Be Excellent To Each Other

It is budget day here in the UK, and pluck, lucky, George "Austerity" Osbourne, the big AO bomb as he is known in the cabinet, will be picking the winning numbers from his big red box and they, the lucky few, probably will not have their departments decimated.

What do we expect from this budget? My top picks!

Beer up 10p a pint
Fags up 30p a packet
Fuel stays the same
More money to poor families
Less money to the arts
You can't cut funding, you will regret this!
Posturing punitive tax on one person
Fugly tax held
VAT increase

Place bets now, and join in the fun on the UK goverment's big wheel of misfortune!

'We inherited the situation from the previous administration'

I'd rather have Myp in charge of the budget, and he's a blithering idiot.

Beer can't keep going up, can it? There's so much on it now that London pays more alcohol duty than Germany.

HMG are very fond of the duty escalator.

FTFQN

It's almost as if they don't want people going into pubs.
Still, at least the ridiculous 'minimum pricing' idea seems to be dead in the water - sin taxes should at least benefit the government, not the big breweries.

I predict a riot a freeze on fuel duty and scrapping of the beer escalator (which isn't as cool as it sounds).

More taxes, more money for MPs, more money spunked on nothing, less money for everything else.

Drinking, and particularly drinking to violent, messy excess, is a basic human right of every Englishman, and has been for centuries. Hands off our way of life! etc

As long as the poor can't do it, I suppose. Rich thugs are just fine.

Heh.

I suspect increase in duty won't make any difference to the price of a four pack in TEH ASDAS though.

I hope not, as CoOp's Continental Lager is quite nice, and good value at less than £4.

Cheaper beer, whoo!

FWIW, as a strict non-drinker, I don't like the almost collective punishment approach to drinking taxation either. It's a crude, blunt instrument to tackle a cultural problem that can't be 'fixed' with simple knee jerk measures.

CUNTS

Which bit(s)?

Apparently i'm going to be £124 better off next year.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17442946

£148 personally, as a unit, £318! NEW BIKE TIME! or a clutch.

OUT OF AUSTERITY AND INTO THE ELYSIUM FIELDS

£151 better off!

*lights cigar with a 50 note*

Beer duty escalator scrapped, a penny off duty... yet the BBC thing says £1.10 per pint worse off? What?

£24.91 better off, without taking into account the alcohol.

Frankly the government needs to do more to look after those of us who are losing child benefit (which was last year's loss, of course, so I'm £24.91 better off on a negative £1,800 position), the bastards. What do I get? Nothing! Not even a married couple's tax break. WHO WILL THINK OF THE MODERATELY WELL OFF?

PAH

"Pottery industry in Midlands to be exempt from climate change levy"

THANK THE LORD.

£258 better off apparently.

£345 worse off

A bit that hasn't been reported yet, but will be.

Is it a one off Riles tax?

Point 7 on my predictions.

Potentially. Except for the one off bit.

I think we came out at about £540 better off.

Except for the bit where I underpaid a previous year's tax by £740.

Let's borrow this thread. The first Tory budget since 1996!

Whatever happens, this will be the best budget for me personally since 2001.

Because I'm not at work.

I'm pleased that it sounds like I may be paying less tax. Finally a Tory government that actually does something for me.

Fuel tax frozen until March. Hurrah!

Dividends taxed sensibly for the first time since 1998.

Me to spend nine months talking about little else to clients.

Corporation tax to be cut to 19% in 2017, followed by a cut to 18% in 2020.

Meh

Holy fuck, child support is going to be capped to two children.

It's more complicated than that, but he's talking to fast for me to keep up.

New minimum wage of £7.20 next April, going up to £9 in 2020.

My work colleague just commented "It's a bit China."

Screws most of my PSC clients over though. DAMN.

Nice to see they are hitting wealthy tax dodgers ( a little bit) as well as making people with legacy subsidised housing who can afford market rent pay it

Thought the proposal to pay 10K a year to recipients of the GC and VC medals was a nice touch as well

Was it as bad as that bloke who shouts in town said it was going to be?

Has beer duty gone up?

No. You are still expected to drink a pint a night

Not too bad really. I'm quite pleased that they're making WRAG payments the same as the dole, as IMO that's the most abused benefit we have in Britain.

"Ow, I hurt my back, now give me £60 extra per week". And there's no way to disprove that, and people taking the fucking piss with it. As much as it pains me I do try to watch these programmes with people on benefits. I remember seeing one guy who was smoking weed all day abusing the system. He ended up going inside for stabbing some one (oh yeah, lovely bloke) Maxwell IIRC.

Well it's cunts like that this will get rid of.

They'll also get rid of the "Slapper who has kid every two years instead of a job" type too. That will no longer be a job option to local WETS.

You know... benefit abuse is a tiny, tiny part of the overall benefit spend despite what the Daily Mail would have you believe.