1. Child Tax credits taken away from those earning more than £30k.
2. VAT increased to 19% or 20%
3. Capital Gains Tax increased to up to 40%
4. Increased taxes on banks
5. Public sector pay to be frozen for at least 1 year
6. Public sector pension contributions to be at least doubled
7. Alcohol and tobacco duties to go up by at least 5%
8. Welfare benefits to be frozen for a year
9. Additional spending cuts of more than £50 billion
10. The end of some universal benefits
I hope you might find time to tune into LBC's budget coverage, which I will be presenting between 12.30 and 4pm.
34 comments:
I thought in the election DC said only people earning over 50k would lose child tax credits..
The only one that sounds good is increased taxes on banks - and you can bet they'll pass that cost onto their customers somehow.
Or they can follow my plan:
http://captainranty.blogspot.com/2010/06/tips-for-condems.html
It's simple and effective.
CR.
Given the way public sector pension schemes work, a doubling in contributions would be, in effect, a significant tax increase and a reduction in take home pay.
Couple that with a pay freeze, inflation running at 3% and and an increase in VAT and public sector workers are looking at taking a big hit.
I don't work in the public sector, but my wife does. She's given 25 years of her life to teaching kids in inner London and this is the thanks she gets? A shrinking income and demonisation in the right-wing press. Thanks a bunch Mr Osborne.
I know George Osborne reads this blog regularly, so here are my suggestions for cuts.
1/ We simply cannot have a situation where poor people are allowed to eat. Mr Osborne (whom it is universally agreed is the most talented politician of our times) must therefore impose a VAT charge on all foodstuffs of 135% to take immediate effect. An extra charge to be levied on baby milk, McDonalds take-aways, doner kebab shops and all forms of ketamine. A regional surcharge to be applied (in line with Tory thinking - thank you Reform!) to Glasgow, Newcastle on Tyne, Normanton and Islywn.
2/ A special relief for Tory marginals to be applied in full and retrospectively in the case of those who voted Cameron and not Clegg this time.
3/ A new tiered system for bankers bonuses in which city traders will receive matching funds from local authorities council tax benefit account. So for example, if a banker, city trader or hedge fund market manipulator is to receive a £3m bonus this quarter, this to be topped up from welfare payment accounts to, say, £7m. This to be known as the "Cable Tax".
4/ A new tax in honour of David Laws and Chris Huhne, to be known as the "Telegraph Tax" on all offshore persons whose names begin with B - something - A - something and live in the neighbourhood of Sark. This to be initially set at the rate of 100%.
5/ A special extra relief to be applied to all of those smaller houses valued at over £10m to be deducted from inheritance tax. This will be paid for by increasing national insurance specifically on nurses, fireman and soldiers.
6/ A new "Balls" tax will be imposed on anyone who cannot quite speak properly and who sounds sinister reading a menu or asking for a train ticket. The Balls tax will finance extra reliefs for the 2% of wealthiest shareholders.
I trust these excellent measures will relieve our budget deficit of 1 followed by 17 zeros in short order and I commend them to the Haise. Ere Ere.
A doubling of public sector pension contributions would effectively be a 6% pay cut. Add that to a pay freeze and you're looking at 10%. I think the effect (loss of income to the economy, people unable to pay mortagages, possible strikes) would be too much for the Govt to contemplate. Anyway, the Hutton committee will mean that nothing solid will probably appear on public sector pensions today.
VAT on books Iain?
"She's given 25 years of her life to teaching kids in inner London."
So what?
@macuser e7
Oh do stop crying. You should have tried running a job creating, wealth producing business for the last 13 years. Your Mrs is f*cking lucky to have a pension mine was stolen by Brown after 40 years of hard work and instead of retiring I now have to start work all over again
@despairingliberal
Don't give up the day job ( if you have one). Left wing satire is sooo 80's. It doesn't work anymore as after 13 years of Labour you can't satirize anything because it would be out done by the reality
Exactly why are we having such a severe budget?
You have to love the left, they run up an unsustainable credit card debt and then get the hump when someone else sorts out the mess - making the difficult decisions they put off. I'm sure had Labour miraculously stayed in power they would have made nice 'fluffy' cuts.
Funny how when Labour were elected in '97 they never inherited such a problem.
@macuser_e7: She's given 25 years of her life to teaching kids in inner London and this is the thanks she gets? A shrinking income and demonisation in the right-wing press. Thanks a bunch Mr Osborne.
Loads of people in the private sector have had no pay rises for several years, and many have taken quite substantial cuts... All the while watching those in the public sector clock up their regular 3% or 4% increases.
Welcome to the real world.
Britain is not un dertaxed it is overgoverned. At 53% of GNP the state sector is far to large & is itself the major break on economic growth. I regret the Illiberals have been able to demand that only 80% of deficit cutting ot to come from reducing government. To get back to the 37% which Frank Fields refered to as the "glass ceiling" on the 37% of GNP maximum that it has ever been possible to raise could & should be done by a 37% cut in the government sector.
Thanks for that Libertarian - I agree that the Coalition's transparently obvious manouvre to gain themselves slack for a pre-election tax-cut next time by annnouncing that everything is much more awful than it really is is almost beyond satire. But there you go - one tries!
If you want real satire, check in any time to the Tory blogs, where fantasy is made reality and things Tory think-tanks invented a few weeks ago become utter facts.
Junkies call it a "Moment of Clarity" - when they realise their habit is destroying themselves.
The UK public, PLC and Government are debt junkies.
If this budget fails to deliver a moment of clarity it will have failed.
'I thouight in the electio9n blah blah blah ...'
In the election labour were hiding the full extent of the debt crisis.
We are in the shit. Labour's shit. And Despairing Liberal once again makes an arsehole of himself.
The nitty gritty issue of benefits and pensions are still to be decided - decisions led by lifelong labour politicians and activists. This is something which Harpersons shrill words totally ignored of course. It is not a tory budget it is a coalition budget and that coalition spreads beyond the libdems.
Sane members of the labour party will regret that these men were not properly supported before we got into this mess.
The autumn will make clear what is going to happen.
add to that list the Lib Dems becoming the lapdogs of this ConDem government and you've got it right on the money.
"this is the thanks she gets? A shrinking income"
The authentic sound of the greed and envy of the middle class Left.
They "passionately" believe in redistributing wealth (created by others) into their own pockets (in the name of social justice you understand) because they think they are worth it.
Nobody else (needless to add) thinks they are worth it, which is why they so "passionately" opposed to anybody having the freedom to make our own choices.
It is the sort of thinking which makes Jeremy Paxman fawn over the lightweights and charlatans running for the leadership of the Labour Party.
I have more respect for leeches. They at least drop off when they have has their fill.
@ Macuser_e7
If you think your wife deserves thanks merely for doing what she is employed to do, you are off your trolley. And why should anyone be exempted from a tax regime on that basis?
We're paying her, aren't we? If she's not happy with the arrangement she could always try her luck in the private sector- where the job security, the pay, the pensions, the holidays, etc are all rather less. Oh, and you still get no thanks for doing your job.
It's the mindset that gets me. Who the hell do these people believe they are?
@ Libertarian 11:40AM
Yes, the events of the past thirteen years have been entirely beyond parody. Evelyn Waugh would have struggled.
I do hope we'll be able to return to some semblance of sanity shortly, but my fear is that the left-wing craziness we have all endured is now too deeply embedded in the grain of society.
Vince Cable doing a good job of defending the budget on SKY.
Some would like to say he is semi detached - well not on this showing.
As for the public sector - some years ago it was recognised that lower salaries in the public sector were compensated for by a relatively generous pension. Those days have changed and the harsh reality is that thanks to browns incompetence we cannot afford what public sector workers would like. I was a public sector worker once and my wife still is.
Despairing Liberal continues to defy the gravity of reality. It IS more serious than labour pretended.
Pretending that we can safely borrow more is akin to 'Roadrunner' shooting of the end of the cliff as he chases the elusive coyote, pausing in mid-air for that numbing moment until reality sets in and he plummets to the ground.
BTw - its interesting that harperson was saying th\t we cannot emulate canada's way of cutting the defict as our position is even worse! What a bunch of jerks.
And what a bunch of jerks we have who refuse to acknowledge the mess we are in.
Hmmm, no increase in fags and booze (beyond the VAT rises, of course). Interesting. Hopefully George won't be averse to taking the axe to the funding of the fake charities ASH and Alcohol Concern while he's trying to find millions to save. Indeed, in Tobacco Control alone there are tens if not hundred of millions to be saved. Just look at the Tobacco Control Conference in Scotland last week. 594 delegates, each one representing some publicly funded (because no-one actually donates to these things) body. 594!! And none of them on less than £60k you can bet, most probably on a Hell of a lot more. There's ASH, Smokefree North East, D-Myst, Smokefree Northwest, Tobacco Free Kids and the hundreds of other organisations that suckle on the tax-payers' teat, as well as all the Doctors in the NHS who spend their time and money concocting reports on smoking and attending conferences like the one above rather than, you know, actually seeing patients. Hack the lot of them. Millions saved and the interfering Big State nobbled. It really is win-win.
VAT would never rise to 19% as it makes the maths too difficult.
@ Essex (and others
Repeat after me
Corporations do not pay tax
Individuals pay tax
The comment from POGO is so wrong. Teachers salaries have not increased by 4% each year, but don't let the facts get in the way of your rant.
there is a rise in cigs and alcohol duty - that was done by labour in the march budget.
Osborne has repealed the bizarre attack on cider and perry.
George Osborne gave a star performance today.
"I thought in the election DC said only people earning over 50k would lose child tax credits.."
Well, that's before he saw the scale of NuLab's mismanagement, isn't it?
I was out drinking in Canary Wharf and the response from the trading floors was ...
"IS THAT IT?"
If it was that easy why didn't George just nail the whole deficit in one go. I think history will say he didn't have a grasp of the depth of the problem or the opportunity he missed. We didn't get our "Moment of Clarity". Oh dear.
@Norfolk Blogger: The comment from POGO is so wrong. Teachers salaries have not increased by 4% each year, but don't let the facts get in the way of your rant.
Reading comprehension not your strong point I see. Where did I say "teachers"?
However, you are correct in claiming that teachers haven't had 4% pay rises, according to the LES 23/06/10:-
Education Secretary Michael Gove confirmed that teachers in England and Wales will get a pay rise this year - before a two-year pay freeze for all public sector workers kicks in next April.
He said the Government remains committed to "honouring in full" a three-year pay award that will see teachers getting a 2.3% salary increase in September.
Teachers received an extra 2.45% in September 2008 and 2.3% in September 2009 as part of a deal recommended by the School Teachers' Review Body (STRB).
So they've not had 4% every year, but they have had 2.45%, 2.3% and will get another 2.3%. In the same time most of my "ordinary" working friends in private industry have receieved 0.0%, 0.0% and 0.0% (and in one or two cases, 0.0%, -5.0% and -10.0%).
Well, the markets have spoken... the FTSE is down less than the other major indices, and Sterling has risen against both the Dollar and the Euro - in fact, against everything except the NZ$.
Seems like they think we're going to be OK.
Thanks to all the nice people who had such warm words of thanks to my wife for her hard work and sacrifice. Nice to know that teachers are so widely appreciated.
I know she should be grateful to be able to work 50 - 60 hours a week. The idea that she might be paid as well? Why, the ungracious cow! And have the pension she was *promised* when she started out? Oh, please - how utterly unrealistic. Doesn't she realise how things are out in the real world?
Of course she has to bear the burden and pay for this crisis! She caused it. Her and all her unproductive, lazy, leeching public sector pals. If only they were as productive, useful and wealth-creating as those bankers in the city!
@macuser_e7: Calm down. Is that how you and/or your wife think it's appropriate to treat her employers? She's paid to teach, and that's a very useful service, but it's not bloody charity work. Oh no! The hours are long and the work is stressful! If it's such a bad deal, quit.
You say her pension was promised? Is your wife on the salary she started work on? No? Because terms and conditions can be ratcheted up, but never down? The simple fact is that the public sector pension schemes are as unaffordable as they were in the private sector when employees had to accept changes to prevent the companies going bust. Now the whole country is going bust and you're whining because you can't get a bigger share. Grow up.
You seem to have a lot of bile to spit about bankers, too. Well, sorry to piss on your chips, but they actually do create wealth, screwing it out of the French, the Russians, the Arabs, the Yanks, etc. Money exists only at borders. The taxes that bankers pay on the wealth they create pays your wife's wages. This may be an uncomfortable fact, but that's your problem, not mine.
macuser_e7... May I draw your attention to the closing paragraph of my previous post?
So they've not had 4% every year, but they have had 2.45%, 2.3% and will get another 2.3%. In the same time most of my "ordinary" working friends in private industry have receieved 0.0%, 0.0% and 0.0% (and in one or two cases, 0.0%, -5.0% and -10.0%).
... they don't get thanks either. And guess what? Neither do they get inflation-proofed pensions, or, in many cases, pensions.
I'm sure that (some) teachers do a damned good job, but fergodsake cut out the demands that they be "appreciated", poor lambs. They do a job, just like a lot of other people do jobs, it's just that being in the public sector they've largely been insulated from the global recession that's knocked seven colours of s**t out of the private sector.
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