Are we more 'enlightened' now?

Paperbackwriter I've often seen very lenient sentences for brutal crimes, not always murder but where victims have been badly injured or had life changing mental health problems as a result. There have been drunks who run someone over and kill them, they have not had life sentences but in some cases very short sentences.

M0nica

But most of those people (who look for schemes to avoid paying care schemes) are not the well off. They are those on average incomes, most of whose capital (the value of their house), would be swallowed up by care fees, leaving nothing for their children to inherit.

You need to separate the amounts of money the government chooses to exempt from taxation from those that are illegal.

For example every person with any income gets a tax free allowance, currently £12,750. That means everyone is complicit in not paying taxes, if they can avoid them. Any money paid into a pension is tax-free and so on from there. If the government said that they would only take a person's income into account when assessing care charges, not their capital, then no scheme to avoid charges would be necessary. It would be a normal tax exemption like saving for a pension.

Pointing out that schemes set up to enable someone to avoid paying care fees will not work is just stating a fact. I would do the same if someone said they were going to invest in any other scam, whether investing in carbon credits or investing in fine wine.

What I am still not clear is the income level that makes someone well-off and means that if they use any tax exemption allowed by the government, for example saving into a pension, it is distasteful, while for someone with an income below that point it is entirely acceptable.

I'm talking about deprivation of assets, which means that a person has assets to deprive themselves of.
Again, it has been spoken of on here before.

I thought it was quite clear to what I was referring, and you did ask what proof I had.

I have no reason to think people on here are lying when they speak of different schemes or means to squirrel their money away, so I based my "proof' on that.

Of course I wasn't meaning people doing legal, government endorsed things.

It is just that people use phrases like the well-off without giving any idea about what that means. Does it include the person on pension credit, but owning their house, which may be worth £200,000? Or are you talking about someone with an income of £50, 000 and a house worth £500,000?

You cannot make value judgements, unless the values have been specified. Anyway if the scheme is a scheme that is approved by government and is part of the range of tax exemptions that is included in government fiscal policy it is perfectly reasonable to take benefit from it.

People entering these schemes for putting their money out of the hands of care fees believe and have been told, usually by solicitors, that the schemes proposed are legal, permissible and effective.

I merely point out that while the schemes are entirely legal and permissable and within the government's fiscal regime, they are ineffective and that they are wasting time and money setting them up. They are a form of scam and we are alwaays very active on GN about warning each other about scams.

Well, that is what I used as my "proof".
The fact that I have read threads on here about doing just that.
I see it as stealing.

It isn't stealing because these schemes are ineffective, so no money is ever shielded from care home fees.

Ah, but the intention was there, regardless of whether it was successful.

I have found children in my wider family tree who have been in prison for petty theft and have gone on to industrial.school and ended up living a normal life after that. Some where the whole family spent their lives in and out of jail for poetry offences. Maybe in some situations where children were not well looked after and we're neglected it was the best thing for them. Others whose economic and life situations seemed very similar but didn't end up in jail at all and lived respectable lives.
I'm afraid I do judge those whose actions were wrong then and would be wrong now. Like the great uncle who as a widower married a widow with a couple of children and had other children with her. Then abandoned her, so sad to read. What she wrote on the 21 census return that she had been abandoned 20 years previously and some more stuff , obviously could not get a divorce, so had to bring up her children herself with no support from him. Another whose daughter marries a relative and I was trying to find where the youngest daughter was, and discovered the mother and siblings in foster care earlier and then. Being trained to be servanrs, found that the father had been imprisoned for child cruelty beating the littlest boy, although the mother had died he had a housekeeper. So the children were taken from him, sadly the little bit was in the workhiuse and died yojng. Him I judge

I'm not sensitive to names or pictures being revealed now. It's too late for anyone to be hurt. I had an ancestor once who murdered the land agent in Donegal. He went on the run and found a witch on the road who told him to settle down the next place where the sheep were grazing peacefully. He did so in Mayo, and changed his name to Munnelly. We also had a family ancestor who was hung. That's why my mother says I can't stand tight things around my neck.