Best Of

For me its the wrong question.

Labour have two choices:
Stick with the manifesto pledges, fiddle round the edges, the economy stagnates, they get blattered at the election
Man up, things are bad, tax rise for growth, economy performs, people feel better, nobody cares about the manifesto

They'll probably manage to splice the front half of the second one and the back half of the first one...

You beg the question of whether tax rises will lead to economic growth. Why not cut taxes for growth? The Chancellor can't just tack “for growth” on the end of whatever the Treasury brainstormed and guarantee it will happen.

Sure! Its an option, but I'm not sure its one they can do.

Cut taxes to entrepreneurs like me to go generate economic growth. OK, infrastructure is bad and getting worse, my potential customers feel broke and aren't spending and now feel even worse as you've cut expenditure on vital stuff again.

Government could borrow to pay for the tax cuts for growth. No, hang on that was the Truss Delusion.

Whilst I agree that taxes are too high, they can't cut them now. But what they could do is unveil a completely revised tax code - change the game completely by rolling welfare into a universal payment and scrapping all the tax loopholes by abolishing the taxes they avoid.

You can't drive growth by taxing less. But you could drive growth by taxing differently...

You certainly could drive growth by taxing less.

Here's an example:

I'm currently running a business with a full order book out to 2028. I want to do more work, employ more people, maybe even make a larger profit and pay more tax.

My biggest constraint at the moment is premises. I basically need a steel framed shed with a decent sized overhead crane in it. I'm renting one that's 5k sq ft, I to grow really need 10-15k sq ft. I nearly bought a 21k sq ft site, the bit that kiboshed the deal was that it came with a £32k pa business rates bill, and covering that, and the stamp duty was just too much dead money to overcome straight after moving.

There are several things you could do which would enable me to grow. You could abolish planning permission, and let me build a suitable building on farmland (I'm in a rural area, and quite geographically constrained if I don't want to lose my existing staff). The site I was trying to buy was £850k, I could buy some land and build everything I want for about £250k.

Alternatively, imagine a scheme where when a business moves into a more expensive rateable premises, the difference in business rates is phased in over 5 years - that would have given me time to get over the "hump" of moving, and let me start expanding and taking on staff to get turnover up before I was hit for the rates.

Incidentally, the site I wanted to buy has been sold to a haulage firm. They are going to knock down the buildings to get out of the rates, and use the hardstanding to park lorries. So the council will lose the rates anyway, and there will be one less small industrial site out there for a manufacturing or engineering business.

Taxes, especially badly designed ones, destroy growth. The only route to meaningful growth is reducing taxes and/or regulation. Until we have a government which understands this, we will remain stuck in this doom loop of ever higher taxes and lower growth.

For me its the wrong question.

Labour have two choices:
Stick with the manifesto pledges, fiddle round the edges, the economy stagnates, they get blattered at the election
Man up, things are bad, tax rise for growth, economy performs, people feel better, nobody cares about the manifesto

They'll probably manage to splice the front half of the second one and the back half of the first one...

Patently tax increases are necessary. The various mini-me-Musks waving chainsaws around have nothing.

If the country just does not function because of degradation of basic facilities and maintenance of services - an example being the bush I saw growing out of a pedestrian refuge on one of the major roads in my town yesterday * - then investment in people, process and organisation is necessary.

We also have the bizarre idea that to improve in the private sector you spend money and invest in higher quality people, whilst in the public sector you just wave your chainsaw, cut everything, and make the quality of people lower to improve services. That perverse logic will not hold.

* Take any section of road and compare 2022 with 2009 on Streetview for what has changed since the local Councils were gutted.

This may be true but is not self evident. Public spending (TME or total managed expenditure) stands at 44-45% of GDP. About the same as Spain, lower than France, a bit lower than the EU average. A huge amount of money.

Running stuff competently (not letting prisoners out, police responding properly to crimes, eliminating benefit and tax fraud, teaching small boys to read even if they don't want to, smashing the gangs and stopping the boats, making sure poor kids don't miss school, getting medical stuff done right first time, answering the phone when Leon calls the HMRC) is cheaper than running it badly. Once that is all sorted, then people will be much more open to paying for improving what is already a very excellent service.

Empirically, raising the tax/expenditure ratio by 1% of GDP reduces GDP by 0.75%-1% in the medium/long term. Roughly, an increase of 1% of GDP in the state sector reduces the private sector by a little under 2% of GDP, or about 3-4 percentage points in size in total. See the excellent and comprehensive 2011 ECB panel data study on this issue. (That's an average, and it depends a great deal how you do it. Raising taxes on business profits or payroll reduces GDP far more than raising VAT. And guess which this moronic government did last year?)

Meta studies show a consensus of eight or nine to one that higher tax/spending ratios are associated with lower economic growth - a truly extraordinary ratio for a controversial issue in a social science.

This country desperately needs lower taxes and spending, not higher. Basic behavioural economics, not to mention common sense, teaches that the private sector, though not perfect, allocates resources much more efficiently than the public sector on average, for two simple reasons: private sector companies are constrained by a fear of bankruptcy in the way that the public sector, which can always extort more money, isn't, and the public sector is impeded from quick and effective decision making by political accountability constraints. Reducing taxes and serious deregulation are the two things the government could do to spur economic growth the most.

No, private sector companies are not “constrained by a fear of bankruptcy” for two reasons. They are paper entities who don’t have emotions and cannot go bankrupt. Yes, admittedly, there are analogous insolvency procedures for companies, but not bankruptcy, and self evidently, a fiction like a Ltd or an LLP can’t “fear” them.

Basic behavioural economics my arse. Companies exist to protect investors from the fear of bankruptcy by the use of limited liability. So those who could actually feel fear, the shareholders and directors, are shielded from the ultimate impact inefficient allocation of resources has beyond their investment.

Hence the GFC in 2008, when the people allocating resources, in the form of loans to homebuyers who could not possibly pay them back, knew they were shielded from the catastrophic ultimate consequences of their actions by, ironically enough, a the governmental fiction of the incorporated entity. And Grenfell, where the decision makers knew that the companies they ran, not them, would carry the can for allocating dangerous resources to clad blocks of flats.

Markets have their uses but let’s not pretend that we live in a world where directors who fuck up can’t just go and start a new company once they’ve lost the old one. Fear has very little to do with it.

Businesses themselves may not have feelings, but those who run them definitely do. Fear of bankruptcy constraints quite a lot of of my business spending, because I'm a rational actor who doesn't want my equity (most of my worldly wealth) wiped out.

Those that hold the equity often don’t run the business. Directors so often capture upside personally but contain downside within the corporate shell. The “deterrent” effect is diluted when the worst case is "I lost other people's money and have to get another job."

This doesn't mean markets are useles but posited model of "fear of bankruptcy disciplines efficient allocation" is carrying far too much weight in a world of limited liability. The actual discipline often comes too late after the harm, applies to shareholders who had no operational control rather than reckless executives (and then only to the value of their shareholding) or doesn't come at all (e.g bailouts).

The honest position is that limited liability enables capital formation but also enables decision-makers to take risks they don't personally bear.

For me its the wrong question.

Labour have two choices:
Stick with the manifesto pledges, fiddle round the edges, the economy stagnates, they get blattered at the election
Man up, things are bad, tax rise for growth, economy performs, people feel better, nobody cares about the manifesto

They'll probably manage to splice the front half of the second one and the back half of the first one...

You beg the question of whether tax rises will lead to economic growth. Why not cut taxes for growth? The Chancellor can't just tack “for growth” on the end of whatever the Treasury brainstormed and guarantee it will happen.

Sure! Its an option, but I'm not sure its one they can do.

Cut taxes to entrepreneurs like me to go generate economic growth. OK, infrastructure is bad and getting worse, my potential customers feel broke and aren't spending and now feel even worse as you've cut expenditure on vital stuff again.

Government could borrow to pay for the tax cuts for growth. No, hang on that was the Truss Delusion.

Whilst I agree that taxes are too high, they can't cut them now. But what they could do is unveil a completely revised tax code - change the game completely by rolling welfare into a universal payment and scrapping all the tax loopholes by abolishing the taxes they avoid.

You can't drive growth by taxing less. But you could drive growth by taxing differently...

You certainly could drive growth by taxing less.

Here's an example:

I'm currently running a business with a full order book out to 2028. I want to do more work, employ more people, maybe even make a larger profit and pay more tax.

My biggest constraint at the moment is premises. I basically need a steel framed shed with a decent sized overhead crane in it. I'm renting one that's 5k sq ft, I to grow really need 10-15k sq ft. I nearly bought a 21k sq ft site, the bit that kiboshed the deal was that it came with a £32k pa business rates bill, and covering that, and the stamp duty was just too much dead money to overcome straight after moving.

There are several things you could do which would enable me to grow. You could abolish planning permission, and let me build a suitable building on farmland (I'm in a rural area, and quite geographically constrained if I don't want to lose my existing staff). The site I was trying to buy was £850k, I could buy some land and build everything I want for about £250k.

Alternatively, imagine a scheme where when a business moves into a more expensive rateable premises, the difference in business rates is phased in over 5 years - that would have given me time to get over the "hump" of moving, and let me start expanding and taking on staff to get turnover up before I was hit for the rates.

Incidentally, the site I wanted to buy has been sold to a haulage firm. They are going to knock down the buildings to get out of the rates, and use the hardstanding to park lorries. So the council will lose the rates anyway, and there will be one less small industrial site out there for a manufacturing or engineering business.

Taxes, especially badly designed ones, destroy growth. The only route to meaningful growth is reducing taxes and/or regulation. Until we have a government which understands this, we will remain stuck in this doom loop of ever higher taxes and lower growth.

The idea that a high tax burden destroys growth just doesn't reconcile with the experience of the rest of Europe, where we see both economic growth and significantly higher standards of living in countries with higher tax burdens.

You might be right that the correct route for the UK is lower taxes, lower regulations. But it does come across as dogmatic when you assert in this way. You can make a strong argument that the 40% burden in Germany and the Netherlands, 45% in France has delivered more for their populations than the 33% in the UK.

Firstly, it is the opposite of dogma when a member takes time to relate his actual experience.

Secondly, Europe's growth has been stagnant vs. the USA over the last 20 years. Few countries have done quite as badly as the UK, with its toxic mix of high tax and regulation with an oddly laissez faire attitude to the family silver being sold off, but the overall trend is clearly shown in the relative growth figures. That absolutely reconciles with the theory that a high tax, high regulation environment kills growth, and it's absurd denialism to say otherwise.

Compared with the United States in the past 20 years or so, we have had Osborne's failed austerity but more subtle is the Covid response where Britain subsidised companies while America subsidised workers. It also of course has had a shedload of government investment which our faux free marketeers decry as ‘picking winners’.

We did not have 'failed austerity', we had an extremely modest attempt to rein in spending which led to a couple of years when Government spending didn't rise - it certainly didn't fall by much, and it soon continued its upward trajectory. There was no serious attempt to reduce the size of the state.

@TOPPING (fpt)

"Let me help. Most of them - units dealing with elderly patients - are fucking useless. Because actually, they don't really care whether the elderly patient survives or not. Not really. Of course there are individuals who are great in the NHS but institutionally perhaps because there is precious little accountability (and then only when something "obvious" has gone wrong), it doesn't matter if your 85-yr old aunt lives or dies. Or is neglected. Or isn't fed properly. Or whose bed isn't changed regularly. Or who is or isn't given the correct medication.

I challenge everyone on PB to ask 10 friends about treatment an elderly relative has received at the hands of the NHS and a significant proportion of them will have shocking stories. But of course the ones that have received great care (and of course plenty do) will write letters, call phone-in programmes and bang saucepans to say how marvellous the NHS is."

And into this system the government proposes to introduce an AD law which will create an obvious, glaring and gigantic conflict of interest and multiple opportunities (pressures even) for its staff to "suggest" or "coerce" (because who will find out - all effective external scrutiny having been removed) such people into suicide to save money for the NHS. For those who think I am exaggerating listen to the answers Stephen Kinnock, the Palliative Care Minister, has been giving to the House of Lords Committee this week. As well as lying about what the Equality Impact Assessment said, his answers are utterly chilling in their lack of humanity for precisely the people @TOPPING is describing and, indeed, people like me with a terminal illness.

Don’t worry.

Some men will be along shortly, to mansplain that the actual things that have happened in Canada and the Netherlands can’t happen.

I could try anger. But I just smiled at the doctors who were dehydrating my father. And politely asked them to put him on a drip for the eleventh time.

"units dealing with elderly patients - are fucking useless. Because actually, they don't really care whether the elderly patient survives or not. Not really. Of course there are individuals who are great in the NHS but institutionally perhaps because there is precious little accountability (and then only when something "obvious" has gone wrong), it doesn't matter if your 85-yr old aunt lives or dies. Or is neglected. Or isn't fed properly. Or whose bed isn't changed regularly. Or who is or isn't given the correct medication."

And the end of the day though why is this up to the institution? Individual nurses deal with individual patients. If they can't be fucking arsed to hydrate them as seems to be often the case these days then they are morally responsible as human beings imho.

Not a new thing. Back a bit there was a scandal when hospital patients were found to be drinking the water from the flower vases. They made sure that wouldn't happen again by forbidding flowers in wards.

Very much the same story with the majority of the wards my father found himself on in the last decade or so of his life.
There were exceptions, but the rule was either indifference or outright neglect.

When he was hospitalised with bacteraemia for a couple of months, he simply would not have survived had we not visited him daily to ensure adequate nutrition and treatment.

Some others on the ward didn't.

My Mum in her final weeks had mostly good hospital care, but not always perfect. (My dad and first stepmother died at home, the second stepmother in a home, and all in the US.) My aunt, despite much ill health, continues on and receives excellent care as an outpatient.

My dad lived for quite a long time with dementia, and had various other health episodes, so I got a fair amount of experience.

Elderly patients who don't for whatever reason get visited by family tend also to get neglected by the staff.

That isn't always true, but regular visitors are good for patient morale as well as for keeping up care standards.

Bad care can get normalised very quickly. It is a feature of institutionalisation.

This review article looks at problems of neglect in different care systems in UK, North America, Continental Europe and Scandanavia and South Africa.

https://bmchealthservres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1472-6963-13-156

Oh, it wasn't always true in my father's case either, but more often than not, it was.
It was the basic failure to ensure adequate nutrition and hydration that I found most disturbing.

That's an interesting report, though a bit detached in tone. I only skimmed it, but nowhere, for instance, did I see leadership and effective management discussed.

I have to admit that it's hard to argue with @Cyclefree . While I am fairly strongly in favour of the principle of assisted dying, the practical concerns she raises echo some if my own.

I am one of the many doctors sceptical to say the least about Assisted Dying. I accept that there are some staff that may abuse it, but I think pressure from avaricious relatives cannot be ignored either.

The problem of neglect and poor nursing and medical care is much wider though, and not unique to the NHS. It is probably much more prevalent in private social care, and is an issue in other healthcare systems too. Neither is it a new phenomenon. Florence Nightingale made her name by exposing poor care at Scutari hospital 170 years ago.

Often there is poor leadership at ward level, and in the same hospital there are often wards that are vastly different in the quality of care, sometimes even adjacent to each other.

That's certainly true from my experience, too.
Though the difference is that is a larger Siemens choice in social care; it's more possible to 'shop around' - though again that requires family committed to doing so.

I think people get habituated to their environment very quickly. Whether nuses, doctors, prison officers, police, lawyers, social workers, bankers or the armed forces people rapidly adapt to their conditions. That power of adaption is one of our strengths as a species and why we can live in some very hostile environments, but it has its dark side too. It is how people become heartless, cynical, callous and normalise bad behaviour.

We become products of our environment and it takes a fairly strong character to stand against the tide. I think the best defence is wide friendship groups outside that environment in order to recalibrate. In an atomised online world that gets harder each year.

The guy has lost it.

He's in a world of his own; owning the libs is irrelevant when you're in charge and failing.

Trump responds to a question about rising prices and affordability: “The reason why I don't want to talk about affordability is because everybody knows that it's far less expensive under Trump…Karoline, could you discuss that question that was asked and how it was asked in such a fake, disgusting manner by the fake news?”
https://x.com/BulwarkOnline/status/1986864594371895648

His mental decline should be the lead story, but nobody will report it

Trump has replaced Biden's portrait in the Whitehouse with a photograph of an auto-pen. With what should the next Democratic President (it might be a while) replace Trump's portrait?

Keep Trump's portrait.

As a warning from history.