Some of us don’t remember the medieval era as well as you
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Tax only dropped on draught beer in 40l barrels. A lot of small breweries use 30l barrels. So a tax cut that will favour the big breweries. I wonder how many donate money to the Tories.
Off to start a business converting 30l barrels to 40l ones, will be a millionaire soon.
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Proper cunty. No doubting his true blue Tory credentials.
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Well Wishy Washy delivered a tax increase for me and a lot of other people. I look forward to the 3% council tax rise (on top of 4.99% this year). The 7% increase in the useless and ineffective police commissionaire costs in Cheshire (on top of the 7.4% rise this year).
The rise in car tax for my car (yet the roads get worse).
Good job we all spent £37+ billion on a waste of time track and don’t call, with the highly critical report buried on the same day as the budget. £37+ billion and a total failure, yet nobody will be held accountable and bunter and his merry crew will be absolved.
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Snow White took longer
So, inflation is higher than living memory for a lot of people, and there are some significant price rises to come. CPI is over 5%, RPI is over 7%.
Is there anything that can be done about this? I think that the government will try to limit public sector pay rises, which would be typically evil of them. But what should be done?
I await the inevitable interest rate rise and will wonder, yet again, why the way to stop things getting more expensive is to make them even more expensive… And since hardly anyone is on inflation linked pay (except retirees it seems) there is no upside to a rate rise for 99% of us.
Unless an interest rate rise will reduce Russian gas prices, container prices and Brexit-dividend price rises, what the chuff is it going to do except compound the misery on anyone already struggling - is Universal Credit getting an inflation rate hike?
The banks will as always have the increase baked in within miliseconds (is interest linked to inverse gravity cos it goes up far faster than it comes down…) so anyone already being shafted by rising energy and food prices will see their mortgage/rent go up, their loans increase and prices of everything else go up to swallow the rate rise so they’ll be absolutely stomped on.
I don’t know how you fix t, but i really fail to see how an interest rate rise will help now. Its not discretionary spending based on credit that’s driving things up.
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Cabinet Office notified agencies of a recruitment freeze late last year, the shitty part of this is that for a lot of agencies this also includes filling vacated roles.
I think that an interest rate rise should strengthen the currency, which should bring down the price of fuel. In principle…
I think we buy most of the gas and oil at prices negotiated around 6 months in advance so any currency fluctuations will take a while to kick in.
I think they always take ages anyway. If they even work at all
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All irrelevant anyway as…
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There’s an argument that this is the inevitable result of QE. Which of course is still going on and benefitting a small group of already very wealthy people.
I can’t help but think that if they did a decent review of VAT - put it onto discretionary items at a higher rate and tapered it for other things - then it would be a better way of tapping those than can afford it without hurting everyone. Fixing things like VAT on shoes over size 5 - my kids were in adult 6 when they were in primary school so it’s a pretty disfunctional tax threshold by any measure.
So if the economy needs calming, ideally without hurting the worst off, put VAT at 50% on £100+ trainers, luxury cars and bikes, leisure boats, flights, (fancy watches, hifi 
). Wasn’t that one huge benefit of leaving the EU, that we could set VAT independently? Take it off food, sanitary products, shoes and clothing below a typical/sensible price. The majority of people won’t pocket that saving, they’ll buy other things they go without, so the gov’t won’t lose out
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Well that’s all perfectly sensible, so it’s got no chance! 
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Fuck off. When you’ve fucked off, fuck off a bit more. Finished fucking off? Wrong, you need to fuck off still further.
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You mean you can’t wangle them as a business expense like your tonearms?
I haven’t tried but I suspect it would be a struggle. To be fair, they generally don’t cost over £100 so they wouldn’t incur @pbg’s ‘Tax the shit out of stuff I don’t happen to be buying’ theorem.
I’d go for VAT on shoes over about £30-50 myself. That would catch most of my shoes, and make me choose the kids’ school shoes more carefully.
What’s wrong with these? You some sort of fashionista? Choosing to spend ‘a lot’ on trainers is up to you. Sticking a 20% surcharge on trainers that kids have to have for PE at school seems unfair.
Or is it fairer to make some people choose between heating and food so you can continue to buy expensive hifi?
Remind me; HiFi companies in the UK assemble their items by magic and force of will yes? Or do they employ people who also have requirements based around food and electricity? People who’s ability to do that might be somewhat curtailed when there’s a sudden 50% rise in the cost of the product? The nature of a great deal of what this country makes is ‘luxury goods.’ It doesn’t follow that everyone employed in those industries is minted. These companies have found the last few years to be extremely fucking challenging so suddenly nailing them with this will likely finish many of them off.
The trainers thing is an irrelevance by comparison although indicative of you just randomly selecting something you don’t buy. I’d counter with a £25k PA scuba diving license. It would be lucrative and it doesn’t affect me at all so it’s automatically brilliant.