For a lot of older career people, the "tax break" (we're actually deferring most of the tax til later) is what keeps us working full time instead of going part time or taking an earlier retirement

Remove these breaks and watch the NHS collapse as senior consultants go part time

If the likes of Rayner, Reeves and co can get away with such phrases when acquiring and. making monies from RTB's and claiming tax payer monies to fund second home expenses, then you should be fine. However don't put your head above the parapet yet.

Given the shrinking tax base problem I described above, I can only really see 3 options:
1. Cut public spending.
2. Economic Growth.
3. Spread the tax base by taxing the "poor" harder (and by "poor" I probably mean anyone paying basic rate tax, which I know sounds bizarre).

I personally don't like the look of no. 3, so I'm leaning towards a mix of 1 and 2.

Public spending strikes me as far too high, and there seems very little appetite to put the brakes on public sector pay, or the benefits bill. Other than the cuts to WFA, which is probably dwarfed by the rest, and in any case feels like a bad place to start.

Economic growth always seems the most "painless" route, but that involves creating a spirit of entrepreneurship, innovation, and encouragement of private capital to get ploughed into existing UK companies (plus UK arms of foreign companies), and start-ups. If you discourage that capital for ideological reasons then a lot of it is not going to materialise.

As investors I think we sometimes lose sight of the role of our capital, but in essence what we're doing by buying shares and trading them with one another is recycling capital around the economy to support company risk-taking and expansion plans. We hope to earn a return on this capital (obviously) but the socialists always miss two points - (1) we're exposing the capital to risk (because that's the nature of running a business for shareholders), (2) it does have a societal purpose because it's what grows economies, provides jobs, and pays for public services. But you can't have any of that unless you ideologically accept that some investors will end up making a lot of money, which is where socialists come unstuck and try and run the economy themselves, like the nonsense of GB Energy (does anyone actually know what this is yet, as it sounds to me like some badly thought-out hybrid between a subsidy mechanism and an ill-run taxpayer funded VCT), or the National Wealth Fund (National Debt Fund?), another excuse for socialists to pour taxpayer's money down the drain when all that's needed is to incentivise the private sector and let them get on with it.

Along with the ideological campaign to destroy what's left of the North Sea (like not defending the Rosebank and Jackdaw licences) the current government are I think more likely to cause a recession rather than kick-start growth. The Germans are quickly finding out what the loss of access to cheap fossil fuel does to your industry, but at least their misfortune was caused by a war, not self-inflicted.

All of which I think means we're back to increased taxes in the forthcoming budget and the collapsing pyramid model of my earlier post, at least for the next 5 years.

To Old Jock's 3 options, I would add a 4th - borrowing. I suspect that we will get substantially more of it alongside tax rises over the next few years, since growth is unlikely to come to the rescue quickly enough (or at all?), and cutting spending will end up in the 'too difficult' pile. Many will be unconcerned about increased levels of debt if it means avoiding austerity, but it does mean that the purchasers of that debt will need to be persuaded that it's more attractive than other options available to them.

Some time ago now, there was one year where I estimated that I paid more in tax than my (albeit it lowly paid) dad had paid throughout his whole working life. Tends to concentrate your mind a little and wonder exactly where your money's going...

More so if, like me, you once happened to be seconded to a, err, "key Government department renowned for appalling inefficiency", to help their bigwigs understand why their projects were costing (or being quoted at) over 2-orders of magnitude more (I kid you not!) than the identikit private-sector projects that we were successfully delivering. You could not make up the mind-blowingly wasteful nonsense observed, hence the absurd costs, nor the resolute resistance by most to change. Anecdotes and reports indicate that things have only gone further downhill since my audit... 🤦

I've little doubt that many of the state's functions could be delivered for a fraction of their current cost, with vast numbers of staff freed up for productive roles that actually generate tax revenues rather than just soak them up, but it'd require substantially dismantling all these bureaucracies, which have evolved through time to now largely serve the needs of the insiders rather than the public, re-engineering them from the ground-up as modern, lean entities.

The tragedy today is that the new Government probably have the political cover to begin this mammoth exercise, but have insufficient will to upset their public sector / union client voters, no real-world insight or experience to bring to bear, and are in any case hamstrung by ideology, preventing pragmatic solutions.

The idea of this current lot that the tax thumbscrews will simply be turned even more on the narrowing cohort who are already paying for everything is just ridiculous. They might as well be running 24hr adverts telling successful people to back right off, kick back, cut their hours, tickover rather than grow, retire early, focus resolutely on the tax tail vs the dog, clear off elsewhere, etc etc etc.

"Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome". Utter donkeys.