Okay!

Generally I think it's a stupid idea for any government to raise any specific tax ring-fenced for any specific use. What's the point of telling me my income tax is say 15%, plus 2% NHS tax, 1% Army tax and 2% Paying Benefits To Other People Tax?

So where would it come from? Income?

I’ve got nothing against the idea in those terms but I suspect (insert ackbar gif) it’s a trap. Once you’ve notionally removed it from the tax pot it becomes easier to then mark it as compulsory health insurance which can then be spent on private providers for ‘patient choice’ and before you know it it’s an Obama-care style system where NHS is the budget option for peasants.

Ring-fencing it might make people more willing to accept rises, but I’m vaguely certain that surveys show most people are willing to pay more tax for the NHS. I’m also dubious about all this long-term, 10-15 year funding settlement to ‘provide certainty’. Could easily be a way of squeezing the life out of the thing for good.

Liveinadive wrote:

Income but not income tax.
Like I say, calculated alongside NI. It would be an NI increase essentially but separated out on your payslip and ring fenced.

Yeah so self employed cunts like you can fiddle it, aye.

Jesus, when did you become so sensitive? I thought you were cool, man

I never thought it was mate, I have nightmares about doing my SA still. And the NI rate is fucking murder.

I did my SA this year. It was incredibly easy. 
Add up the total you've been paid, add up your expenses, enter them on the HMRC site, answer 10 pages of questions that basically ask you if you made any other money from other sources, then it tells you how much tax you owe.
Job done. 

I've been paying an accountant to do it for years.

I used to dread printing out all my invoices then finding the corresponding payment into my bank account, printing that, getting all my receipts etc... It's what my accountant insisted on.  
I got my accountant bro in law to sit with my whole I pressed 'no' twenty times of those extra income pages and I was like, 'Is that it?'. 
Yup.

This Carillion thing stinks.

Reading between the lines it seems the government are using private sector companies for higher risk projects, which is sensible at face value but in reality seems like they are setup to fail over a long period.
So companies like Carillion secure large government contracts (HS2 for example), the government know there is a high risk of the failure, so will the people at the top signing the paperwork.
 
The key is that long game, the first few years they have profit coming out their arse and pay dividends, then the well runs dry and they leave it to the tax payer to pick up the pieces either through bailouts, taking the project back into public hands or worst case paying benefits to the now unemployed workforce.

The whole time they are forcing out smaller companies or the public sector that probably could do the job because the bigger companies will undercut them, easy to do when they have no intention of fulfilling the contract.

Secure contract - deliver for a few years- cream dividends off the top sabotaging the longer term project - run to the government when the pot runs out - repeat until company collapses - establish new company- repeat.

It's okay though, because the private sector is so much more efficient and is too big to fail... ?
Something something the free market will self-correct something something.

It's the double decker shit sandwich that really pisses me off.
It is one thing to line pockets with tax payer money, but to then fail is an extra kick in the teeth.

They will say it is a complicated business but it is them that make it so. Adding share holders, subsidies, bidding processes and contracts hardly simplifies it.
"ooh we have to pay them that much to get the best people" Fuck off they are failing.

Yeah look at our PM.

An insider's (brief) view on Carililololol.

A lot of companies measure performance success using turnover as a key metric. Omg we turnover 2bn of a work a year we r awsum we can do ur big job no prob.

They don't tell you that they make fuck all on that work because the business took out loans repeatedly to buy smaller companies to get bigger to win the biggest juciest projects and they also eed to get work in to keep everything going day to day. Then cos they're getting bigger they go out and get more investment to buy more smaller companies because OMG LOOK AT US GROWING SO FAST WE MUST BE V. STRONK.

The whole thing is a colossal investment clusterfuck. The business grows until it becomes an unwieldy nightmare, then they start going hard on slashing prices on bids just to get work in almost at cost to keep the business going because they've got so big so fast they can't deliver efficiently any more and stop generating profit on their work.

Then a few of those cost price jobs go a bit wobbly and your house of cards comes down.

The real scandal here is how the fuck Carilion executives had the gall to keep it going for so long and who the fuck at government was doing the due diligence on the robustness of Carilion when they kept giving them contracts even after the profit warnings.

We have 2 jobs on with Carilion right now that are about to down tools at any moment. The stupid fucking greedy fucking tarmac bastards.

Also their pension black hole is a joke. Where is the regulation on private pension funding already? Taxpayers gonna be on the hook for that 600m as well as the 1.9bn or whatever bailout we already gave them.

What a colossal bunch of shitlords.

The pensions thing should be a warning to everyone, the government won't keep bailing out these pension pots forever and the procedures in place to protect them clearly don't work.

Get control of your own pension, especially when over 50 and you no longer have time to rebuild it.