I am of the opinion that the British pension system is unfairly rewarding the wealthy boomer and depriving younger generations of the our financial opportunities.
Taxing work through higher national insurance is no way to improve pensions
It will;
- Reduce the capacity of employers to pay proper pension contributions to staff
- Increase incentives for employers to use self-employed workers as contractors (who don’t get mandatory pensions)
- Drive employee pension contributions underground (through salary sacrifice)
- Keep wages lower meaning lower mandated contributions via auto-enrolment.
Add to that “French style” employee protections and the cost of employment will mean a crunch on money going into pensions. This will hit young people hardest, they have most of their working journey ahead of them, older folk like me will be relatively lightly impacted.
This is exactly not what I voted for. I voted for a Government that would tax wealth and not workers and even if those taxes hit “wealthy me”, I would gladly pay them to re-address the embarrassing imbalance in opportunity between my generation and our children,
It would seem that the numbers only add up for Rachel Reeves by reclassifying work taxes as those that employers pay. But we all know that those taxes get passed on. Here is the research of Dan Niedle published last week (and on this blog)
People absolutely get that if you tax businesses with higher labour costs, those taxes get passed on.
And people are adamant that it is the wealthy who have the broadest shoulders who should be bearing the brunt of tax rises. In particular people who have wealth stored in property or squirrelled away in tax-shelters.
This may sound like pure populism on my behalf, but as most people don’t have a voice, it’s worth restating the blindingly obvious – that the silent majority need speaking up for.
I am sick and tired of being told that pensions cannot be taxed , pension lump sums should be tax-free to 25% of the total pot, that pensions should be an IHT shelter and that they should continue to pay the vast majority of the £70bn of tax incentives they enjoy, to those at the top table.
This is not Jeremy Corbyn blogging but it might as well be. If we are to address the glaring disparity between the retirement opportunities of my generation and those of our children and grand-children, we need to stop taxing work and start redistributing from the elderly wealthy to the young and that means loading taxation on pension wealth.
Filling the Chancellor’s £20bn black hole with further national insurance contributions from those in work is not acceptable. There may be some need to pay more NICs and I accept the importance of a minimum wage that is a living wage, but loading employers with costs that force them away from making proper retirement provision for their staff is regressive and wrong. It is not what I voted for.
