'Graeme' couldn't put it better. Is 44k enough tho?

An additional point.

Withdrawing Child Benefit could damage women's entitlement to a basic state pension.

If you care for children at home, and get child benefit, your National Insurance contributions are maintained - which protect your basic state pension.

If your partner is earning £46k does that mean a woman's state pension is no longer protected?

The govt needs to answer that, and it's yet another instance of the burden of bailing out the banks falling on women.

How it works: http://bit.ly/cFkh0I

Another election promise gone. Someone should keep a list.

When this news broke today, my first thought was, that this is a spectacular own-goal for the tories. I have long believed that they don't know what they are doing, but this is so stupid. This will affect many ordinary hardworking people, who pay into the system. To lose £2000 per year is massive. This money is for the mother to spend on her children. It is another way of hitting women and children hardest. They have already frozen it for 2years, taking money from the poorest people. This lot are common thieves and are intent on dismantling the state because they see no need for it. They think they can just skip off into the sunset, hand in hand with the bankers and joe public will just lie down and accept it. Ed miliband needs to cease this opportunity and speak up for the people of this country before it's too late!

Its about making serious decisions to solve very serious problems, many of them bequeathed by the last government.
Red Ed can look for dividing lines all he likes, but what would he cut instead?

Spending reviews are not required of opposition parties. The tories never mention the global economic recession, I wonder why? I know, it's because they can't blame Labour for that, so just don't mention it and the stupid British public will never know. The tories are making the public pay for the bankers greed, but let's not upset the bankers eh!

12 allusions to it all being Labour's fault in the first five minutes of his speech. Take away those blaming Labour bits and he'd have nothing to say.

When Clegg was deemed a 'King Maker' I can think of another type of 'Maker'. It's still 4 letter word ends in t and begins with c... Yes, so pleased to have a Tory Gov back! Here we go, what's next to go... hopefully Cameron and Clegg. What STUPID STUPID assesement of who should get what... Well done everyone who voted Tory and Lib Dem. *claps hands*

It's only Day 1 of the Tory Conference & they're already inflicting shock and awe tactics.

If someone is paying 40%+ income tax, how dumb is it to give them a welfare handout?

Anyone who does not believe that wefare dependency and its cost to the taxpayer should be reduced is not going to applaud Osborne for this change, but I do. He is wise to announce a welfare cut at the top before the rest of the package is revealed, and if he can start to chip at tax rates before this parliament ends he is playing a good political hand. Labour wants everyone to feel they benefit from welfare, let Osborne end that fantasy and Mr Ed will have a very tough cause to argue at the next election.

As usual it is the working families (who probably only have one or two children) who get stuffed while those families that produce child after child with no income get the benefits. Why do I bother working and putting my child in daycare just so I can pay for some non-worker to see her children all day while I only get to see mine a couple of hours every night?

Fact is if a Labour government had made these changes to child benefit, then NS would be asking for a new bank hoilday to celebrate!
As to those families who do lose, then tough, all this high income talk is all lost on those of us living north of St Albans, our real world is not one of £100 hairdos and bottles of Chateau Yquem. We grow veg in our garden not flowers, oh yes, and vote tory.

Another ludicrous idea by Osborne and co. What on earth is the point in assessing this on the sole earnings of one person earning over the upper tax threshold rather than the aggregate of both? Child Benefit is directly linked to quite a few other entitlements such as Child/Working Tax Credits as well as used to determine who is parent with care in issues involving child maintenance and the cut off point between child dependancy and non-dependancy, not to mention the determination of when a child/young person becomes a student in their own right. The knock on effects have not been considered by the fool.

The self employed high bracket earners will simply shift declared earnings between one and the other to take advantage of the system.

I will wait and see how the hard pressed HMRC gets on with this one; given that they can't cope with what they have already got.

It's ill- conceived and completely lacks logic, more osbo rubbish! he is an utter incompetent.

The reason for universal benefits are, usually, that it is more expensive to means test them. In fact it's almost always more expensive to means test, when you consider all the civil servants, office blocks, managment, and pension programes that means testing entails.

So I suppose that the stupid 44k earner thing is just a way round having to means test properly. It's easier to identify all the people in the country earning 44k a year and rule their children out, than it is to calculate the total income of every family in the country, which would require first working out what a family is: unemployed mum living with wage earing grandparents a family?, divorced but both contributing to children a family?, co-habiting un-wed adults a family?, civil-partners fostering a child a family? Once you've worked out who is part of the family you add all the incomes together then remove all the deductions and losses to find the total 'family income', and then you check with the inland revenue and the census to make sure nobody's fibbing (and remember they don't have any centralised computer system so it all has to be done by hand) in short a bureaucratic nightmare.

Saying "anyone with 44K+ in the house and you're out", looks crude, but I can see why they did it. Probably it was the only way to make means testing cheaper than just handing out the benefit, frankly considering the small numbers that will lose their 2000 pounds a year, I still think it's going to be more expensive in the long run.

It's just osbo's pathetic attempt at looking as though he's hitting the high earners; this will be one of the most inneffective measures out. It will also potentially encourage more fraud as a single claimant (Child Benefit quite possibly being the only benefit received) will think twice about declaring if a partner moves in who is earning over the 44K threshold.

This group of claimants will see it wrong that the only thing they get out of the benefits system is being taken away. I hope they question who they vote for!

If osbo and his motley crew can't think this one through, how on earth can they be trusted to 'modernise' the whole of the benefits structure?

This government is so unfair it is the normal familes that work that will suffer they should take it away from the ones that cannot be bothered to work or the ones that are earning massive salarys. What else are they going to do in the next 5 years make the country worse than it already is.