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A period of reflection is required

Spud analyses this increase in national insurance and the rise in the youth minimum wage the same way I do. It’s vile and disatrous, it’s going to increase the youth unemployment rate – over time, and structurally – disastrously.

This is a problem of course. If my analysis is the same as Spud’s then where am I going wrong?

Or is Reeves really so stupid that she’s enacted a policy that even Spud can see through?

I console myself with the thought that it’s the second.

20 thoughts on “A period of reflection is required”

  1. I just can’t work out whether they’re evil or just incredibly stupid. Hearing about Yvette Cooper’s approach to her job and Lammy thinking that Henry VII succeeded Henry VIII, I’m inclined to the incredibly stupid but given TTK’s relationship with Lord Alli and thinking getting intimate with an “openly gay Moslem” is just about accepting bribes and a bit of fun, I’m inclined to the evil. Unless he thinks he’s so powerful, with Blair’s backing, that it won’t matter that the UK will soon become a caliphate…

  2. @allthe goodnamesare taken, the problem being that Spud is not normally right once a day, No wonder Tim’s worried.

  3. It’s worth bearing in mind that when Goldman Sachs was appointed by the ‘Troika’ to ‘restructure’ Greek debt, these clever and well remunerated people imposed tax rises and modelled the resulting revenue on the basis that there would be no impact on demand.

    It’s fairly obvious to the meanest intelligence (fair enough, excluding David Lammy then) that this budget, concocted by more humdrum intellects will increase the cost of govt borrowing and increase unemployment. It’s also bound to make a pig’s breakfast rolled into a dog’s dinner of private and state schools while simultaneously increasing education spending.

  4. As someone pithily summarised it:

    Yesterday’s budget was like someone changing their shirt because they’ve soiled their trousers.

  5. Spud operates on the basis that everyone else is not only wrong but doesn’t understand like he does.

    Tax rises (which he loves) are wrong if they aren’t tax rises he would impose. They are the wrong tax rises or if they are the right ones, they haven’t been raised enough.

  6. Oh yes I know this feeling. I recently agreed with a point by Owen Jones, I even liked a tweet by David Lammy.

    Just one mind.

    It feels deeply deeply worrying and wrong.

  7. There’s probably a personal reason he’s now against the rise in minimum wage.

    Probably gets cleaners in and is annoyed that they’re charging more or something.

  8. Two thoughts

    I’m battered by Scottish income taxes and now by UK capital taxes.

    I’m going to do have to do some serious thinking about inheritance tax and my pension pots as I have a couple of rented properties on top of main residence so will be well into IHT now. Maybe even emigrate and liquidate as many UK assets as possible. I’m about 4 months younger than Murphy for context.

    Second, Murphy is unaffected by the minimum wage and employer NICs increases as his son is carefully engaged as a non-employee.

  9. Spud has said he supports the increased price range across which the exchange of labour for money is illegal : I welcome the fact that Rachel Reeves has increased the minimum wage
    When he flies home from Belfast he’ll be working on a grand centralised progressive plan involving justice to mitigate the extra unemployment that will result. No doubt.

  10. You are reminding me that I once supported an argument by a real old-fashioned Labour bloke (they spelled it that way back then) instead of Malcolm Fraser, the Liberal Prime Minister.

    Fraser felt that we should take in Muslim as well as Christian refugees from the Lebanese civil war. The shit-head!!!

  11. @ bravefart

    Yet just this week the potato said that his son was his employee. How can both be true? Surely, the top 50 most influential tax blogger and son haven’t set up a bogus company to evade taxes?

  12. @Bongo “When he flies home from Belfast”

    He’ll probbaly use the flight time to write a blog about how all unnecessary air travel should be banned to stop climate change.

  13. BF: I’m in a similar position, effectively too expensive for me to retire. I have a shop’n’flat, which if I sell I lose close to everything I’ve built up in it, and the remainder will be spent in around five years. Can’t do an equity release ‘cos it’s commercial premises and nobody does equity release on commercial or on residential that you yourself don’t live in. Don’t have any children to give it to, can’t release it to spend, so I’m left with being forced to die in poverty with a huge amount of assets.

  14. “Even a stopped clock is right twice per day”: but a slow-coach of a clock might be right less than once per lifetime.

  15. Moving pension pots into peoples estates is a subtle earner. Often retired people who have big pension pots and other assets draw on other funds first as the pension pot could be passed on free of IHT. Now it’s part of the estate it makes sense to draw funds from it first (to spend or give away) and pay income tax now rather than IHT on death, due to the time value of money. The subtle benefit to the treasury is that they will get the tax income sooner too.

  16. Moving pension pots into peoples estates is a subtle earner.
    Hmmm….. My uncles’s public sector pension would have been a nice windfall, having died just before drawing anything from it.

  17. “, so I’m left with being forced to die in poverty with a huge amount of assets.”

    Which is the point…. You’re supposed to keel over with decent assets, at which point the State takes [x]% ( with x an indeterminate depending on which robber-baron has hir thumb on the scales ), followed by *anything left* and inherited to be taxed as Extra Unscheduled Income, to be put in Box 15 at 99.8% tax… etc.

    You shall own nothing and be happy, and die for the State.

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