Budget news and disscussions

[adam2]

Please use this thread to discuss the recent budget and the merits or otherwise thereof.
Please keep all budget related postings in this thread.

Budget related postings elsewhere on the forums may be delated or locked so as to keep the discussion in one place.


Please remain on topic and at least somewhat polite.

[adam2]

Stamp duty on homes sold for up to £300,000 has been abolished for first time buyers.
And in more expensive areas, the FIRST £300,000 of the purchase price of homes sold for up to £500,000 will be exempted.

This IMHO is a sensible move, it will assist people to buy their FIRST home but will NOT subsidise the middle class obsession with continually "moving up the housing ladder"

[adam2]

Alcohol duty generally frozen with the exception of "high strength white ciders"

Sounds fairly sensible, alcoholic drink is IMHO too expensive and more expensive than in many other countries.

Some high strength white ciders are popular with "street drinkers" and others who misuse drink, a duty increase seems a reasonable targeted response, provided the rules are well drafted and hard to evade. Beware high strength pink cider for example !

[adam2]

Planned duty increase on road fuel has been scrapped, regretfully IMHO.

[PS_RalphW]

Tinkering at the edges.

Fuel duty freeze is a continued concession to the Jeremy Clarkson lobby.

Removing stamp duty does nothing to increase supply, and so as long as credit is cheap, the prices of houses will rise to suppress the additional demand.

[PS_RalphW]

In the small print...

5. Tax breaks for the North Sea oil and gas industry on costs of plugging and abandoning wells and removing infrastructure when fields stop producing

That will come to be very expensive to the tax take in the coming decades

[Little John]

Alcohol duty generally frozen with the exception of "high strength white ciders"

Sounds fairly sensible, alcoholic drink is IMHO too expensive and more expensive than in many other countries.

Some high strength white ciders are popular with "street drinkers" and others who misuse drink, a duty increase seems a reasonable targeted response, provided the rules are well drafted and hard to evade. Beware high strength pink cider for example !

If I was a street dweller, I would, without a shadow of doubt, be strongly inclined to self medicate with strong white cider. In other words, the tendency of homeless people to drink to excess is an entirely rational (or, at the very least, understandable) response to environmental stress. So, limiting the capacity of street dwellers to affordably access cheap, strong alcohol is, as ever, addressing symptoms, not causes.

[clv101]

Stamp duty on homes sold for up to £300,000 has been abolished for first time buyers.
And in more expensive areas, the FIRST £300,000 of the purchase price of homes sold for up to £500,000 will be exempted.

This IMHO is a sensible move, it will assist people to buy their FIRST home but will NOT subsidise the middle class obsession with continually "moving up the housing ladder"

It's not a sensible move.

Two way of looking at it, neither good.

Firstly, the government has specifically chosen a narrow set of people, those wealthy enough to buy (without previous house equity) a house up to £300k (or £500k). That means those with large deposits and/or well paid jobs. These people don't need to receive up to £5000 of public money. These people are already relatively wealthy.

Secondly, this is equivalent to just pumping a few thousand pounds, per house, into sections of the housing market. The buyers will just end up bidding up the price to what they can afford.

There are better ways of spending these few millions than simply giving it to a few thousand relatively wealthy first time buyers.

[clv101]

Fuel duty freeze is a continued concession to the Jeremy Clarkson lobby.

The Chancellor today boasted that under the Tories, fuel duty has been frozen since 2010. That amounts to around a 20% cut in real terms (tens of billions lost tax). Why is the government choosing to inflate away fuel duty?

He also said those charging their electric cars at work wouldn't be hit with a 'benefit in kind' tax.

[woodburner]

Stamp duty on homes sold for up to £300,000 has been abolished for first time buyers.
And in more expensive areas, the FIRST £300,000 of the purchase price of homes sold for up to £500,000 will be exempted.

This IMHO is a sensible move, it will assist people to buy their FIRST home but will NOT subsidise the middle class obsession with continually "moving up the housing ladder"

It won’t help any but the early purchasers, it will merely push up prices. I suspect this was the intention anyway to jack up the ailing GDP.

[Little John]

And as it pushes up prices to a new high, any "benefit" to purchasers will be duly wiped out, making the underlying problem of unfordability worse, not better.

As if more of the same shite will make the problem stink any less.

You couldn't make this up

[cubes]

Fuel duty freeze is a continued concession to the Jeremy Clarkson lobby.

The Chancellor today boasted that under the Tories, fuel duty has been frozen since 2010. That amounts to around a 20% cut in real terms (tens of billions lost tax). Why is the government choosing to inflate away fuel duty?

He also said those charging their electric cars at work wouldn't be hit with a 'benefit in kind' tax.

Taxing anything to do with cars is a big vote loser. It's like saying to some of the more vocal drivers "cyclists deserve to be on the roads" only not as bad.

[clv101]

@CarolineLucas

Price of travelling since 1997:

⬇� car down by 16%
⬇� domestic flights down 16%
⬆� train up by 23%
⬆� coaches and buses up 33%

There's no war on motorists. There's a war on ppl who can't afford a car, or want to leave it at home.

[raspberry-blower]

And as it pushes up prices to a new high, any "benefit" to purchasers will be duly wiped out, making the underlying problem of unfordability worse, not better.

As if more of the same shite will make the problem stink any less.

You couldn't make this up

A poster on the House Price Crash forum said that this is designed purely to keep the Tory Party together UNTIL the next election. This seems plausible to me.

There is an "aspirational class" that are into property flipping, got a new car on tick and have been loading up on the never-never all fuelled by dirt cheap credit. This is the new class of voter that the Tories are looking to for their future core support as their current support base is at the wrong end of the demographic spectrum.

Given the recent Ministerial resignations, and a definitive date for Brexit it is quite probable that this administration will not last the course. Particularly not if we pass 2300 on 29/03/2019 and they cannot deliver something resembling Brexit.

Another thing to note in 2019 is the fact that Mark Carney will leave his tenure as head of the Bank of England. He has a track record in cutting interest rates which have resulted in property bubbles that eventually burst. in fact the recent interest rate made by the BoE was, I believe, the first time that he has presided over such a move. Will his successor be more willing to raise interest rates?

The property bubble has got to insane levels and when it bursts it will be devastating. To the aspirational class. It seems to me the Tories will keep the plates spinning for as long as they can cling onto power. Which may well be sometime in 2019 - April or May is my bet

[cubes]

There is an "aspirational class" that are into property flipping, got a new car on tick and have been loading up on the never-never all fuelled by dirt cheap credit. This is the new class of voter that the Tories are looking to for their future core support as their current support base is at the wrong end of the demographic spectrum.

That's assuming the 'aspirational class' are still solvent and not blaming the government for their woes at the next election. Pity we just didn't let people and companies go bankrupt over their excessive debts in 2008. We'd be on our way out of this shitty economy by now. Keeping them solvent and borrowing just means a much bigger problem further down the road, but I guess that's some other politicians problem.