer tastes that dictate what manufacturers produce, it is government rules. Not only the EV mandate, but also reams of contradictory legislation, such as safety regulations that make cars heavier at the same time as emissions rules say they should get lighter. And it is not aggregate demand in the form of consumer incomes and economics that dictate what people actually get – that is decided by statutory entitlement. In the past, it was how much you earned that determined whether you could get a new car; now, it is whether or not the Government agrees that you suffer from anxiety, or if your child is autistic. This brings us back to the original point of Rachel Reeves desperately trying to fill the “black hole” in the Budget. Britain today has neither a capitalist market economy driven by supply and demand, nor a socialist command economy in which consumption could be throttled back to ensure that means meet ends. Instead, we have ended up trying to run an economy based on a nebulous idea of “fairness” in which people have rights that simply have to be fulfilled, one way or another. And so we end up with the absurd spectacle of the Chancellor trying to claw back in taxes some of the money it is obliged to pay out in Personal Independence Payments, which nominally pay for Motability cars, via VAT and IPT. It’s the fiscal equivalent of a cat chasing its own tail. The car industry is among the worst, but the same thing can be seen across the economy. The Government flattens household energy prices while its rules make electricity far more expensive to produce. The Government offers credits for childcare to people on low incomes, while legislation insists on stringent minimum staffing ratios pushing up costs for people in better paying jobs. All in all, the price mechanism is broken in Britain, and it is seriously questionable whether we can still be considered a market economy at all."
Motability: 'Just because I'm disabled, why can't I drive what I want?' - ""We should all have a choice, just because I'm disabled - why can I not have a choice and drive what I want?"... Motability's financial reserves have doubled to £4 billion since the pandemic, mostly due to the increased value of the leased vehicles driven by scheme users. The scheme accounts for roughly 40% of all new car sales in Northern Ireland"
Left wing logic: if you don't give people free/subsidised products and services, you're restricting their freedom. Similarly, in the US, if you don't give people free food through SNAP, supposedly you're not letting them eat
The Green Party on X - "At the Budget, the Green Party's message is clear: Cut Bills. Tax Billionaires."
James Orr on X - "Britain has ~160 billionaires. Total wealth: ~£680 billion. Annual public spending: ~£1.3 trillion. So if the Treasury confiscated 100% of billionaire wealth tomorrow it would cover public spending for roughly 6 months. The runway to Socialism’s Paradise is a short one."
