Torsten Bell sums up the problem with the Tories trying to bribe older voters with a tax cut (reversing their own tax-grab conducted via fiscal drag)...
'Trying to bribe baby boomers with small tax cuts completely misses the point that they’d like something else. A functioning NHS'!
[The sound of chicken coming home to roost]
@ChrisMayLA6 As a pensioner what I see from the Tories is
* triple lock suspended whenever they feel like it
* tax cuts spun as going to "everyone in work" actually go to everyone in work except pensioners
* fiscal drag and thus increased income tax.
OK, so they're promising to maybe not do the last one again, but they're not going to get elected so they can promise what the fuck they like in the full knowledge that they're not going to have to deliver.
I live in Luxembourg and have two pensions, A Luxembourg state pension and a British state pension.
Over here, on the combined pensions, I don't pay any tax at all as I don't reach the taxable threshold but if I moved back to my homeland, the UK, I would be taxed at the rate of around £2,500 a year!
Over here they tax the rich whereas in the UK the tory scum tax the poor!
@Paulos_the_fog @TimWardCam @ChrisMayLA6
So sadly, what you are experiencing is not a revolutionary socialist taxation system, more like tax brackets aligned with local incomes.
And let's be honest, the UK state pension is a joke, the effective Austrian minimum pension (basically social benefits) are higher, in most cases significantly higher than the UK maximum state pension.
@Paulos_the_fog @TimWardCam @ChrisMayLA6 I'm not sure how much more tax I'd pay in England, but certainly far more than the €140 p.a. levied here in France for 2023. France hasn't the richesse of Luxembourg, but though it's by no means egalitarian it still manages not to rip off poor people at the rate of UK.
@Paulos_the_fog @TimWardCam @ChrisMayLA6
I wouldn't go so far.
The reality is rather that the UK, back then before the BrExit, was rather the poor house of Western Europe.
Most regions of the UK were literally in the list of the "top" poorest regions of Northern Europe.
The inequality in the UK is massive, per capita the UK GDP pre BrExit was only minimal above the Eastern European batch.
LUX OTOH is per capita one of the richest countries in the world.