PENSIONERS ARE IN THE FIRING LINE AGAIN — AND THIS TIME, THEY COULD BE H!T WHERE IT HURTS
Andy Burnham urged to kick pensioners where it hurts – by charging them National Insurance
As the next Labour Budget looms, pensioners are in the firing line again.
And once again, the attack comes from one of those leftie think tanks that spends its days dreaming of ways to drive our taxes to fresh highs, while splashing still more on benefits and green tech. They’ve developed a thing about pensioners. Tax-wise, they want to hit them for six. It’s almost as if they want to start an intergenerational war. Or perhaps it’s revenge, because pensioners have learned the hard way never to vote Labour.
When Torsten Bell was top dog at leftie think tank The Resolution Foundation, he was all over pensioners. He wanted to tax their homes, savings, capital gains and inheritances, and axe the triple lock to boot. He’s been keeping his head down since being made Labour pensions minister. Now the Institute for Public Policy Research (IRRP) has taken up the challenge. It’s been dubbed Labour’s favourite think tank.
The IPPR has just called on Andy Burnham to shift the tax burden from workers to pensioners, to fund the costs of our ageing population. Like almost everybody on the left, it wants to slap new taxes on our homes. It also wants to hike capital gains tax rates to bring them into line with income tax. And that’s just for starters.
Rest assured, that if pensioners do ever to have to pay NI, that initial 2% charge would probably rise over time, and possibly apply to ever more income.
Ben Ansell, a professor at the University of Oxford and author of the paper, argues that the tax system had increasingly shifted responsibility towards younger workers while protecting retirees who have benefited from decades of rising property and asset wealth. As the population ages, pensioners must pay.
