Goddammit, just tax us

[ailbhe]

Tax us more. This Child Benefit thing is ridiculous. It's not as immediately horrific as what seems to be happening to Housing Benefit, which is really horrible, but it's silly and badly thought out and won't gain nearly enough to justify the damage it will do.

(We'll be fine; when we lose it, I will still have access to and partial control over household income, and none of it will suddenly disappear overnight, because neither of us is daft with money, though I might be a little obsessive about it. But plenty of women won't be.)

Comments

[the-changeling.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking about you through all of this. I was pretty sure it would hit you.

*damn*

*hugs*

[ailbhe]

We don't need the money. I quite agree with that.

[thereyougothen.livejournal.com]

tax is the only fair option. I've been reading about this and never mind the fact that it's a universal benefit for *children*, it's the way they are implementing it. Some families will be able to earn what, £86K and keep it, and others will lose it at £44K.

[lovingboth]

I can sort of see why that is - it's a cheap way to ensure that a non-earning parent doesn't lose out because their partner earns £lots. The alternative, if you're going to be evil enough to abandon universality, is means testing = the costs of doing that swamp the savings.

So the only 'losers' are those single parents earning £lots.

[ailbhe]

Er, no - if *one* parent earns over the threshold *the family* loses the benefit.

[songster.livejournal.com]

Looked like the opposite to me. If both partners are going out to work, there are likely to be high childcare costs involved. So, while losing child benefit may be affordable for one person earning £44k, it's much less likely to be affordable for two people earning £22k each. Where it falls down is where you have two people each earning £43k, obviously. Ideally you'd base it on combined household income after childcare is paid for - but that's a lot of expensive admin and might well negate the whole point of the exercise.

Sticking a finger in the air, I'd say that to be roughly equitable between single/dual income families the threshold could be set at one parent earning more that 44k, or 60k combined income. That effectively assumes childcare costs come out around £16k, so the 60k dual income family has the same net income as the 44k single income family.

I do agree in principle that a universal benefit is really silly. It makes no sense to tax someone earning £30k and pay the benefits to someone earning a million. I know the argument that says it's paid to the child, not the parents: sorry, but no it doesn't work like that.

[(Anonymous)]

"Ideally you'd base it on combined household income after childcare is paid for - but that's a lot of expensive admin and might well negate the whole point of the exercise."

Which they already do for Child Tax Credits. And I thought we were in a brand new world of inter-agency data-sharing - they're happy to use that for things I don't agree with, lol, so why not use it when even I can see it might be useful?

I'm personally upset because it's a big "fuck you" to families with a stay-at-home parent - basically my life is pointless unless I'm out there earning money and paying tax.

I think it's very cynical and manipulative - remove people's personal connection with the welfare state, and they'll start to question why other people are deserving of it.

asilon

Am also concerned because receiving Child Benefit gives you a tick in a pension-entitlement box for each year a parent gets it but doesn't earn money - they haven't said how that will work in future.

[thereyougothen.livejournal.com]

I'd forgotten about that. My state pension was protected for the years I stayed home to look after my kids. We would lose our child benefit if we were still in the UK, because my husband earned over the threshold, but only just, and I might lose my state pension as a result. Great.

[ailbhe]

We're probably going to cancel some of our insurance and make my NI contributions from Rob's salary, I think. Insurance is one of the luxuries I lived without before so I can live without it again.

[biascut.livejournal.com]

Goddammit, just tax us

Amen! And the same for graduates!

[lovingboth]

Um, this may be me totally misunderstanding your position, but unless you both earn enough to pay the top rate of tax, why would you lose it?

[myfirstkitchen.livejournal.com]

She will lose it because Rob is a 40% tax payer. You only need one higher rate (not just top rate, top rate is 50%) tax payer to lose it.

[myfirstkitchen.livejournal.com]

It's truly ridiculous. It saves £1billion and not 'til 2013 (and they need to save over £80billion RIGHT NOW according to them), and yet they plan to bring in marriage tax breaks that will cost half what is saved, £500million, if it goes as originally planned just to standard rate tax payers or £750million, three quarters of what the CB cuts save, to extend it to higher rate tax payers which they may do just to please their core support. So it's ideological, all to give people £150 a year.

[st-lemur.livejournal.com]

There's £120 billion of evaded and avoided tax a year out there. If the government called that in there would be no need to cut anything or raise taxes.

[caerleon.livejournal.com]

Avoided tax is fine.. unless you think things like TESSAs and ISAs should be stopped..

Remember that a lot of tax avoidance schemes are deliberately set up by government to promote certain fiscal behaviour..

[songster.livejournal.com]

Well, there are different types of tax avoidance. There's using tax exemptions for the intended purpose (pensions, ISAs, TESSAs or whatever), and using them for unintended purposes.

If you do a lot of international business, clearly you should only pay tax on the income once, so you have to have rules that say "income earned abroad gets taxed where it's earned". That's working as intended. When you then finagle those rules on a technicality to claim that your income is all earned in Outer Erehwon despite the fact that you actually do your buying and selling in the UK - well that's not working as intended. Legally, it's still avoidance, but morally it's evasion. It's just very hard to word laws that correctly manage to permit X while forbidding Y.

[caerleon.livejournal.com]

Indeed.. it does bother me though when people lump avoidance and evasion together.. it's the sort of fiscal incompetence I expect only from trade union leaders on their £100,000 per year salaries that are probably avoiding as much tax as they can possibly get away with under the law..

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, and lessening the blow with a MARRIED couple tax allowance? Ugh ugh and more ugh.

asilon

[ailbhe]

Srsly, I get closer and closer to wanting a divorce.

[tin_kitten.livejournal.com]

That's maybe my plan - I feel a bit ill at the thought of having a Tory sanctioned relationship really. I don't think my husband thinks I'm serious though.

[(Anonymous)]

C and I keep talking about it too. But I'm pretty sure divorces cost money and I don't know if we can afford it, lol! I'm hoping we can just not claim a marriage tax credit.

asilon

[tiggsybabes.livejournal.com]

We will lose it. It's not the end of the world, as I use it to pay for Kate & Holly's swimming lessons & we have 3 year's warning.

What does annoy me, is that if both parents earn slightly under £44k, they don't lose it & yet we do. I earn about £4 or £5k a year, before deductions, & am also paying £1200 a year in degree fees, plus textbooks etc.