Quote:
Originally Posted by Damien
They can grasp it.
This is all confected outrage. When we talk of workers we generally think of people whose income comes from their direct labour. People on salaries or self-employed.
We don't think of people who gain passive income from investments.
No honest person is that confused about this and thinks they're not workers because they own a few thousand pounds worth of shares or they have some savings gaining interest. When we talk of class in this country this divide is now probably the most important one, the answer to the question of if you need to work or not.
There is plenty to criticise about this budget regarding workers, i.e increasing the employers' NI contributions will indirectly tax workers. You can argue Labour never should have made this promise at all and instead should reverse last year's NI cut because it was never budgeted for in the first place. You could also argue that by far the biggest tax increase in tomorrow's budget will be that the tax bands are once again being frozen pushing more people into the higher tax bands despite inflation eroding the values of those salaries. An honest budget would go back to last year's NI rate and tell everyone upfront about the freezing of the bands. The tax burden on the middle-class is already very high so there isn't much scope to increase it beyond those measures anyway.
But instead of those substantive points, we get this disingenuous nonsense. Just liars everywhere arguing fiction between each other. This budget is a tax increase on workers, the last Tory budget was an tax increase on workers, it's needed because the economy has no growth and nobody is confused what workers mean.
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I'm sure I will see an increase in my tax today because my main source of work is a contract that has been placed inside IR35.
There are many that are on contracts like myself who pay employer NI and the apprentice levy as well as employer NI, income tax and for umbrella company services. These people are not all well paid, when all the costs are added up some are on similar wages in their pockets to permanent employees, but it looks like they are going to take a hit.
I have just renewed what was my main contract on terms that are a maximum of 3 days a week, there's just no point working 5 days and the extra I inevitably ended up doing on the weekend. I'm now going to stick rigidly to 2.5/3 days per week.
The problem I have been working on as the engineering lead is costing in excess of £1m every working day until there's a fix in place, and it was on hold for 10 weeks while the civil servants got their act together renewing the contract. They introduced a weeks delay while they attempted to cut my day rate by a small percentage. (I just accepted it because we all want to get on with the job)
It means that making it not worth my while to work a full week by double taxing me with IR35 is going to cost the taxpayer a hell of a lot more every day than the extra tax they collect off me.