* UK population is 68.8 million (2023 data)
* UK public spending per person is therefore £15,116 per person
So, you need to be paying more than £15k of tax for each year to be a “net contributor”.
Roughly you need to earn around £4,970.00 per month or £66,614.52 and you pay around £15,245.40 total tax for the year.
Edit: Agree with all the comments its not only the tax you pay but even a good amount of income tax + other taxes paid over the year has to add up to £15K and that’s alot of money!
thespiceismight on
The hell is going on here? This is criminal incompetence. There need to be charges.
>”The previous government covered up the true state of the public finances”
Ms Reeves said this. Either it’s true, in which case, prosecute, or it isn’t, in which case she’s lying.
thedybbuk_ on
>She promptly cancelled several projects, including 40 new hospitals, reforms to adult social care charges, a new Advanced British Standard qualification, and several road and train projects
Maybe we can solve the energy crisis by tapping the power generated from Clement Attlee and Nye Bevan spinning in their graves.
Disastrous_Fruit1525 on
Why don’t they just borrow money, that’s what governments do. Borrow money to invest in the country, hopefully the returns will be enough to pay it back. When we are 2trillion in debt another 20 billion is peanuts. How the fuck does she think we are going to get any growth if they keep destroying everything.
earth-calling-karma on
In the grand scheme of things, 22bn doesn’t seem like all that much. 3-400 per head. ‘Black hole’ is a tad dramatic. Just borrow the damn money (print it up – Lettuce Truss shot a load worth 30bn in a couple of weeks) and stop chewing the scenery.
Make all foreign nationals living in the uk pay health insurance, it will take about 10 million people out of the of the NHS, which will be worth a couple of £billion!
Stopped giving social housing And more importantly benefits to non-new UK citizens! This will relieve another couple of £billion.
Stop paying to put illegal migrants in hotels, cancel HS2, stop giving billions of pounds worth of foreign aid to extremely wealthy countries!
Cancel net zero because the UK is 1% of global emissions, instead of putting the handbrakes the UK economy, we could take it off and let it grow!
The list could go on and on UK government waste so much money on so many stupid things is obscene!
BobMonkhaus on
‘But speaking on the Politics with Jack and Sam podcast today, Sky News’ deputy political editor Sam Coates said: “One of the things I’m told is that the overall black hole could be bigger than £22bn, because don’t forget, £20bn is just the gap in this financial year alone.”’
Well that seems credible. Nice to see nobody overreacted on here without reading it *could be bigger* according to a sky news random.
NunWithABun on
The year is 3034. The United Kingdom has been in perpetual austerity for over a millennium. Euston’s HS2 rebuild is almost finished after being cut to one platform.
wkavinsky on
Press briefing for even more austerity, since the previous briefings didn’t get any push back.
If this keeps up, it’ll be one-and-done for Labour under Starmer.
And remember – a dead donkey could *probably* have got elected against the Tories in this election, especially with Reform having taken ~15% of the Tory vote nationally.
sbos_ on
It makes me wonder what tories were planning to if they continued in office. Just BAU and kick can down the road. ?
22bn is a very small part of the pie of the countries economy, according to this chart ( above) public spending is currently: 1,189 bn.
This is more a competence problem rather a money problem.
TarrouTheSaint on
This is such horseshit.
22 billion is only 10% of what non-structural tax reliefs cost in a year. Most of those reliefs are absolute bullshit (not all, some are actually quite good growth measures).
The money is there. Labour just lack the political will to access it.
LCFCgamer on
So the decline will continue?
Got enough money to send £12bn overseas each and every year, £60bn over the parliament
Got enough money to give already wealthy public sector workers a bumper pay rise, despite most being on 30k/40k/60k+ already, by stealing the money from pensioners, including the really poor who don’t qualify for Credits
Got enough money to spend £5bn on illegal immigrants, £30bn per parliament
But haven’t got any money to prevent the country becoming even more shit?
F politicians!!!
Dry_Sandwich_860 on
This is the same mistake that the Tories made with austerity. Even the USA used economic stimulus to get the economy moving after the 2008 financial crisis. If people can’t get to work or to the shops, etc, they can’t spend money.
The only way to have a healthy economy is to have a healthy workforce where people can get where they need to go and where they have money to spend after paying rent/mortgage.
I live in the centre of a major “wealthy” city where over half of the shops are shut. People can’t get into the city to spend money on a broken bus service and expensive and unreliable train system. Businesses and individuals can’t afford rent. And we’re not educating enough people, so are still sending our own kids into dead-end hospitality and retail jobs while having to steal professionals from other countries’ taxpayers. Except that we can’t even get enough of those anymore because of Brexit. Good companies are also fleeing to the continent because of these problems and Brexit.
More austerity is not the answer.
Mkwdr on
Before making knee jerk reactions , I recommend listening to the latest More or Less podcast which generally looks into statistics in the national media with experts – and in this case examines the £22 billion gap.
It’s pretty objective , I think.
It may have been obvious that the Tories were being ‘economical with the truth’ in their budget forecasts, and some of the ares but not necessarily by exactly how much.
I’m not sure I think Labour could have been expected to run an election campaign based on ‘the budget is generally dishonest so we will be specifically raising this and that / cutting this and that’ in the light of the Conservatives just denying it and using their version of project fear.
There’s also a difficult balance now between austerity blocking needed growth and causing more problems than it solves …. versus promising unfunded spending and more borrowing when you are dependent on international market opinion.
I do fear where we end up if the new government gives no sense of hope , no sustainable private sector growth ( beyond more building) or progress in rescuing the public sector form slow collapse. We need innovative yet effective changes – I don’t know what they should be but ‘more of the same’ seems likely to get us nowhere , worsen public disillusionment and increase support for the extremes.
Peter_Sofa on
New governments always do this, they want to get rid of any crappy projects from the other lot, and put their own projects in place, which will likely be next year budget.
EwokSuperPig___ on
Is they can announce in a year or so that all these cuts have worked and the black hole has been filled and we can exit austerity then I’m more than onboard. Only problem is that will not happen
Comfortable_Rip_3842 on
Labour are a fucking mess. They are basically David Cameron Tory’s. When this doesn’t work in 15 years time what will we do then?
wombatking888 on
Hey baby, I’m looking for someone to fill my Fiscal Hole…got any hard currency?
21 Comments
“[traumascares](https://www.reddit.com/user/traumascares/)”UK public expenditure is currently £1,040bn per year ([source](https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/public-spending-statistics-release-february-2023/public-spending-statistics-february-2023#total-expenditure-billions))
* UK population is 68.8 million (2023 data)
* UK public spending per person is therefore £15,116 per person
So, you need to be paying more than £15k of tax for each year to be a “net contributor”.
Roughly you need to earn around £4,970.00 per month or £66,614.52 and you pay around £15,245.40 total tax for the year.
Edit: Agree with all the comments its not only the tax you pay but even a good amount of income tax + other taxes paid over the year has to add up to £15K and that’s alot of money!
The hell is going on here? This is criminal incompetence. There need to be charges.
>”The previous government covered up the true state of the public finances”
Ms Reeves said this. Either it’s true, in which case, prosecute, or it isn’t, in which case she’s lying.
>She promptly cancelled several projects, including 40 new hospitals, reforms to adult social care charges, a new Advanced British Standard qualification, and several road and train projects
Maybe we can solve the energy crisis by tapping the power generated from Clement Attlee and Nye Bevan spinning in their graves.
Why don’t they just borrow money, that’s what governments do. Borrow money to invest in the country, hopefully the returns will be enough to pay it back. When we are 2trillion in debt another 20 billion is peanuts. How the fuck does she think we are going to get any growth if they keep destroying everything.
In the grand scheme of things, 22bn doesn’t seem like all that much. 3-400 per head. ‘Black hole’ is a tad dramatic. Just borrow the damn money (print it up – Lettuce Truss shot a load worth 30bn in a couple of weeks) and stop chewing the scenery.
The IFS warned this [as early as March](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/mar/07/ifs-warns-of-labour-and-tory-conspiracy-of-silence-over-future-tax-and-spending-plans) this year, that the Tories have pencilled in 3.5% annual cuts to unprotected departments, so when Rachel Reeves signed up to Tories’ spending plan, she also agreed to these cuts. Now they are going to claim it’s a black hole that they are not aware of.
Make all foreign nationals living in the uk pay health insurance, it will take about 10 million people out of the of the NHS, which will be worth a couple of £billion!
Stopped giving social housing And more importantly benefits to non-new UK citizens! This will relieve another couple of £billion.
Stop paying to put illegal migrants in hotels, cancel HS2, stop giving billions of pounds worth of foreign aid to extremely wealthy countries!
Cancel net zero because the UK is 1% of global emissions, instead of putting the handbrakes the UK economy, we could take it off and let it grow!
The list could go on and on UK government waste so much money on so many stupid things is obscene!
‘But speaking on the Politics with Jack and Sam podcast today, Sky News’ deputy political editor Sam Coates said: “One of the things I’m told is that the overall black hole could be bigger than £22bn, because don’t forget, £20bn is just the gap in this financial year alone.”’
Well that seems credible. Nice to see nobody overreacted on here without reading it *could be bigger* according to a sky news random.
The year is 3034. The United Kingdom has been in perpetual austerity for over a millennium. Euston’s HS2 rebuild is almost finished after being cut to one platform.
Press briefing for even more austerity, since the previous briefings didn’t get any push back.
If this keeps up, it’ll be one-and-done for Labour under Starmer.
And remember – a dead donkey could *probably* have got elected against the Tories in this election, especially with Reform having taken ~15% of the Tory vote nationally.
It makes me wonder what tories were planning to if they continued in office. Just BAU and kick can down the road. ?
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/UK_Government_spending_for_2023-24.png](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/UK_Government_spending_for_2023-24.png)
22bn is a very small part of the pie of the countries economy, according to this chart ( above) public spending is currently: 1,189 bn.
This is more a competence problem rather a money problem.
This is such horseshit.
22 billion is only 10% of what non-structural tax reliefs cost in a year. Most of those reliefs are absolute bullshit (not all, some are actually quite good growth measures).
The money is there. Labour just lack the political will to access it.
So the decline will continue?
Got enough money to send £12bn overseas each and every year, £60bn over the parliament
Got enough money to give already wealthy public sector workers a bumper pay rise, despite most being on 30k/40k/60k+ already, by stealing the money from pensioners, including the really poor who don’t qualify for Credits
Got enough money to spend £5bn on illegal immigrants, £30bn per parliament
But haven’t got any money to prevent the country becoming even more shit?
F politicians!!!
This is the same mistake that the Tories made with austerity. Even the USA used economic stimulus to get the economy moving after the 2008 financial crisis. If people can’t get to work or to the shops, etc, they can’t spend money.
The only way to have a healthy economy is to have a healthy workforce where people can get where they need to go and where they have money to spend after paying rent/mortgage.
I live in the centre of a major “wealthy” city where over half of the shops are shut. People can’t get into the city to spend money on a broken bus service and expensive and unreliable train system. Businesses and individuals can’t afford rent. And we’re not educating enough people, so are still sending our own kids into dead-end hospitality and retail jobs while having to steal professionals from other countries’ taxpayers. Except that we can’t even get enough of those anymore because of Brexit. Good companies are also fleeing to the continent because of these problems and Brexit.
More austerity is not the answer.
Before making knee jerk reactions , I recommend listening to the latest More or Less podcast which generally looks into statistics in the national media with experts – and in this case examines the £22 billion gap.
It’s pretty objective , I think.
It may have been obvious that the Tories were being ‘economical with the truth’ in their budget forecasts, and some of the ares but not necessarily by exactly how much.
I’m not sure I think Labour could have been expected to run an election campaign based on ‘the budget is generally dishonest so we will be specifically raising this and that / cutting this and that’ in the light of the Conservatives just denying it and using their version of project fear.
There’s also a difficult balance now between austerity blocking needed growth and causing more problems than it solves …. versus promising unfunded spending and more borrowing when you are dependent on international market opinion.
I do fear where we end up if the new government gives no sense of hope , no sustainable private sector growth ( beyond more building) or progress in rescuing the public sector form slow collapse. We need innovative yet effective changes – I don’t know what they should be but ‘more of the same’ seems likely to get us nowhere , worsen public disillusionment and increase support for the extremes.
New governments always do this, they want to get rid of any crappy projects from the other lot, and put their own projects in place, which will likely be next year budget.
Is they can announce in a year or so that all these cuts have worked and the black hole has been filled and we can exit austerity then I’m more than onboard. Only problem is that will not happen
Labour are a fucking mess. They are basically David Cameron Tory’s. When this doesn’t work in 15 years time what will we do then?
Hey baby, I’m looking for someone to fill my Fiscal Hole…got any hard currency?
Here’s an £11.5bn saving – https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/jul/26/ed-miliband-labour-honour-pledge-11bn-overseas-climate-aid