Child benefit cuts

NI is assessed per pay period, so you can get completely different results depending on how often you're paid.

Can you remind me of these rule changes? IIRC the family would also pay less tax from April.

Sounds like a good idea to me.

Nope. They specifically said that the rise in the personal allowance would be cancelled out for higher rate taxpayers (by lowering the HRT threshold).

For employee NI they are sticking with Labour plans to raise the threshold and raise the rate, resulting in people on under 20k gaining and those on over 20k losing.

It is. But tax rates would probably have to rise, and successive governments have been obsessed with lowering it over the last few decades.

It might be if he wants to live alone.

If he doesn't want to live alone, renting a 3 bedroom house and taking in

2 lodgers (assuming the lease permits this) is likely to cost much less than renting a 1 bedroom house.

Or he might have lots of stuff, or be self employed and use some of the rooms for his work.

It's a weekly tax for weekly paid and a monthly tax for monthly paid. But the "weeks" and "months" are determined by the employer's payroll, not the calendar.

But in any, case your example only results in "extra" tax if you only work one week in the month. If you do the same (Fri-Mon) schedule week in week, then week 2 will consists of Sun-Mon from the first work session and Fri-Sat from the second etc. After the first week, every week would still contain 4 working days.

tim

For a single renter to rent a 3 bedroom house is a stupid thing to do.

A single person with WR of 450 not switching to a meter and paying 100pa is a stupid thing to do.

Lots of 4 person families have two cars.

tim

I wouldn't have called living alone a luxury. Family life can be much more rewarding.

Anyway the kitchen is hardly shared, unless each member of the family cooks independently..

(Not if they each have their own room)

This is getting silly; you expect mature single people to all live in the same 2-3 bedroom house with strangers?

In practice, a single person on a low income is likely to live in a flat, but they are not that much cheaper than houses (not to the tune of 75%), and they have many disadvantages compared to a house.

So the family still ends up with a far better lifestyle: more income, a nice house with garden, and state aid on top! Compared with 4 unrelated singles each living in their flats or bedsits.

And again, you expect this to be a 4-car family?? I'm saying this should be

1-car family; if they want 2-cars, then no way should they get state aid to support that lifestyle.

(In the family I grew up in, we were a 0-car family.)

Also, pretty much any ordinary car will easily transport two adults and two children. Child benefit shouldn't be for financing luxury cars.

I didn't get to that bit. But my figures (admittedly just a bit of fun), showed the single person had to eat on £200 a year, while the family had over £20,000 left!

I didn't say it was easy. Just possible, and it doesn't need to happen tomorrow.

If the family are likely to have very young children in 2013 who need caring for at home, then maybe the choice isn't there, but then this will be a young family and living costs will also be a lot less compared to teenage kids; a £45K income will still be plenty.

Having extra tax allowances might make a lot more sense. And be less controversial than what is perceived as hand-outs to rich people.

He might like to have guests staying over...

Anyway the difference between 2 and 3-bedrooms is small, and why shouldn't he enjoy the amenities of a house rather than a flat?

When renting privately, that depends on the permission of the owners (who may want to move back in themselves at some point).

And your £100pa rate sounds unrealistic: I doubt water companies would have a tariff where 4 adults end up paying less than the unmetered rate.

What is much more practical is for water companies to give at least a 25% discount to single occupiers, as happens with council tax.

Good luck to them. But if they are so well off, perhaps they can do without extra benefits paid out of my taxes.

It's more than I have paid on a meter in each of my last three properties so it's very realistic.

Actually I found your 450 pounds based upon RV a bit on the high side.

They aren't getting benefits. I understood this hyperthetical example to be based upon salaries

tim

It seems to depend on region. In the south-east, I was paying around £200pa. A friend in the south-west was paying £900pa.

The £450 is in the north-west (as clearly Manchester has a more arid climate than London..).

Probably the per-litre tariff will vary by region too. I was quoted

0.125p/litre in the south-east, but I've seen higher figures as well.

As can sharing anything. A bottle of wine, a meal, a car, a house. You don't have to have a family to share any of them.

Strangers? Do most single people have no mates? No family (in the broader sense)? I lived in several shared houses when I was single, mostly with people I knew already, and one of them with complete strangers when I looked for room ads in the local paper (though obviously they weren't strangers after a week or so living with them).

So share a house, FFS! If you've got no mates, make some by replying to the house share ads in the papers! But if you want to live alone, don't expect to compare your standard of living with those who choose to share their accomodation with others. That's just as stupid as complaining you pay more if you drink a bottle of wine yourself than if you share it.

You said the costs would be the same. A single person only needs transport suitable for 1 (if he's not going to share). Either a very small car, or maybe a motorbike. Even if the family share, and so they can't do different things at the same time which require a car unlike the single person, they would need a bigger car.

And tax allowances shouldn't be financing selfish people who don't want to share.

Extra tax allowances are pretty much identical in effect to universal benefits like child benefit.

As I said, paid as extra benefits to well-off parents, they are more controversial.

But whichever way the benefit is given, it still leaves the underlying problem that we can't afford benefits for everybody.

If benefits (in this case, child benefit) have to be reduced, we can (1) reduce them equally for everybody; (2) reduce them for poorer people; or (3) reduce them for more well-off people.

The government seems to have decided on (3). In effect, higher-paid people will be taxed even more, with a few corner-cases that are attracting attention.

The NW is a bit of an anomaly.

In the older houses the RV is very very low, but newer properties have much higher RVs for the same size house. In a newer house you can end up paying

3-4 times that of the same sized old house.

tim

The main reasons we do it as paid benefits, rather than allowances like the French, are:

a) Old fashioned sexist stereotypes that if the earner (typically the bloke) benefits from the extra he'll spend it down the pub and not on the kids

b) It's cheaper. Under a French style system where a family of 4 get 3 allowances, a basic rate taxpaying single earner family would gain by about 2500, a higher rate taxpayer by about 5000. Compared to about

1750 in child benefit. And the higher rate threshold wouldn't kick in till about 132,000!

Personally I'd do the following:

a) Get rid of child benefit completely

b) Restructure the tax system to a French style system which taxes families, not individuals, so a family would get an allowance per person not per earner. Ending the hypocrisy of assessing people as individuals for tax but as couples/families for benefits. Or a US style system where couples can chose whether to be assessed as individuals or families.

c) Raise income tax rates to make b) revenue neutral, ie the tax take remains the same.

d) Increase means tested CTC to account for the loss of child benefit.

That would result in a much bigger saving than the current proposals, the vast majority of the child benefit budget would go rather than 15% or so. It would of course piss off childless people who would pay more tax - but there are no handouts, just a fair tax system which allows everyone to use their allowance!

In message , Andy Pandy writes

If my wife was still alive she would probably remember with nostalgia the few bob per week she got for the second and subsequent child, (nothing for the first), in the 60s. If you only had one child you were presumably not "doing your bit" towards boosting the post war population.

As for time off for fathers, we had to take annual holidays, most of us got two weeks, the lucky ones as much as three.

Traditional rant about today's young people.... ;-)

Under your proposals would there still be a "need" for CTC (if you mean Child Tax Credits) at all?

Yes - for those who don't earn enough to use the allowances, eg the unemployed, low paid etc.

"Mark" wrote

No they won't! - we've discussed this before. Overall, on average and over their lifetime, people pay the same amount to the state as they receive from the state. OK, so some people pay more to the state over their lifetime than they receive, and others receive more over their lifetime than they pay in. But the average is the same.

So only *some* children will end up being a net "benefit", whereas other children will end up being a net "drain" on the state. The average child will be no benefit at all...

"Mark" wrote

They (like everyone else) get the benefits but also pay for the "drain".

"Mark" wrote

A return of *zero*? When you say "better", what are you comparing it to?!

In message , Tim writes

PSSST! There is no such person as the average child, or man or woman....