General Chat

Insted of making the poor pooer
why dont MPs and those in the house of Lords
Just do what they do for free for the next few years
Think of how easy it would be saving billions


HOW WOULD YOU SAVE MONEY IF YOU RAN THE COUNTRY :-D

Execute the bankers! :-D

Geordie. Please Spell bankers the Correct way,or at least the way I spell it with a W. :-D

and i would cut foreign aid to nothing
till we are on a even keel here :-D

The Chancellor will always give with one hand and take away with another or vice versa, he took away child benefit from many in his 2012 Budget and in this one he is giving many of them part of that back with new childcare allowances. Most Chancellors are magicians and have mastered the arts of sleight of hand tricks and deception ;-)

I wouldn't believe anyone who said that if they don't get huge salaries as the head of UK companies and banks then they'll get them overseas.

I say GO and, as my mother used to say, 'Don't come crying to me' when it all goes belly-up.

I don't mind foreign aid at all but I do mind bankers and MPs getting away with putting this country in such a bad financial state and keeping it there. Tax the rich more and stop focusing on the poorest or those on benefits who are such a small percentage of the country's outgoing

Governments who maintain power without becoming unpopular - has anyone ever witnessed such a phenomena?

i also would stop people
claiming family tax credits or child benefit
for kids that dont live in this country :-D

I am with Joy on both counts and I would put a limit on bonuses for the fat cats and when they are sacked/resign NO golden handshakes.

Family benefits for first three children only. That will stop those having children in order to bring in an income.

M.P's expenses - anything under £30.00 will not be refunded neither will those who persist in taking 1st class travel - just repay 2nd class.

Link winter fuel allowance to the age at which an individual can claim the State OAP rather than the female retirement age. I think that for this winter, it was still 60 where as the female OAP age has been rising and was 61plus a bit last year.

Raise free prescription by virtue of age to that of the current female OAP age and esculate it in line with that.

Certainly agree that child benefit should be limited to the first born within a family. I'd go as far as saying the children of the first 2 confinements. The children for which it is being claimed ought to be resident in this country.

Housing benefit to only be paid for residence in England, Wales, Scotland and N Ireland, not Eire!

No other social benefits to be paid unless the claimant has been resident in the UK for at least 5 years (so as not to exclude young adults) , or has paid NI for for 12 months.

Proof of residence before free NHS treatment unless as an emergency.

I could go on, but would probably be banned!

It really confuses me. We (the people) own a few banks now (RBS , Lloyds etc). If they are owned by the country, they're on a par with public sector workers.
Public sector workers aren't allowed bonuses.
So why are the bankers getting them?
Especially when they've done nothing to deserve them.

A lot of the suggestions above are admirable but at the end of they day they only scratch at the surface.

Taxing the rich more doesn't help either as the top 10% of earners already pay nearly 50% of all income tax collected and when you add to that the fact they also pay the lions share of all the VAT collected there isn't much scope for tapping them for any more.

The reality is that government spending will this next year exceed £700 billion per year, or put another way, a staggering £11,000 for every single person, man woman and child, in the country.

Over 75% of spending goes on just 5 things,

State Pensions £140 billion
National Health £125 billion
Social Security £120 billion
Education £100 billion
Defence £45 billion

and then there is another £45 billion to be paid in interest on the borrowing that had to be made to pay for much of this.

You will see that items such as foreign Aid don't even get near the top five so even cutting it to nil would have little effect overall.

Another issue that tends to get glossed over is that the public sector is around 5-10% less efficient than the private sector, and as we have seen with the various scandals recently, there is far less accountability by those supposedly in charge when things go wrong. This is something that successive governments have failed to get to acknowledge.

As usual on Budget Day I will be watching to see what strokes are pulled, even although I cannot stand that smarmy gloating George Osbourne, every time I listen to him speak I get the impression he is saying "believe me when I say we are all in it together, I know how cuts affect people after all I am a Millionaire Right Wing Conservative Politician ;-)

He will no doubt boast about how he has reduced the deficit, which I always find amusing as neither, the Chancellor or the Prime Minister, seem to know the difference between the deficit and the national debt :-S

Last year the Chancellor massaged the figures when he included a figure for the sale of the 4G Mobile Phone licences, a sale which had not actually been finalised at that time :-S

I wonder if this year the Chancellor will include in his calculations, the £5.5 billion windfall he will get in 2016 from the ending of the second state pension when the new Flat Rate Pension starts ;-)

Another fast one he might pull is to announce the privatisation of Royal Mail and somehow include the proceeds from that sale in his figures for this year :-|

IMHO this budget is all going to be about ensuring the rich don't suffer to much and that the poor can squeeze out a living from what few crumbs he can throw at them :-(

How would you pay child allowance to the first born if there were twins?

Phyll - Already thought of that

"the children of the first 2 confinements" :-)

Anyway, the powers that be will never take our ideas on-board

They are looking at the problem through the wrong end of the telescope. Focusing so tightly on spending issues is not going to reduce the deficit.

Instead the main objective should be growth which will automatically increase government income faster than spending.

It is the sad fact that it is because growth has been well below projections that Osbourne can only sing the blues.

The UK simply does not have enough manufacturing capacity anymore to "re-balance" the economy towards physical exports. It may be possible in the longer run - 20 years - but will need a massive change both in education and the taxation of manufacturing industry. Right now we are going in 100% the wrong direction. A good start would be to abolish corporation tax on this sector over 5 years. ( It may be counter intuitive but getting rid of corporation tax altogether would pay handsomely.)

That leaves the "service sector" - entertainment, education, banking, tourism, law, the arts - which has had the living daylights knocked out of it thanks to 20% VAT, restrictive visa rules and high payroll taxes.

Government capital spending is not the way to go. Projects tend to deliver very poor value for money and take so long that the economic impact near zero. The obvious thing to go for is private house building coupled with affordable mortgages. That means a LOT of land being released for building in the SE and SW. ON this at least the govt has the right instincts though it has of course the NIMBYs to contend with.

Steady as she sinks.

What a joke this man is, he must think we are all living on another planet my question is he going to survive? How Odd to hear a boast that the is coalition spending more than Labour did

PS George Osbornes voice is giving me the headache. :-S :-S :-S :-S

Maggie

They must be keeping it a secret from you or maybe it no longer happens but I do recall Social Work managers getting performance related pay. One chap told me that it all depended how he completed 'the form'. He got it right and managed to finance his annual holiday. Another one was totally against the PRP and refused to apply for it.

Not sure if this ever happened in the NHS but then maybe I wasn't privy to it just being a worker.

Vera

Well just listened to the smarmy gloating Chancellor giving his budget speech and the only thing I would give him credit for his audacity and hypocrisy.

If the announcements in this budget fail and we do not start to see some real growth and real jobs in the economy, at least George Osborne, David Cameron, Nick Clegg and all their rich cronies can sleep at night knowing that their wealth has increased during this governments time in office. That is a luxury that the ordinary hard working individual and the vulnerable in our society do not enjoy :-|

His first budget was in 2010, his second budget in 2011 was a tweaked version of that, his third in 2012 was a tweaked version of his 2011 budget, and this budget was a tweaking exercise on his 2012 budget. Like his previous three budgets, in this his fourth budget he once again says it is a budget for growth and prosperity, well none of his previous three budgets produced growth or prosperity, in fact the produced the reverse :-(

As in all his previous budgets he praised the figures from the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) the quango he created. He espoused on and on about their encouraging forecasts on borrowing falling and growth rising over each of the next five years - amazing considering the OBR have never got their forecasts correct since they were created. The fact is that after each of his three previous budgets, which he based on their forecasts, the economic situation has only got worse, yet once again in this budget he is relying on their forecast :-S

I was really annoyed when he kept saying that "they" had taken 24 million people out of paying income tax by the increase this year in personal allowances. Come on Mr Osborne, be honest, if you were not in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, a conservative government would never have given this increase :-|

He also kept repeating that they had created one and a quarter million new jobs, but how many of these one and a quarter million new jobs are full time proper jobs and how many are simply as a result of what were public services now in the hands of private organisations ;-)

I was also puzzled when he clearly said all our armed forces and government personnel in Cyprus, and I quote - "will be compensated in full for any loss on their savings and deposits" in Cyprus banks. It will be interesting to see if he back tracks on this again ;-)

So to sum up, what he said is, this is a budget for growth and prosperity based on the information he received from the Office of Budget Responsibility and that it will get us out of the mess caused by, Labour, Europe, and that the present government washes their hands of any blame - perhaps he should change his name to Pontius Pilate ;-)

Let's face it, politicians, bankers, and their rich cronies are all in one street and the rest of us are all in another street, now what was that street called ;-)