The Theresa May General Election thread (edited)

Heartfeltdawn

capo4th said:

Whats wrong with stereotyping?  

I think we covered that with the discussion on private education. Stereotyping means cutting out nuance. 

Fretwired

Forget tax. I'll happily pay more tax when the government stops wasting the money it takes. Corbyn wants to give the NHS £6 billion and intends to raise tax to pay for it.

However, Labour's NHS National Programme for IT cost the tax payer approximately £11 billion before it was scrapped. I say approximately as nobody seems to know the true figure and the government will have to continue paying until 2017, pushing up the cost to nearer £14 billion. The Public Accounts Committee has slammed the project as “one of the worst and most expensive contracting fiascos in the history of the public sector”. It has been estimated that £11 billion could easily pay the salaries of 55,000 nurses for 10 years.

Now you may be forgiven for thinking this is an isolated case. Sadly it is not. A project to build a new control system for the fire service has cost £480 million and has been scrapped. A system that should have improved the collection of tax at HM Revenue and Customs has failed (at a cost of £98 million) and, as the winter nights draw in, you might wonder why the publicly funded BBC is showing so many repeats. It might have something to do with wasting £100 million on a digital media project that has – you guessed it – been scrapped.

Moving to defence - the Nimrod fiasco cost £3.6billion before the project was scrapped, the Astute class sub was £1.2 billion over budget, the Typhoon fighter was £13 billion over budget and our new aircraft carriers are already £5 billion over budget and that doesn't include the aircraft which will cost an additional £4 billion.

Government wastes money. Rule one: don't give them any more.

ToneControl

Fretwired said:

Forget tax. I'll happily pay more tax when the government stops wasting the money it takes. Corbyn wants to give the NHS £6 billion and intends to raise tax to pay for it.

However, Labour's NHS National Programme for IT cost the tax payer approximately £11 billion before it was scrapped. I say approximately as nobody seems to know the true figure and the government will have to continue paying until 2017, pushing up the cost to nearer £14 billion. The Public Accounts Committee has slammed the project as “one of the worst and most expensive contracting fiascos in the history of the public sector”. It has been estimated that £11 billion could easily pay the salaries of 55,000 nurses for 10 years.

Now you may be forgiven for thinking this is an isolated case. Sadly it is not. A project to build a new control system for the fire service has cost £480 million and has been scrapped. A system that should have improved the collection of tax at HM Revenue and Customs has failed (at a cost of £98 million) and, as the winter nights draw in, you might wonder why the publicly funded BBC is showing so many repeats. It might have something to do with wasting £100 million on a digital media project that has – you guessed it – been scrapped.

Moving to defence - the Nimrod fiasco cost £3.6billion before the project was scrapped, the Astute class sub was £1.2 billion over budget, the Typhoon fighter was £13 billion over budget and our new aircraft carriers are already £5 billion over budget and that doesn't include the aircraft which will cost an additional £4 billion.

Government wastes money. Rule one: don't give them any more.

what was the name of the HMRC project?

DWP lost £120m on a project that was scrapped, and AFAIK has thrown more at the latest projects around universal credit.The ineptitude was amazing, and the guilty parties are still in post

ThePrettyDamned

ToneControl said:

ThePrettyDamned said:

capo4th said:

Everyone needs to pay a fair share of tax and contribute to society.

Have you noticed many self employed types always pay in cash and never on a card which tells you all you need to know.

I pay a shed load in tax and give to charity, contribute to society etc giving something back in the local community, being a good citizen etc.

I look at my monthly tax bill and just see it being squandered by wasters. 

If we overtax people they they will leave unfortunately I am not in a position to do that and don't consider myself rich. What happened to people having aspiration and achievement? 

Question, if someone insisted you pay cash for work done (for example, an electrician or car mechanic) would you comply or insist on electronic payment or find someone else? 

I've never (literally not once) been asked to pay cash bar my local tandoori which was cash only for the first few months of opening. 

you must live a sheltered life, plenty of people insist on cash

I know people who won't use any cards, or reward cards, won't buy online, put their house in their spouse's name, etc.
There really are plenty of working class people paying no or little tax, or to me far worse: claiming tax credits whilst not declaring quite significant incomes. This was why I was annoyed at Corbyn's "tax cheats" comment

Maybe I do, I don't know. I suppose if I include market stools then yeah, I have experienced cash in hand only. 

But even the local curry house has a chip and pin machine. The local hairdressers does. My mechanic does, as did our plumber. 

Even the big issue man outside the sainsburys has one attached to a phone... 

Perhaps the consumer could have more of a say. Don't accept a cash in hand job. Fuck knows you'd be screwed over if something went wrong - surely there is no receipt? 

Heartfeltdawn

ToneControl said:

what was the name of the HMRC project?

DWP lost £120m on a project that was scrapped, and AFAIK has thrown more at the latest projects around universal credit.The ineptitude was amazing, and the guilty parties are still in post

I would guess it's the RTI project. 

http://www.computerworlduk.com/it-business/hmrcs-real-time-paye-project-over-budget-not-resilient-may-miss-deadline-3455845/

Not all of the guilty parties are in post at the DWP. One of them quit having wasted a lot of money. 

http://www.politics.co.uk/blogs/2016/03/17/ids-loses-legal-challenge-to-keep-universal-credit-problems

capo4th

Government and council waste is stratospheric and much of it is due to brown envelopes and silly projects being signed off for people's personal financial gain.

These self employed benefits / tax credits cheats need to be stopped.

People need to pay their taxes and contribute to the UK.

Far too many people sponging and relying on the state for handouts. 

Europeans receiving more in benefits than they are contributing to HMRC is fundamentally wrong.

We need some fundamental changes however handing over the reigns to the Labour Party - Jeremy Corbyn, Diane Abbott, John McDonnell, Sadiq Slimy Khan and Emily Thorberry etal would be a disaster on a monumental scale setting the country back 20 years.

siremoon

For those old enough to remember the industrial peace and tranquility of the 1970s and hankering for a return to those halcyon days...

... the Labour manifesto has been leaked.

ICBM

siremoon said:

For those old enough to remember the industrial peace and tranquility of the 1970s

You mean when Ted Heath was PM?



He was far more responsible for that than Wilson and Callaghan - it's just that they got the blame since they had to try to deal with the results. The evidence is that by '78 things were starting to slowly improve - if Callaghan had called the election in late '78 when Labour were ahead in the polls he may well have won. It's true that the unions then made his job very difficult in the winter of '78/'79, but if he'd had a fresh mandate he could have dealt with them instead of Thatcher taking the credit for it.

siremoon said:

... the Labour manifesto has been leaked.

Nothing particularly shocking in it, so I'm not sure what the point was.

ToneControl

here's the data on  the salary level for each percentile point, for 1999 up to 2015:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-from-1-to-99-for-total-income-before-and-after-tax

this is an amazing way to get perspective:

firstly to realise that people you think are "rich" are in quite mundane jobs:
London underground and other train drivers get salaries up to 93% => they are in the top 10% earners in the country
Nurses can get up to £40k => into the top 20% of earners in that analysis from a few posts ago showing that "higher earners pay less tax" 
Junior doctors are all (I think) in the top 10%
Secondary school Head teachers are all in the top 3%
I know of heads of 6th form colleges on £200k+, which is in the top 1%

Aldi store managers get up to £58k, that's in the top 7% in the country - these are the people being branded as "rich people with too much cash, who should be taxed more than "normal people", "the many".
As a labour voter, I find this part of Corbyn's rhetoric shameful


I just created a 2D plot of salary against percentile. it's exponentialish:
it starts at £10k at 1%, then pretty much goes up in a straight line to about £42k at 84%,
then doesn't really shoot up until  93% at £61k
long serving police constables, at the lowest rank with no overtime, are in the top 20% at about £40k
plumbers range up to £100k, that's in the top 3% of earners in the UK

anyway, this is all to show that the us & them class war rhetoric from Corbyn is wrong and immoral:
To get more tax collected, it needs to come from the area under the graph (i.e. number of people x their income). The vast majority of the income to UK workers as a whole is below the 84%  percentile (£42k), and also the proportion of tax currently collected from those over £42k is far higher. Therefore, to significantly increase taxes, it is very hard to just collect the extra tax from the 16% of people to the right of the graph, realistically you need to add 2% to everyone below that as well

Emp_Fab

I like turtles.

siremoon

ICBM said:

siremoon said:

... the Labour manifesto has been leaked.

Nothing particularly shocking in it, so I'm not sure what the point was.

We'll just have to agree to differ on that. The only saving grace is that Corbyn probably won't get the chance to attempt to implement any of it.

ICBM

ToneControl said:

To get more tax collected, it needs to come from the area under the graph (i.e. number of people x their income). The vast majority of the income to UK workers as a whole is below the 84%  percentile (£42k), and also the proportion of tax currently collected from those over £42k is far higher. Therefore, to significantly increase taxes, it is very hard to just collect the extra tax from the 16% of people to the right of the graph, realistically you need to add 2% to everyone below that as well

Despite popular perception, the UK's tax system is already highly redistributive, with the 'rich' paying the overwhelming bulk of income tax.

So they're going to have to find another way of broadening the tax base, since generating significantly more from the 'rich' would require putting rates up far enough that it will cause the usual problems of tax avoidance. You might be surprised that I'm agreeing with this, but the maths is really not complicated.

siremoon said:

We'll just have to agree to differ on that. The only saving grace is that Corbyn probably won't get the chance to attempt to implement any of it.

Were you surprised by anything in it? The only things I was surprised by were the commitment to renew Trident and the £1000 'energy price cap', which sounds unworkable but there may be detail we're not getting.

ToneControl

ICBM said:

ToneControl said:

To get more tax collected, it needs to come from the area under the graph (i.e. number of people x their income). The vast majority of the income to UK workers as a whole is below the 84%  percentile (£42k), and also the proportion of tax currently collected from those over £42k is far higher. Therefore, to significantly increase taxes, it is very hard to just collect the extra tax from the 16% of people to the right of the graph, realistically you need to add 2% to everyone below that as well

Despite popular perception, the UK's tax system is already highly redistributive, with the 'rich' paying the overwhelming bulk of income tax.

So they're going to have to find another way of broadening the tax base, since generating significantly more from the 'rich' would require putting rates up far enough that it will cause the usual problems of tax avoidance. You might be surprised that I'm agreeing with this, but the maths is really not complicated.

That's great, a lot of people just don't seem to understand this, and it's absolutely key to having a proper perspective on the tax-raising plans of any party

ChuckManual

Emp_Fab said:

I like turtles.

TORTOISIST!!! 

Heartfeltdawn

ToneControl said:

Aldi store managers get up to £58k, that's in the top 7% in the country - these are the people being brands as "rich people with too much cash, who should be taxed more than "normal people", "the many".
As a labour voter, I find this part of Corbyn's rhetoric shameful

Agreed. Excellent breakdown. 

siremoon

ICBM said:

siremoon said:

We'll just have to agree to differ on that. The only saving grace is that Corbyn probably won't get the chance to attempt to implement any of it.

Were you surprised by anything in it? The only things I was surprised by were the commitment to renew Trident and the £1000 'energy price cap', which sounds unworkable but there may be detail we're not getting.

I was suprised. Until now I thought they were trying to get elected but failing due to Corbyn's general lack of appeal and a tendency to trip over their own feet when being interviewed.

The last time Labour peddled this sort of stuff they were out of office for 17 years.  If you're going to succeed as a party you have to catch the mood.  Thatcher did, Blair did.  In my opinion this doesn't even try.  For instance how can you campaign for unlimited immigration when a substantial proportion of your traditional support voted for Brexit on that very issue?  Doesn't make sense to me.

Fretwired

Labour manifesto proving popular .. surge in support for Labour from young over scrapping tuition fees, nationalisation of railways, Royal Mail and power stations, taxing the rich, hefty property taxes .... what's not to like .. May's landslide looking less likely now ....

Seriously thinking of voting Labour - radical plans for broken Britain ..

Fretwired

ICBM said:

Were you surprised by anything in it? The only things I was surprised by were the commitment to renew Trident and the £1000 'energy price cap', which sounds unworkable but there may be detail we're not getting.

The Unions want Trident renewed .. lots of well-paid jobs for members. Corbyn did say when he became leader that he'd consider building the subs but not buying the missiles.

DarnWeight

If they've got all that costed as they claim, then it's a manifesto that will win them votes.  I can't see it being enough to win, but probably enough to make a difference to the margin of the result.  Whether you agree with any of it or not, it is, finally, a distinct alternative to what all the mainstream parties have been touting for the last few elections.  One of the main factors leading to widespread public disengagement with politics as a whole is the "they're-all-just-offering-up-the-same-old-shit" argument.  This manifesto certainly addresses that.

Jalapeno

capo4th said:

I was complaining about builders and plumbers who under declare their income and cheat the treasury out of tax. 

Whats wrong with stereotyping?  

It's more than a stereotype - we can all relate to it IMHO.

However, if these guys under-declare too much they run a significant risk:

1. They get audited - they're fucked then - lifestyle doesn't match declared earnings

2. They get sick - they're also fucked - they can only claim insurance or benefits on the their declared earnings.

Anecdote: I know a taxi driver who grossly under-declared, when he had a heart attack at 38 (congenital condition he knew about) he'd only declared about 30% of his earnings.  He was completely banjaxed financially, luckily his Dad bailed him out. Though now his Dad's heart condition has taken him, his ongoing financial woes mean he's having to sell up and apply for social housing (nowt wrong with that btw), use the foodbank.  Moral: Karma applies, even with taxes