20% vat

[WigWam]

Chancellor of the exchequer says he will raise vat to 20% by january.

Will this effect your business?

linky - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/politics/10371590.stm


WigWam

 

[monaghan]

Most of my customers are VAT registered so will claim it back anyway, so it just means collecting a bit more tax holding it for a few weeks and paying out a bigger sum each quarter.

 

[GreyWing]

It had to happen, we've been paying millions of labour voters to sit on their fat dole claiming backsides for the last 13 years.

At least we get to see those council officials get the squeeky bum time as they worry about their jobs and re-entering the real world of work.

So for me I think it's a magic budget.

 

[tifosi]

25% department reduction, considering some departments ringfenced will mean 40-50% for some departments.

I listened to some of the lefties including harperson bemoaning the budget saying it will cost jobs. Well, duh!! It'll be all of the mickey mouse jobs for the boys (and girls) with extra long titles that will go first.

One sideline offshoot will be a cooler housing market thats been fueled by the cushy public sector jobs.

I've got close relatives who are civil servants... and I know from them just what wastage there is. Expect the unions to be sharpening their teeth. Got no sympathy though.

Time for some parity.

S

 

[ukdomains]

i think its harsh especially for the low earning public sector workers a pay freeze for 2 years . Whos going to pay the bills with prices going day in day out ?

I think we should hit the banks hard with the money they have stolen lol

I think the banks got off lightly raising a measly £2bn from them it should be a lot more... £10bn or even the whole deficit dreams dreams

 

[davedevelopment]

i think its harsh especially for the low earning public sector workers a pay freeze for 2 years . Whos going to pay the bills with prices going day in day out ?

My company hasn't done inflationary pay rises for three years now, it's about time things caught up to the public sector.

 

[retired_member12]

I'm self employed and haven't been able to even consider upping my hourly rate for 4 years. At the same time, it's been suggested that public sector pensions alone account for £4000 of the tax bill of every single household in the UK! Fuck the lot of them, time they experienced what it's like in the real world, uncertainty is the norm in the private sector.

Read the final paragraph of this earnings report at the Office For National Statistics web site:

The percentage difference between the median level of full-time earnings in the public sector (£539 per week) and the private sector (£465 per week) widened over the year to April 2009, following annual increases of 3.1 per cent and 1.0 per cent respectively.

I'm totally deaf to any whinging regarding public sector employees, they may as well be Greeks to me.

 

[crabfoot]

What I know about the public sector -

I once had a public sector job, in a sewage works lab. The Chief Chemist was actually a zoologist who got the job because nobody else applied, and the rest of the workforce were similarly suited to their tasks. I stood it for about 8 weeks ...

If you want to be an inspector for the Home Office, you want a good History degree. Same for the Customs and Excise Inspector that checks on your industrial alcohol usage. Those people have the tech knowledge of the average newt, and only function effectively by assuming that everyone is trying to hoodwink them ...

I got applications rejected when I applied to be a Factories Inspector. I asked why and was told it was because I didn't have appropriate qualifications, despite the fact that I had "what was specified" and was prepared to take a £2k pa pay cut.

A friend of mine was in line for promotion. His boss wanted him to have the job, the moguls of Alencon Link (Basingstoke) kept blocking that promotion because his qualifications did not fit their profile easily.

The "promotion controllers" permeate every branch of the Civil Service, they are the hardest to get rid of and the least value for money.

Every government since the Thatcher years has attempted to streamline the Civil Service. The trouble is that they cannot attack the root cause of problems.

This government, like their predecessors, are lopping branches off the metaphorical tree because to uproot it is too expensive, and far too messy.

It took a long time to get those sort of people out of the railways - the ones that couldn't be removed because no-one else had the experience to be parachuted in and do the job (and there are still a few in there).

Bring back the ghost of Sir John Harvey-Jones. Alan Sugar is not a substitute.

 

[GreyWing]

£1 in every £8 of your council tax goes towards local government's pensions, not wages, pensions.

Crabfoot you are spot on, the public sector is full of you scratch my back I'll scratch yours, friends of friends etc Hopefully these cuts will target them not the guy's and girls on £15k a year sweeping the streets.

For that to happen the central government will need to tell them what and who to cut, not the local government. Otherwise all we will have is the same number of high paid pencil pushes and nobody doing anything.

 

[tifosi]

The problem is there's a LOT of them and they're heavily unionised so you can pretty much guarantee that we have general strikes coming.

Yes, I expect them. But the fact that the issues are global, or at least pan-european, and the flack the private sector has taken will mean they get very little, or no sympathy.

Time for some real world problems you bunch of desk-hugging, pen-pushing, paper-clip stealing wasters!!

 

[stender]

Worlds gone crazy. I work for a company not made a profit for 2 years and i get a nice bonus and 2% pay rise as did most others? no wonder we're making no money?

Is the CGT change going to be much help to those of you with your own companies?

I take it gas and electric is +VAT? looks like whoever caught fleeceblankets yesterday is on to a winner as we won't be able to afford to have the heating on come winter.

 

[crabfoot]

£1 in every £8 of your council tax goes towards local government's pensions, not wages, pensions.

Crabfoot you are spot on, the public sector is full of you scratch my back I'll scratch yours, friends of friends etc

Glad you got the point - I looked at it today and thought "what a ramble"!

To streamline an organisation and make it more efficient, one needs to evaluate the tasks of the business, and determine a minimum number of people to carry on those tasks. Then, people are designated for redundancy, or assigned to new tasks.

But whenever an organisation needs streamlining for efficiency, it has to be done from the outside.

If it is left to the people on the inside, two things happen -

The people at the top who actually contribute nothing to the day to day operation of the business, and are responsible for its parlous state, ALL stay in place.

The most competent people leave because the writing is on the wall, and the business is left to be operated by the semi-competent and bewildered. Little "nuggets" of efficiency usually remain (like the dustmen in East Yorkshire), but mostly the organisation is a crock of woe.

In the private sector, such "streamlined" firms stagger on for a couple of years and then collapse. In the public sector, as much work as possible is "farmed out" to private industry because the public agency is no longer capable of doing the work.

Whatever, you still have to pay for it!

I take it gas and electric is +VAT?

Gas and electric are a lower rate of VAT to everything else, might be unaffected, I'm having trouble reading that part of the budgie.
Whatever, a lot of people in these parts still burn coal, and we have oil-fired heating in our house ...

 

[MCNM]

The banks run this country not the government. There more powerful then we think.

 

[scooter]

One sideline offshoot will be a cooler housing market thats been fueled by the cushy public sector jobs.

Agreed. Also nice to see they are capping housing benefit at £400 per week. (still a rediculous amount but a huge step in the right direction and will also help cool the market.)

.

 

[Edwin]

Agreed. Also nice to see they are capping housing benefit at £400 per week. (still a rediculous amount but a huge step in the right direction and will also help cool the market.)

.

Yes, I cheered when I saw that bit. It's ridiculous that people are allowed to live in the most expensive parts of one of the most expensive cities in the world at the taxpayers' expense just because they "happened to be there" when claiming the benefit (there may be a bit more to it, but I don't think the hurdle's very high).

If you don't have a job or any other source of income (aside: don't you hate it when the media and government collude to call handouts "income"?) then it's not going to be a genuine "hardship" to move a few miles down the road to less nosebleed-level rent areas (or further, if necessary - I still don't see why it's somehow unthinkable). And £400 a week should still get you reasonable accommodation somewhere in any major UK city.

 

[namealot]

If your business is business to business not much change as you claim it back..

I think its not good when the people it will affect the most e.g. on low incomes will be proportionaly paying the highest price, I know it was them that made the banking system go into melt down.... But the government had sense and did not see fit to tax the bonuses or close any loop holes that mean oh so many bankers and other that "earn" (must remeber when I have a terrible year and force my company to go for had outs to give myself a bonus) 1000 of millions pay less tax etc than a road sweeper living in a bed-sit…..Keep up the good work…. I see the Ifs report says it will effect the poorest most but what would they know... there not experts..? http://www.ifs.org.uk/budgets/budgetjune2010/browne.pdf

 

[crabfoot]

I visited Croatia about ten years ago, they were working on 20% vat to get into the EU. Lots of people were forming "car clubs" - four people would pay one person with a car to go to Italy once a month and do a "big shop" to keep the grocery bills down.

I'm on the ferry next month ...

 

[retired_member12]

I visited Croatia about ten years ago, they were working on 20% vat to get into the EU. Lots of people were forming "car clubs" - four people would pay one person with a car to go to Italy once a month and do a "big shop" to keep the grocery bills down.

I'm on the ferry next month ...

On the contrary, the amount of people in France who are buying their groceries from the UK is shooting up. From all accounts, their costs are about 25-30% higher than ours!

 

[crabfoot]

Yea, but the euro is falling against the pound and dollar since a strong government is now in power.

And France is not my idea - I'm off to Belgium for cheap tobacco. Whisky from Lidl is also a good buy (unlike the weird stuff they sell in Aldi over there).

When you're a chainsmoking alkie with a white van collection, you're on a hiding to nothing every time someone says "budget".