Labour rebels call off tax change revolt
   

<p>
Labour rebels today called off their revolt over the abolition of the 10p
  income tax rate after Alistair Darling promised to compensate poor
  households who will lose out from the change.
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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/labour-rebels-call-off-tax-change-revolt-814266.html?r=RSS
   

  The Tories are exactly the same as Labour now.  Although, if they beat Brown in the next election, God knows how they're going to unravel the mess the economy's in.  The Child Tax Benefit Credit scheme alone, is a bottomless pot, and far too open to fraud.

  A lot of families would.  But, a lot of single women work only for sixteen hours a week, when they could very well take on a full time job.  There's also a lot of two parent families that don't need it at all, and are deliberately restricting their working hours solely to qualify.

  Single parents don't.  In fact, they're told it's really not worth taking more than sixteen hours a week.  And I also know of two families where the main breadwinner is working a strict 37 hour week, and their partners are doing as few hours as possible to qualify.  It's a hard thing to quantify, though...  Are they defrauding the state, or just taking advantage of an opportunity?

  It's rife around here.

I know that if we didn't recieve it, we'd probably get council tax benefit and maybe housing benefit so it may well cancel itself out...
but to be honest even if i took them off our bill list and then took away the credit we recieved we would be worse off, and pauls not even on minimum wage.

Something has seriously gone wrong somewhere..... it does seem to be a bottomless pit, but i hope they don't take it away because they can't stop others from defrauding the system.basically the tax credit replaces the child tax allowance and family allowance? ,marriage allowance? (not sure what one) too, obviously the amounts are higher and there are other additions too. But the cost of living has risen as well.

I remember as a kid my folks got family allowance at one point and it had to be reapplied for every six months, or was only allowed for 6 months or something.

  I just can't see how it's sustainable for many more years.  It's a massive drain on the economy, and of course, all the more popular because it's a 'Credit', not a 'Benefit', which means a lot of people who are restricting their working hours to qualify, have more time to write their vitriol-filled letters about 'Scroungers', to the local evening paper.


  If all that's on offer is repetitive, back-breaking menial labour, for minimum wage, then I suppose she was right.  You always have to take into account what sort of a wage a person can bring in.