2021 Budget Predictions

[Macron]

Wednesday March 3, Rishi Rich will be telling the rest of us how much poorer we need to be to pay for Covid, £280bn and rising...

What are your predictions (ie how much lube, and where?)

I can see a lot of stealth, eg freezing allowances, and the fuel duty escalator coming back in, before we've thought about CGT as discussed in the Finance folder perhaps being aligned with income tax.

[Macron]

vulture1 said:

Brainpox said:

Public sector pay freeze
Extend stamp duty relief to after the summer
Some proposals to encourage spending at hospitality venues, when they are allowed to re-open
Fuel duty must surely be raided now?
Given there's still plenty of time before the next election I wonder if they'd do something like reducing tax-free allowance?

Can you imagine the outrage that will come with the public sector pay freeze. Even though a huge chunk of the private sector has been destroyed.

Hardly a prediction, it's already been announced.

And there are oddities with the early departmental settlements, MOD got £4bn for kit, and will lose 10k armed forces, and needs to go further than that on civilians (obvs), reducing the pay bill by 12.5%.

Done deal.

The only thing Rishi can do is announce yet more NHS £ as wages to thank our hardworking medical personnel, which I'd like to think few would argue with, but this is PH, and of course it rather undermines a PS pay freeze.

[Macron]

There's money in UK FS from you paying into an ISA, and it's money they've already taxed once. Easy to stop raising the limits though.

One off wealth tax anyone? Let's hope this numpty's stupid short termism is ignored. She's senior. God knows how.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/wea...

[Macron]

Lots leaked yesterday and today, looks like fiscal drag could last a while, LTA to be frozen, 40% tax band too.

Cap gains equalisation still on the cards.

[Macron]

fishseller said:

A good start would be to raise interest rated for savings accounts, plenty of people have 100k+ in the banks who do not wish to spend the capital but would be happy to spend the free bit the Interest earned.

I had to quote this as I can't quite believe you are replying to this thread thinking the budget has anything to do with interest rates, or that "plenty of people" have £100k in the bank, or that they would apparently leave their capital alone and just spend interest in a high rate environment.

Did you reply to the wrong thread?

[Macron]

Welshbeef said:

This is a very good budget - anyone disagree.

It's not "very good", because everything's not free etc. It does include a lot of the least worst options though. So it's a B+, could have been worse.

Freezing tax bands means in theory more lower paid workers will pay tax over time, which is not ideal. I'dike to have seen a move to increase the level at which NI is paid, as the willy waving of a few years ago to raise the base tax limit doesn’t mean free money. Having tax and NI start at the same point would make sense to me at least. Obvs that would mean a cut for all workers, so it's not attractive to governments who got carried away with those headlines.

Apart from that, no VAT rise, no general "parcel tax", no CGT complexities, and no one will cry for 22,000 people who will apparently breach the LTA before 2026. Although many are GPs and NHS consultants, who I suspect will quit before that happens, which is a societal loss.

Housing move a negative, although if you think the tax raised from people moving who otherwise would not do exceeds the stamp gain, you've got more complex models than I do.