Will things kick off?

[Workingman]

The Budget is claimed to cost 13 million families £260 a year on average.

60,000 jobs will be lost.

Four million working hours lost each week.

Scrapping student grants and turning them into loans.

That 's a lot of people to cheese off within five weeks of coming to power.

[TheOstrich]

The public service sector unions and the left-wing socialists will kick off. I don't think anyone else will, apart from a general grumbling.

[medsec222]

Thanks to Gordon Brown's introduction of Child tax credits which have now ballooned into a cost of over 30 billion, drastic action had to be taken.

[Workingman]

Meds, there are few arguments against action needing to be taken, but there is a lot of genuine concern about the apparent haste and the method. The cuts are now and the NLW is not till 2020. There are also nowhere near 13 million well-paid jobs for those workers who are trapped on low-pay and in-work benefits to train up to.

[Suff]

As with cancer, when you are getting up to 100% of GDP total debt for the UK, you cut fast and you cut deep.

Because of Clegg and his troop of clowns, we didn't cut fast and we only took the surface off. That meant that we continue, even to this day, to rack up debt and will probably hit 100% of GDP in total debt within the next 3 years.

This is not a laughing matter. It will put the UK close to Italy in terms of government debt.

Osborne seriously wants to avoid this as it will drive up the cost of the debt he is issuing. As soon as he reaches a surplus and starts buying back UK treasuries, the yields on them will drop, making it even easier for him to pay them off.

Whilst I'm not arguing that there have been serious "vested interests" to be pandered to in this budget; it is neither a quickly put together scheme, nor one which swings as heavy an axe as, say, Maggie had to in 1979/80 to put the country back on track.

Osborne has had 5 years to plan this through the frustration of Lib Dems who think that spending money on people to look good, is better than ensuring that we _will_ have the money to spend on the people who need it most in society 5 years down the road.

Note the press made very much about the £1tn UK total debt. Totally ignoring that virtually all of that was run up by Blair and Brown (as I recall they inherited a fiscal surplus although actual debt). They will, in a year or two, also crow when debt hit's 100% of GDP, driving markets into a frenzy and completely ignoring the fact that Osborne is dealing with the situation. Whilst at the same time ranting about how Osborne is cutting too much and how people are being hurt too badly.

It's enough to make you grind your teeth....

[medsec222]

Meds, there are few arguments against action needing to be taken, but there is a lot of genuine concern about the apparent haste and the method. The cuts are now and the NLW is not till 2020. There are also nowhere near 13 million well-paid jobs for those workers who are trapped on low-pay and in-work benefits to train up to.

Agree Frank. It has to be done, but I would have preferred to see the level for tax taken right up to £15.000 taking a lot of working people out of tax altogether. This is in UKIP manifesto. With the rise in minimum/living wage eventually coming in, many of the lower paid would eventually come back into the tax bracket and start to pay a little bit of tax. I was surprised that the tax level was only raised £11.000 and that it is not coming in until next year.

[cruiser2]

Since MPs are public servants-???- shouldn't their pay rise be restricted to one per cent?

Did n't see any mention of extra benefits for pensioners.Does this mean I can only have three cruises next year?

[Workingman]

Figures from the IFS and OBR show that a household with two children would need gross earnings of ~£32,000 to break out of benefits. That is two full time jobs of £16,000 pa or £8.20/hr. If one is on min wage, £6.50/hr or £12,675 the other needs £9.98/hr or £19,325 pa. There are plenty of places where those wages are not available, and certainly not 13 million of them.

Also, according to the ONS final figure for 2014, there were about 690,000 jobs available at any one time. There was no breakdown as to how many were FT or PT, nor the wage levels. It would be surprising if 20% (138,000 or 0.011% of the 13m) of those were at a level to take a worker out of in-work benefits. People really are stuck with what they have got

Osborne's proposals will mean years of absolute pain for almost two thirds of the UK workforce and will only make a small dent in the debt. Even lifting the tax level to £15,000 will still leave millions on working tax and/or child tax credits.

[Suff]

Back before Blair and Brown my #1 daughter was working for the NHS as a junior accountant. Her husband was a Corporal tech in the RAF. Their son, our first Grandchild, had to be put into child minding so our daughter could go back to work.

The work, transport and child minding took most of my daughters pay. In the end, they looked at private schooling where he would be taken in pre school before work, kept in after school clubs until picked up and fed two or three meals per day. The cost was not significantly more than the child minding.

As the first term was going to be a real pig to pay, they came and asked if we would help. Being who we are we paid the entire first year for them to give them a chance to build up funds to pay the following years without too much stress (actually we then paid 1 term a year for the next 5 years). My grandson entered the school before he was 4 and had an excellent education until he was 12.

We're talking two middle class workers on above first rung on the ladder wages with one child, a reasonably priced home in one of the cheaper areas of the country and modest outgoings. The whole point of the exercise was that my daughter could build a career and a good income. She exceeded both her and our expectations as acting director of finance for a very large health trust before demoting herself and dropping back to a level she was happy at.

The morale of the story?

If you want two children on minimum wages, then something has to give. This has not changed. All that has changed is that expectations have been set by the Blair/Brown tax credits which are going to take decades to work out of the system. Both employers and employees have factored it into the system and it's going to take time to get it out again.

Simply put, it is not the responsibility of the government to fund a lifestyle which your wages can't afford. The country can't afford it as the government is a cost centre, not a revenue centre. If we want this to happen, then someone has to pay for it and as far as I hear nobody want's to pay more taxes (in fact none at all) and there's nowhere else this money is going to come from...

I never said it was a nice thing to contemplate, but it's the truth. Which is a hell of a lot better than the Blair/Brown lies.

[Workingman]

Yes, but take the personal out of it and look at the general.

When the Cons came into power in 2010 the debt was £0.76 trillion, it is now £1.36 trillion, a rise of £600Bn. OK there was a crash, but that is still a debt growth of of £120Bn per year under the Tories.

A £12bn reduction in welfare payments is only a 10% reduction, year on year, if the debt is paid off. Government debt is about £20m, so there is still an £8m shortfall.

Since 1700 almost 50% of the time debt to GDP has been over 100%. During the 1800s it reached over 250% at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and over 200% with WWI and WWII.

It was not individuals families who created those rates, it was the government, as it is today. Yet the government wants individuals to pay for its failures, that is why there is anger, and it is not surprising.