Time to fulfil a crucial promise...

digannio

Before the election, David Cameron said: "In order to help deal with Labour's debt crisis and help turn Britain from a spend, spend, spend society into a save, save, save society, it is time to abolish income tax on savings for everyone on the basic rate of tax, with top-rate taxpayers continuing to pay the same".

Does anyone know when this is to be introduced?

tradetime

Probably shortly after hell freezes over, election promises aren't real promises, but then I am a cynic.

dunstonh

That was said before they realised how much damage Labour had done to the economy.

The question you have to ask now is if you abolish tax on savings for all basic rate taxpayers then who are you going to pass that lost revenue on to or what benefits or expenditure are you going to remove?

sabretoothtigger

Bit of an idealist promise unfortunately. If they raise vat again this would be more then justified way to balance it

digannio

So, what you are saying is that the goalposts have just been moved after promises were made. Not like a politician to say one thing and then do a complete U-turn after people vote for them.
And I don't think it is right or fair to renege on every promise you made because you didn't realise how bad things were.

Don't promise things if you may not be able to deliver them.... simple. I thought trust was going to be restored. Yeah right. What about all the savers who may have believed what they were told and voted accordingly?

tradetime

Welcome to the shady world of politics. :wave:

dunstonh

Don't promise things if you may not be able to deliver them.... simple. I thought trust was going to be restored. Yeah right. What about all the savers who may have believed what they were told and voted accordingly?

Technically, the Govt we have issued no promises before the election.

digannio

But leading members of the main party that now make up the coalition certainly did make promises and repeated them many times... and have now quietly swept them under the carpet. And they say the Right Honourable...

StevieJ

dunstonh wrote: »

That was said before they realised how much damage Labour had down to the economy.

The question you have to ask now is if you abolish tax on savings for all basic rate taxpayers then who are you going to pass that lost revenue on to or what benefits or expenditure are you going to remove?

Pull the other one :rotfl:

DavidHayton

It was a silly pledge in the first place. Most people would benefit marginally or not at all. For example, nearly all my cash savings are in ISAs. The small amount outside ISAs is getting such a paltry rate that the tax is insignificant. I will then cheerfully resort to the usual argument that anyone fortunate to have so much money that they can't get it all into ISAs should do the decent thing and pay lots of tax to keep the country afloat. (I am now hiding under the table)

A more helpful plege would be to stop the little game that the banks play whereby you get less on a Cash ISA than a regular savings account. The result is sometimes that you are better off paying tax outside an ISA than collecting tax-free interest inside the ISA.

David

jamesd

digannio wrote: »

Before the election, David Cameron said: "In order to help deal with Labour's debt crisis and help turn Britain from a spend, spend, spend society into a save, save, save society, it is time to abolish income tax on savings for everyone on the basic rate of tax, with top-rate taxpayers continuing to pay the same".

Does anyone know when this is to be introduced?

No sign of it. Instead the plan is to raise taxes on the pensions of ordinary people's pensions and cut them on wealthy people's pensions.

The raise is from limiting how much can be taken out as income, so more remains in the pension, then raising the tax on it if you die before age 75 from 35% to 55%. The cut is for those who used it for inheritance planning and have an effective tax rate drop from 83% to 55%. Neither tax applies when the money is put into the pension pot of a beneficiary instead of being inherited outside a pension pot.

Welcome to the wonderful world of coalition politics, where nobody has to do anything that they said they would do before the election. Getting back to elected governments will be a refreshing change.