[Omah]

Good News :

Income tax

The personal allowance will rise again to £10,000, from the 2014-15 tax year.

As previously announced, this allowance will rise anyway on 5 April this year - for those aged under 65 - from £8,105 to £9,440.

Bad News :

Tax allowances for investment in shale gas

[arista]

And help to buy a home
with you taking a share.

[Vicky.]

Heh. Well, I dont understand it very much, but from what I gather, I will pay less tax. Always a good thing.

Unfortunately my work is really drying up(bars cant afford karaokes anymore as people cant afford to drink in them so they dont make profits, and noone has enough money to pay for private gigs either) so I will be on benefits if I dont find someone else very quickly, and had no luck so far. Then I will become one of these demon scroungers that IDS hates so much even though I have paid tax for most of my adult life. I will be sent to unpaid workfare even though I have years of experience, I will be sent on ridiculous 40 hour a week courses in nothing. I will probably lose my home as I wont be able to afford my 'spare' room on benefits too.

So not jumping for joy too much at the prospect of a few months of lower tax I'm afraid.

[Jack_]

Originally Posted by Vicky.

Heh. Well, I dont understand it very much, but from what I gather, I will pay less tax. Always a good thing.

Unfortunately my work is really drying up(bars cant afford karaokes anymore as people cant afford to drink in them so they dont make profits, and noone has enough money to pay for private gigs either) so I will be on benefits if I dont find someone else very quickly, and had no luck so far. Then I will become one of these demon scroungers that IDS hates so much even though I have paid tax for most of my adult life. I will be sent to unpaid workfare even though I have years of experience, I will be sent on ridiculous 40 hour a week courses in nothing. I will probably lose my home as I wont be able to afford my 'spare' room on benefits too.

So not jumping for joy too much at the prospect of a few months of lower tax I'm afraid.

But just remember Vicky - we're all in this together!

The ****ing ******s

[Vicky.]

Originally Posted by Jack_

But just remember Vicky - we're all in this together!

The ****ing ******s

Oh yes of course we are

[Marsh.]

Originally Posted by Vicky.

Karaoke presenter/dj

Originally Posted by Jack_

But just remember Vicky - we're all in this together!

The ****ing ******s

Loved seeing them squirm when Miliband gave them some truths. And I don't normally like him.

[Novo]

[arista]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/b...e-Osborne.html

Andy
13 stupid New Labour years
is why its slow now.


This Budget is for Hard Workers like me

[Marsh.]

What is your line of work Vicky? Selling karaoke machines?

[Vicky.]

Karaoke presenter/dj

[Jack_]

[arista]

Go and Live in Cyrprus
Jack.


We had 13 Stupid New Labour Years.

[Mystic Mock]

Originally Posted by arista

Go and Live in Cyrprus
Jack.


We had 13 Stupid New Labour Years.

Tbf Arista while Labour are a joke of a party that ran this country into the ground, what has the Tories exactly done to improve this country? if anything they're making it worse.

[Kizzy]

Nobody actually believed that did they?.... haha

olitical reaction to the budget.

Ed Miliband, in his Commons response to Osborne, said it was "a downgraded budget from a downgraded chancellor".

Now, what did the prime minister declare late last year, and I quote:

The good news will keep coming”.

And what did the chancellor tell us today?

Under this government the bad news just doesn’t stop.

Back in June 2010 the chancellor promised:

“a steady and sustained recovery...”

He was wrong.

We’ve had the slowest recovery for 100 years.

Last year he said in the budget there would be no double dip recession.

He was wrong, there was.

He told us a year ago that growth would be 2% this year.

He was wrong.

Now he says it will be just 0.6%.

He told us that next year, growth would be 2.7%.

Wrong again.

Now just 1.8% ...

And the only time the country’s felt all in it together, was when he got booed by 80,000 people at the Paralympics.



http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/b...e-blog-osborne

[Omah]

Originally Posted by Kizzy

Nobody actually believed that did they?.... haha

olitical reaction to the budget.

Ed Miliband, in his Commons response to Osborne, said it was "a downgraded budget from a downgraded chancellor".

Now, what did the prime minister declare late last year, and I quote:

The good news will keep coming”.

And what did the chancellor tell us today?

Under this government the bad news just doesn’t stop.

Back in June 2010 the chancellor promised:

“a steady and sustained recovery...”

He was wrong.

We’ve had the slowest recovery for 100 years.

Last year he said in the budget there would be no double dip recession.

He was wrong, there was.

He told us a year ago that growth would be 2% this year.

He was wrong.

Now he says it will be just 0.6%.

He told us that next year, growth would be 2.7%.

Wrong again.

Now just 1.8% ...

And the only time the country’s felt all in it together, was when he got booed by 80,000 people at the Paralympics.



http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/b...e-blog-osborne

[Omah]

The Good News :

September's 3p fuel duty rise scrapped

April's 3p rise in beer duty scrapped. Instead, beer duty to be cut by 1p

Annual inflation +2% rise in beer duty to be ended but "duty escalator" to remain in place for wine, cider and spirits

The Bad News :

Growth forecast for 2013 halved to 0.6% from 1.2% in December

The OBR predicts borrowing of £121bn this year, the same as last year.

The Good News :

The complicated system of National Insurance will be made less onerous for employers.

A new Employment Allowance will knock the first £2,000 off the NI bill for every business and charity.

For big employers, this will be utterly trivial.

For the many small employers who employ just a few staff, this will be a big deal.

The Bad News :

A range of working-age benefits will rise by just 1% in April. That is lower than the rate of inflation and, consequently, a real-terms cut.

This affects benefits such as jobseeker's allowance - which will rise by 71p to £71 a week - employment and support allowance and income support. Maternity, paternity and adoption pay will also rise by 1% in April.

[Omah]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21867026

It may not sound like a big shock but it was: the government announced it would borrow about the same amount in this financial year as it did last year.

Economists and politicians were already surprised that it was forecast not to rise last December, and things have got worse since then.

At the time, the independent Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) predicted that the auction of fourth generation mobile phone licences would raise £3.5bn. In the event, the auction only raised £2.3bn.

Also, experts were expecting more borrowing because of the lack of economic growth in the UK.

Less growth usually leads to a fall in the amount the government takes in tax.

But in the Budget, it turned out that the amount of borrowing for the year to the beginning of April 2013, excluding certain one-off factors such as the transfer of the Royal Mail pension scheme to the Treasury, was unchanged from last year at £121bn.

Actually, Robert Chote, head of the OBR, said the relevant figures suggested a fall from £121bn last year to £120.9bn this year.

But he added that the £100m fall was: "fiscally and statistically insignificant" and the Treasury figures did not even give the decimal place, rounding both figures instead to £121.

So how has the government managed to keep borrowing stable?

It hasn't been easy.

The main part of it has been that the government expects Whitehall departments to underspend by a whopping £11bn, which is £3.4bn more than they expected to underspend in December.

That's a big number - £11bn is about the amount spent in a year by the entire Home Office. The OBR itself said it was very unusual for government departments to underspend by so much compared with plans made a year ago.

Indeed, the OBR was so worried about this underspend that it asked the government for more details of where it came from.

Clearly, some of the money was a genuine underspend: money that departments were not spending in the current year and would not spend in the future. This always happens because there are big penalties for departments that exceed their budgets, so they usually leave a buffer.

A big component was £3.9bn that departments decided to return to the Treasury because they wanted to spend it next year or the year after instead, which they are allowed to do under the relatively new Budget Exchange scheme.

At least another £1.6bn is a result of the government pushing forward some spending it was planning to make this year into next year instead.

That included things like regular payments to international organisations such as the World Bank, which were due to be made in the last few weeks of this financial year, but the government has decided to make them at the start of the next one instead.

However, the OBR warns there is some risk that these payments could still be made when they were originally planned.

The whole thing is reminiscent of the time on the Simpsons when, in a future world, Lisa is US President and needs Bart to help her through a debt crisis by assuring debtor nations that the cheques are in the post.

As BBC economics editor Stephanie Flanders says: "You have to wonder whether Mr Osborne will continue to talk quite so much about the fiscal fiddles that went on in the Gordon Brown era."

Yeah, I wonder .....

[Nedusa]

The good news is that the Bad news is not really bad news... The economy is completely flat and not growing in any real sense as anything under 1% growth is negligible. Besides they will always try and cook the books to show a positive number.

[Omah]

Originally Posted by Nedusa

The good news is that the Bad news is not really bad news... The economy is completely flat and not growing in any real sense as anything under 1% growth is negligible. Besides they will always try and cook the books to show a positive number.

Government support for fracking is not just bad news ..... it's appalling ....

[arista]

[Livia]

£1,200 for each child in a working family for childcare from 2015; National Insurance cut from next April enabling businesses to take on 4 additional members of staff without any increase in their NI bill; Fuel duty frozen - currently the longest fuel duty freeze for 20 years; personal tax allowance raised to £10,000 from April 2014, cutting tax for 24 million people and taking 2.7 million out of tax altogether; £3.5 billion to be put into assisting people to get on the housing ladder including equity loans of up to 20% to buy a new house; Corporation Tax cut to 20% by 2015 - the lowest rate in the G20 - enabling our businesses to compete globally thereby helping to grow the economy...

... I thought it was a pretty good budget.

[the truth]

why dont they simply cut vat ? that extra 5% is hammering the average man/woman/family and reducing their disposable income....surely it is these people who spend most of their money so we need them to have more cash to stimulate the economic growth?

[MTVN]

Originally Posted by the truth

why dont they simply cut vat ? that extra 5% is hammering the average man/woman/family and reducing their disposable income....surely it is these people who spend most of their money so we need them to have more cash to stimulate the economic growth?

Well in fairness when Labour cut VAT to 15% it had basically no effect on spending

[the truth]

Originally Posted by MTVN

Well in fairness when Labour cut VAT to 15% it had basically no effect on spending

pushing it to 20% obviously affected disposable income and spending, its simply doesnt make sense

[arista]

Ed Balls - The Labour Ponce
has run round Every TV News and Radio to claim the housing deal
will allow 2nd homes.

You only need 5% of the Value to start up
But the Housing Minister has said (on radio 5)
Not for 2nd homes
it starts next year.
And the System will stop 2nd homes