fags up by 37p

nothing on diesel

no to the gambling tax

No. I've checked. It would have been equally pointless if the Labour Party had thought of it. It would only be a "wonderful initiative" in that strange binary world you appear to occupy where everyone is either Tory or Labour, and they slavishly, uncritically support everything that party does. I've not seen any evidence for that on here.

This seems to be a sop to the Taxpayer's Alliance, so they can point to money spent on the 'undeserving poor'.

ahh well, may aswell start buying the dodgy £4/pack from the pub.

Did anyone else notice petrol stations putting a penny on a litre last night?

I'm interested to know how it will be by email, given that HMRC don't currently ask for the email addresses of self assessment taxpayers and make a point of saying they won't contact you by email unless you specifically request it to avoid people falling for phishing scams.

IMO it will go out with the paper self assessment statements that are issued to taxpayers, or potentially be available online to those who are registered with HMRC Online services.

There is a games machine duty being applied however.

It's a strange budget really. The press, especially the Labour-supporting scum papers will just jump on the reduction in the highest tax rate to 45%. I really don't see the point of that move. The figures it will 'cost' the country don't seem realistic. The changes to stamp duty aren't going to affect most people and those it does affect will no doubt avoid it elsewhere. The 'average' person doesn't seem to have been affected at all, bar the increases in tobacco (Good) and fuel duty (Bad).

There are some positives in the budget such as fuel duty being frozen for haulage companies and the creation of a tax credits scheme for video game and TV show development companies. But overall, all the budget will do is give Labour an enormous rise in the opinion polls and give their media outlets a week of glorious headlines about how much money the rich are going to save.

Apart from the average pensioner, who is going to see the amount they can have in income before they start paying tax reduced in real terms for at least the next two years, possibly three depending on how long it takes to make the £10k personal allowance a reality.

Still, they're only the fastest growing group in society eh, who cares about them?

Hit the nail on the head there. Not only was the 50p tax rate announced a year before it came in thus allowing the rich to bring forward income and avoid the tax, ever since the coalition (and even under Labour I think) the rate was mentioned as being temporary which means people may have decided to defer income to avoid paying tax now in the hope Osborne would look after them - which he has done.

Channel 4 News reported that A4e's Emma Harrison and others brought forward their 2010/11 income to 2009/10 to avoid the extra 10p in tax that came in from April 2010.



Well the argument goes that because this was a "temporary" tax rate then these people may well have decided to do as I say above or if they could not then simply put up with the 50p rate because moving out of the UK is a high cost exercise in itself and would likely lose them money in the short term.

My opinion is few if any left with this as the main reason for going.

What is certainly true however is one years tax returns with the new rate in force are no basis to conclude how effective it is. It would need to run for several years so the effects of bringing forward or deferring income worked their way out of the system and so would have the loss of any revenue due to people leaving the country as the ones minded to leave would have have left.

The fact these so called behavioural responses to the 50p have not worked their way out of the system will not stop Osborne saying relatively low tax revenue for the 2010-2011 tax year is proof it does not work.

It also ignores the rather pertinent fact we had a recession and many high earners in the financial sector will have had a lower income because of that - so less tax to be taken.

They have only had the 2010-2011 figures for 7 weeks and have simply not had the time to do the sums properly and include estimations for what the likes of Harrison did, the recession and so on.

Any such figures will simply be an excuse to lower the rate for the rich and it will be an outright lie to say it has failed.

Its the wrong solution to lower than estimated revenues anyway.

If such behavioural responses will lower the tax taken then punish that behaviour, not reduce the tax.




The amount of money raised by the measures that will supposedly make up for lowering the 50p tax rate such as the stamp duty increase on properties sold over £2m is being debated on various sites commenting on the budget and by the looks of it, it won't come close to even covering the loss in revenue from the lowering the 50p tax rate despite the factors that will make the amount collected from this in 2010-11 lower than expected.

The original estimate for the 50p rate was it would raise £2.7bn. The estimates for the stamp duty measure amount to a mere £300m.

They'll be privatising themselves out of existence soon, so we may not need them.

And didn't councils do this for a while with council tax – before dropping it because it cost so much to do?

Well if the rich are going to save a load of cash when the rest of us fund the governments austerity polices why would you object to this being pointed out?

Even the idea the reduction in child benefit won't affect people who earn £50K instead of those who hit the higher rate is bonkers. Now a couple earning £99,999 can keep it whereas a single earning family on £50K lose it!

Even crazier is with the increase in personal tax allowance the more realistic scenario of a couple each earning £25K each will be about £5K a year better off than the one earner £50K household because they keep the child benefit and get two personal tax allowances compared to one. How idiotic is that?

The increased personal allowance isn't progressive either. Pensioners on the state pension (as is anyone already not paying tax) won't be any better off but are still having to pay increased VAT etc. Yet those families lucky enough to have two in work paying tax who are already doing OK will as I said get two tax breaks.

If you don't want the effects of these policies pointed out to you in the press, what do you want? People to remain uninformed and so vote these nutters in again?

I don't. I'm saying it's a strange budget to come up with. It seems, on first glance to be a perfect set of media soundbites for the opposition, as if they've turned a shotgun on their face and offered Milliband the trigger. I'm not suggesting the media should portray it any differently.

OK fair enough.

By the way, the biggest bullet in the gun is probably the change to the pensioners personal tax allowances. The higher ones you automatically get once you retire which increases again when you hit 75.

These are going to be frozen for existing pensioners and scrapped completely for people who retire from now on.

What is means is between now and 2016/17 tax year the treasury will save £3.3bn off the backs of pensioners paying more tax. This will go toward the cost of paying for the increase in personal allowance for working people.

The paper and the opposition ought to rip them apart over this. Robbing pensioners to pay for tax breaks to the rest of us?

And this was after that stuff about older people working longer because it keeps them from getting lonely, right?

Isn't it the classic "Do all you're nasty stuff in the first three budgets, then have two popular ones" strategy?