[JetSetWilly]

Raising taxes is only “necessary” because of their total lack of gumption when it comes to reducing spending. For example, 1 car in 3 on the roads in the UK is funded via PIP and that has been meteorically increasing as a proportion in the last few years. Labour bottled it in the face of their own backbench rebellion over very reasonable measures earlier in the year, and now they are coming to pick our pockets.

They’ll say they are making hard, necessary decisions, but the truth is that ramming up taxes is the default mode easy decision for labour.

[cassepipe]

It seems like it's a conservative fantasy that all public money is being wasted but until I see detailed information on where and why (Chesterton's fence style) it is being wasted, I can't take them seriously

It seems like people are vastly overestimating the amount of money being wasted. If it was that easy, it would have probably been done. In serious circles (outside overt MAGA propaganda ecosystem) I believe DOGE is considered quite a failure.

I'd be much more sympathetic to a tax system reform as it seems that in democracies, there is a vast amount of tax "gerrymandering" in order to favor your voter base... but of course no politician wants to remove that option

[WindyMiller]

> 1 car in 3 on the roads in the UK is funded via PIP

In 2024 there were about 34 million cars registered in the UK and Motability had a fleet of 815,000. Are you telling me that the 3.5 million PIP recipients are using their payments to fund 2-3 cars each outside the Motability scheme?

(Motability buys about 1 in 5 of the new cars registered in the UK.)

[bigfudge]

Useful factchecking of the "bed wetting boy racer" stories here: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/mar/24/motability-d...

[dgroshev]

Raising taxes is necessary because the previous governments have decimated the tax base. As of now, a median UK PAYE worker is paying about 13% on their income. A median German worker is paying about 30%.

This remarkable result was achieved by the backdoor: successive conservative governments obscured the stagnation by constantly increasing the personal allowance far in advance of the inflation. This bought them votes [1], but as a result we have a baroque tax system that tries to squeeze tax from less visible, often counter-productive places, and still doesn't collect nearly enough to cover necessary expenses. After a decade of cuts, every public service is cut to the bone, and there's no money to invest into hospitals, roads, or trains to increase the overall productivity.

PIP bullshit is a drop in the bucket compared to that.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/HENRYUK/comments/1jsyzip/tax_rates_...