Every time someone says that we need to raise taxes to pay for elder health care, or pensions, or the effects of an ageing population, we should throw back at them the insistence that we knew the welfare state couldn’t be afforded. For that’s what an insistence on more taxation is – an agreement that we cannot afford what has been promised under the taxation levels we’ve now got. Which is, of course, what all of us out here have been saying for decades, isn’t it? We cannot afford the promises of the welfare state given the taxes that are being paid.
This being what the Resolution Foundation are saying:
Giving older generations the health and care they need in the coming decades will
not come cheap – but it is the right thing to do. However, asking younger working
adults to pay that bill in its entirety risks undermining rather than strengthening
the intergenerational contract. A better starting point is to recognise that Britain’s
booming stock of wealth is increasingly concentrated in older generations and that it
is also increasingly lightly taxed.
All those promises that were made cannot be funded out of the level of taxation that is currently paid. Exactly what many have been saying of course:
Make earnings of those above state pension age subject to National Insurance contributions
To pay for it we should be taxing everyone more. Exactly what we were saying needed to be done. Or, of course, cut back on the generosity of those promises. The actual calculation that has been done being that we’ll grudgingly cough up the cash rather than go through the pain of the promises not being met. That after all those decades of being told that we were wrong or even lying in our insistence that the welfare state promises could not be paid for.
To be honest once, just once, we’d like to see a report which recommended cutting spending, not raising taxes. Just for the value of the variety if nothing else.
Is this the same mob who say we must tax the old in order to give the young £10,000 each? Presumably so that the young have the money to pay for the old.
As always, one does not go to the capital to measure anything, but to devise winning sales pitches. “Giving older generations the…care they need” is the old false choice that the only alternative to free “care” is thousands dying in the gutters. The “intergenerational contract” is the usual con job that health care on the suck is a simple extension of the voluntary model. That this particular pitch ends up advocating higher taxes is no surprise, as that is what the authors aimed to do before they sat down at a keyboard to craft a justification for it.
National Insurance ceased to be insurance decades ago and is just another income tax, I have no objections to it being merged into income tax, and so consequently paid by anybody with an income.
Oh, I object. Putting the “earmarked tax” scam back in the deck will simply make it easier to be played again, once Brits “don’t pay Insurance” but only an income tax.
It would have the benefit of removing artificial segregation between the two and making the actual level of income tax more transparent, especially if the fake Employers National Insurance was included in payslips.
ANTONY Moreover, he hath left you all his walks,
His private arbours and new-planted orchards,
On this side Tiber; he hath left them you,
And to your heirs for ever, common pleasures,
To walk abroad, and recreate yourselves.
Here was a Caesar! when comes such another?
Exeunt Citizens with the body.
ANTONY Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot,
Take thou what course thou wilt!
It would have the benefit of removing artificial segregation between the two and making the actual level of income tax more transparent, especially if the fake Employers National Insurance was included in payslips.