The papers absolutely have it in for Labour. Anything that targets wealthy property owners and they get particularly rabid about it.
It sucks that my future pay rises are going to be eaten up by more tax due to them freezing the thresholds again. But that is about the best outcome I could have hoped for really. I am slap bang in the middle earners bracket so I don't benefit from any of the benefits increases or suffer from any of the higher end council tax or savings/property income tax tweaks.
It's just more tweaking around the edges at the end of the day. They can't cut benefits because of their backbenchers being imbeciles and they can't cut the pension triple lock because they will be crucified by the country for it. And so onwards we slowly march to bankruptcy because they aren't doing anywhere near enough to promote real growth and there will be a similar benefits blackhole to plug in next year's budget.
The Absolute State Of It - It's The UK Politics Thread!
Re: The Absolute State Of It - It's The UK Politics Thread!
Yeah, I can't see it as anything other than media bias. Reeves wasn't helped yesterday by the apparently shocking and unprecedented situation of a civil servant accidentally publishing the full budget before she'd had chance to deliver it. It feels like that's just woven into this narrative of incompetence despite that presumably being an unfortunate human error that can't possibly be blamed on her.
My immediate reaction was that I'm getting a bit fed up of the elderly being pandered to at the expense of the young. I can't see why over-65s need a higher ISA allowance than younger people. While I don't want to begrudge pensioners their pension rises (how sustainable that is is a different conversation), people who aren't working that can still afford to pay £20,000 into savings in a given year surely don't need the help. Someone has presumably crunched the numbers and decided that the tax revenue from that extra £8,000 isn't worth the political hit, but there's growing outrage among younger people that their futures are being destroyed by people who are wealthy enough already.
I didn't react particularly well to the fact that I'm now barely above the new minimum wage. Don't get me wrong, my job has more (non-financial) perks than just pay, but it does feel a bit insulting that all of the specialist knowledge I need for my role hardly gets me anything above knowing which shelf to put the tomato soup on.
My immediate reaction was that I'm getting a bit fed up of the elderly being pandered to at the expense of the young. I can't see why over-65s need a higher ISA allowance than younger people. While I don't want to begrudge pensioners their pension rises (how sustainable that is is a different conversation), people who aren't working that can still afford to pay £20,000 into savings in a given year surely don't need the help. Someone has presumably crunched the numbers and decided that the tax revenue from that extra £8,000 isn't worth the political hit, but there's growing outrage among younger people that their futures are being destroyed by people who are wealthy enough already.
I didn't react particularly well to the fact that I'm now barely above the new minimum wage. Don't get me wrong, my job has more (non-financial) perks than just pay, but it does feel a bit insulting that all of the specialist knowledge I need for my role hardly gets me anything above knowing which shelf to put the tomato soup on.
Re: The Absolute State Of It - It's The UK Politics Thread!
Being rather closer to retirement I can see the value in the ISA allowance. What you retire with is what you have, so being able to make the money that you have saved throughout your working life work for you when you have no means of topping up the pot (other than getting back on the fucking treadmill) is a big deal.
08/10/2003 - 17/08/2018RCHD wrote:Snowy is my favourite. He's a metal God.
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Re: The Absolute State Of It - It's The UK Politics Thread!
I think it makes sense to leave the cash ISA higher for older folks because at that age you won't want to be taking as many risks with your portfolio, so having more cash in reserve makes sense.
Overall it's one of the budget changes that I think is pretty meaningless in the long run. Probably not that many people were actually able to make use of the 20k per year cap anyway and if you really are averse to share stocks then you can just dump the money into bond markets instead and still get your 20k stocks and shares ISA allowance.
I haven't used my cash ISA for years now. My savings go straight to my investment ISA every month and I'm nowhere near hitting the cap each year that I'd need to worry about putting any overspill into a cash ISA.
I think the worst thing about this budget is the triple lock pensioners getting another 500 quid a year. On top of the renewable scheme cuts so that energy bills will come down for everyone and the Labour backbenchers rioting over the changes to the winter fuel allowance. Guess what one of the papers ran with on the front page yesterday, a headline about pensioners freezing during winter. Moronic.
Overall it's one of the budget changes that I think is pretty meaningless in the long run. Probably not that many people were actually able to make use of the 20k per year cap anyway and if you really are averse to share stocks then you can just dump the money into bond markets instead and still get your 20k stocks and shares ISA allowance.
I haven't used my cash ISA for years now. My savings go straight to my investment ISA every month and I'm nowhere near hitting the cap each year that I'd need to worry about putting any overspill into a cash ISA.
I think the worst thing about this budget is the triple lock pensioners getting another 500 quid a year. On top of the renewable scheme cuts so that energy bills will come down for everyone and the Labour backbenchers rioting over the changes to the winter fuel allowance. Guess what one of the papers ran with on the front page yesterday, a headline about pensioners freezing during winter. Moronic.