[Closed] I agree with Nick

Blimey, just watched that program with Nick Robinson about tax, sobering stuff. Thinking that maybe taking taxation and budget out of the hands of politicians may be a rather good idea 😯

Means testing is massively expensive. That is one of the arguements behind the flat rate pension payments. It's cheaper to pay some people more that it is to work out a "fair" amount. It's even cheaper to pay some people less which is even more a danger.

Universal credit could go some way to solving this. It seems daft that there are benefits that are individually means tested. What should really happen is that it is all calculated at once and you receive one payment based on your result. Not a little bit from here and a little bit from there. Could solve a lot of these problem in one go. It'll cost a lot less to administer (Although the build cost will be high). It will also reduce the number of civil servants needed to administer it which is good or bad depending on whether you are one of them I suppose.

Means testing anything costs millions, so you can easily end up not saving anything at all.....

Very true. Y'know, the middle-classes love to bash the "handout culture" of the poor, don't they?

Comfortably off people don't need the government handouts they are "entitled" to claim. If they had the moral fortitude not to claim what they did not need, then means-testing and its associated costs would not be necessary.

Taking more than you need robs those in need; It's greed. It's a sick society, from top to bottom.

One of my in-laws' friends has joked that he'd miss his winter fuel allowance as it pays for a tank of fuel for his plane...

Regardless of whether they need it or not at least the money goes back into our economy.

Unlike this

The government has defended its decision to give £1bn in aid to India, despite the rapidly increasing wealth of the emerging economic giant.

A review of UK aid will maintain aid donations to India of £280m a year until 2015, while withdrawing assistance from countries such as Vietnam, Cambodia, Serbia and Moldova, the international development secretary, Andrew Mitchell, revealed.

The decision is likely to infuriate some Conservative MPs, who believe it is time to halt aid to India, which has economic growth of 8.5% a year, gives aid to Africa, spends £20bn a year on defence and has a £1.25bn space programme.

This has to be a bribe of some sort????

Sorry about earlier - going off on one. I'm tired.

Nice to know we're funding India's space programme!

footflaps - Member

We had 11.58 million pensioners in 2008 (1).

It looks like it costs something like £33 per person per benefit claim to means test something (2).

So that's something like £382 million (11.58 million x £33) to means test a benefit across pensioners.

Given than half of all pensioners live on less than £13,600 (3) you are not going to be able to withdraw the benefit for a large proportion of the pensioners, so there just isn't a significant saving to be made overall.

This is why we don't means test TV license and bus passes - it just doesn't save money.

Concise, well argued, easy to understand, and backed with solid numbers. Well played.

Isn't the bus pass thing rather self governing? Rich old people won't use a bus much (even if its free) cos its full of scrotes. Therefore the cost of giving them a bus pass is nothing.