We need massive investment to get the economy going again. Austerity doesn't work and the fact this is in the conversation again shows the Tories are out of ideas.
Great.
Where do you get the money from?
We found billions to bail the banks out last time and the Iraq War
You're talking about a one off of £70bn (which we mostly got back, I think the final losses stand at under £5bn or a profit of £3bn depending how you measure it) and maybe £12-15bn over the life of the war.
If you want to increase spending further from the current levels then you need to start outlining who pays for it, this is exactly where Jez for unstuck because no one believes that an additional £200bn per year can be funded from the "1%" or whatever he termed.
Bear in mind that the UK is already likely to pay £90-100bn in debt interest this year, loading up more debt is no longer an option.
We need massive investment to get the economy going again. Austerity doesn't work and the fact this is in the conversation again shows the Tories are out of ideas.
Great.
Where do you get the money from?
We found billions to bail the banks out last time and the Iraq War
Indeed, that's always Labour's solution - borrow the money and let future governments worry about how to repay it.
So global ex-EV battery capacity last year was approximately the same as the UK's energy usage in an hour?
300GWh, that’s around 3m EVs.
Global car sales in 2019 - 68m.
But that's the ex-EV element.
6 TWh then would presumably be around 60m EVs?
Dare I suggest that the headline “Forecast: Li-Ion Battery Market Might Exceed 6 TWh/Year By 2030”, starts with last year’s total car sales and works backwards?
Of course it does - as it relates to the plans of all the major manufacturers to largely phase out ICEs by then. Point is, it's not an unrealistic forecast.
How much approx would it cost to fill up a car’s petrol tank in 1951?
It’s late in the UK but perhaps some older insomniacs can remember…the online stuff I’ve read suggest it was hideously expensive and I’m having trouble believing it…
According to online data (yes, I know), it was apparently 4s 6d per gallon in 1950.
Comparing prices over time is complicated, because inflation-adjusted prices go down over time (in comparison to average earnings and GDP, which have been historically growing faster than inflation - essentially, a constant £10 "real" price was a bigger impact the further back you go.
Via measuringworth.com:
[RPI adjusted]: real price is £8.20/gallon [As a fraction of average wage]: labour value is £22.42/gallon [As a fraction of average income]: income value of that commodity is £30.73/gallon [As a fraction of GDP]: economic share of that commodity is £40.93/gallon
@Gardenwalker , it would be interesting to see any conclusions you reach.
I started driving in 1992, and I remember unleaded tipping above 50p a litre shortly thereafter. My gut feeling is that petrol prices then to now are roughly inflation, though much of that was in the last four months! cf the price of beer, which tipped to above £1 a pint more often than not about 1991 and has, I'd say, increased by a factor of roughly 3.5 - 4.5.
We need massive investment to get the economy going again. Austerity doesn't work and the fact this is in the conversation again shows the Tories are out of ideas.
Great.
Where do you get the money from?
We found billions to bail the banks out last time and the Iraq War
Indeed, that's always Labour's solution - borrow the money and let future governments worry about how to repay it.
We need massive investment to get the economy going again. Austerity doesn't work and the fact this is in the conversation again shows the Tories are out of ideas.
Great.
Where do you get the money from?
A far better question is what you could productively spend the money on.
Note that if government had, for example, borrowed to build tidal power schemes a decade back, they could be selling power well below the current market price of electricity and be turning a profit after financing costs.
Oh, true. But CHB is a lefty, so I automatically translated "investment" to "spending" a la Gordon Brown.
We simply need for the government to do less and for wealthy older people to pay a much larger share of their ongoing costs.
That's not an election winning platform.
Dave and George won on a fiscal responsibility platform in 2010 and 2015. No need to outline the specifics.
Even if gets a party through an election, they are still going to have to make the cuts.
And the magnitude of cuts you're after aren't going to come from waste, diversity officers and foreign aid. And public sector pay is getting to the point where you can't get anybody, let alone anybody good.
So what concrete things should the government stop doing? Because if the answer is "welfare for richer pensioners" or "expensive care that prolongs end-of-life", you may have a point, but good luck sneaking that past the electorate.
(And no, I don't have a better answer. Except maybe to get the band to play "Near my God to thee". Before firing the band as an unaffordable luxury.)
It will take a government with real cojones to do what it takes to axe the size of the state to avoid a high tax low growth future. Neither party seems up to it.
So what specific things is the government spending money on now, that it should stop spending money on?
Cuts: State pension for retirees with more than £50k in other income, I'd start tapering at £40k until it's all gone by £50k.
All in working tax credits.
All housing benefits paid to private landlords over a period of 5 years, social housing to be built to replace.
No social care subsidy for anyone who has the means to pay their own way.
Revenue raising: Increase the additional home stamp duty surcharge to 5% and then an additional 1% every two years until it reaches at least 3-4 years of lost yield (something like 15%) for BTL leeches.
Annual value surcharge on second properties of 0.5-1% per year to be hypothecated into building of new homes for below market rate rent and sale and upkeep of existing social housing.
Annual value surcharge of 20% on foreign owned property to be put into the same fund as above, include properties owned by foreign domiciled trusts or any tax avoidance vehicles.
Increase CGT on non-primary residential property sales to the same as income tax rates.
Pension income is now NIable.
Tax cuts:
Eliminate the NI rise.
Reverse the CT rises.
Special rate of zero tax on new green energy investments (including Gen 4 nuclear and fusion) and derived operating profit for 20 years.
I'd beg to disagree on the NI and state pension - leave the state pension for high income people. It's paid for through NI after all. Deleting it will ensure that Tories will do everything they can to stamp the state pension out as they get no benefit. Either than or abolich employee NI and convert it to proper income tax, while also eliminating the NI credits for the purposes of state pension.
State pension is not paid through NI. NI is just a tax like any other, there is no hypothecation of NI funds, despite what the government might like to say.
Merging NI and Income tax is fine too. It achieves the same end goal.
You know and I know that HMG are lying shites. We are entirely agreed on that.
However, the amount of SP one gets depends on how many 'qualifying' years of NI one has paid, with a minimum of 10 years.
Merge it and change it to income tax paid for "X" years for qualification and then the actual money amount is income based rather than some odd rule about how many years someone paid into a system that isn't actually spent on said system with some minimum amount for British citizens who didn't work (housewives, disabled etc...) and have no significant income in retirement.
There's simply no need for the state to be giving people like my dad £9k per year or whatever it is he gets, his income in retirement is well into the higher tax bracket without that. It's literally holiday money for him, he's just about to spend £15k on a family holiday for all of us (6 adults 2 kids) to go to Sicily together while my wife can still fly. He's not someone who needs to be given £9k by the state.
That's not far off the old SERPS but with entitlement through IT rather than NI payments, and means-testing for the result - effectinvely converting all state pension to a means related benefit. Which retains the admin complexities and costs, and attracts Tories to attack it. Worth mulling over, though.
We need massive investment to get the economy going again. Austerity doesn't work and the fact this is in the conversation again shows the Tories are out of ideas.
Great.
Where do you get the money from?
We found billions to bail the banks out last time and the Iraq War
Indeed, that's always Labour's solution - borrow the money and let future governments worry about how to repay it.
Borrowing = Fuck the young.
Yup, the generation before us borrowed all the money and now our generation is having to pay £90-100bn in debt servicing costs, that's money with which we could have lowered tax or spent on education, or CHBs favourite - eliminated the £9k student fees.
We need massive investment to get the economy going again. Austerity doesn't work and the fact this is in the conversation again shows the Tories are out of ideas.
Great.
Where do you get the money from?
We found billions to bail the banks out last time and the Iraq War
You're talking about a one off of £70bn (which we mostly got back, I think the final losses stand at under £5bn or a profit of £3bn depending how you measure it) and maybe £12-15bn over the life of the war.
If you want to increase spending further from the current levels then you need to start outlining who pays for it, this is exactly where Jez for unstuck because no one believes that an additional £200bn per year can be funded from the "1%" or whatever he termed.
Bear in mind that the UK is already likely to pay £90-100bn in debt interest this year, loading up more debt is no longer an option.
Any plan for ‘investment’ needs to start with cost savings in government - which means getting rid of a lot of pointless box-ticking, the pointless box-tickers, and the legislation that enables and requires the box-ticking.
Large parts of the civil service are totally unfit for purpose, and governments of all colours have failed to contain the expansion in recent decades.
We need massive investment to get the economy going again. Austerity doesn't work and the fact this is in the conversation again shows the Tories are out of ideas.
Great.
Where do you get the money from?
We found billions to bail the banks out last time and the Iraq War
Indeed, that's always Labour's solution - borrow the money and let future governments worry about how to repay it.
Borrowing = Fuck the young.
Yup, the generation before us borrowed all the money and now our generation is having to pay £90-100bn in debt servicing costs, that's money with which we could have lowered tax or spent on education, or CHBs favourite - eliminated the £9k student fees.
It still amazes me how many people fail to grasp that there's only one way a government can raise money, which is taxation. It's a cliche, but cliches become cliches for a reason - government borrowing is just deferred taxation.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says Western arms shipments to Ukraine mean Nato is "in essence engaged in war with Russia" and there is "considerable" risk of the conflict going nuclear
This is now a settled theme from Russia,.
Tbh I'm amazed they haven't said this from the outset, and it's part of the reason why I think we've being really disingenuous about the No Fly Zone. We have drawn our own line by saying that it's fine to supply tons of military equipment, intelligence and, even, special 'advisors' (SAS) to Ukraine but it's not fine to install a NFZ. 95% of people on here have gone along with this, often vociferously. They've told themselves that the one will help Ukraine but won't escalate it but the other would lead to WWIII and Armageddon.
But it's cant and hypocrisy basically, isn't it? If we're going to support Ukraine, bloody well support Ukraine. We should have backed Zelensky's request and stood up to Putin.
Just my opinion. Don't flame me.
Not going to flame you, but consider this: all but the most psychopathic criminals retain a demented sense of justice, a point quite neatly illustrated by monty python's piranha brothers who nail someone's head to the floor "because he had transgressed the unwritten code." Putin's unwritten code includes no nfz.
Or of course, he is bluffing and we only think it does. But don't fall into the narrative of Stand up to the bully, give Ivan a bloody nose and he will always cave in to true British grit. That is a school story and there's no nukes in schools.
It's amazing how many people think this is fucking Michael Bay film and that Russia will back down if, in some as yet to be defined manner, Ukraine wins.
There is going to have to be a deal sooner or later and the pressure should be on Ukraine and Russia to make it sooner.
What 'pressure to do a deal' can we put on a Russia that is doing, and saying, what it is?
And what makes you think they'll stick with the deal for a microsecond longer than it takes to get what they want?
Again, even nutters have a sense of justice. You adhere to the unwritten code, you don't get your head nailed to the coffee table. Russia's sabre rattling is consistently if...then, else..., not, we are going to nuke you just for shits n giggles and because we can
But OK you think a deal can't be done, so whats your alternative? Give Ivan a dam' good thrashing because then he'll back down, like bullies always do?
The government and people of Russia believe, with 100% confidence, that they will come out of the other end of a nuclear exchange in far better shape than NATO. This is a recurrent theme on Russian TV.
It's a vast and sparsely populated country with shit infrastructure and people who are used to roughing it anyway.
Oh I'm sure that Putin, his cronies and oligarchs with their luxurious palaces and yachts are completely used to roughing it (!)
I don't think they want to spend the rest of their lives living underground.
Russia may be sparsely populated but much of the population is concentrated in a small number of areas. Nearly 10% of the population lives in Moscow, and another 14% lives in the next fourteen cities. It would not take many warheads to destroy those population centres.
I think this is a case where standing up to a bully is actually a lot safer than giving way to him.
If we would do it. Would we? Does Vlad think we would? Do his people?
Moscow was abandoned and burned to the ground in 1812, Leningrad had a 900 day siege, Stalingrad happened at Stalingrad. Having its cities pulverised to fuck and coming back from it, is just part of the myth.
We need massive investment to get the economy going again. Austerity doesn't work and the fact this is in the conversation again shows the Tories are out of ideas.
Great.
Where do you get the money from?
We found billions to bail the banks out last time and the Iraq War
Indeed, that's always Labour's solution - borrow the money and let future governments worry about how to repay it.
Borrowing = Fuck the young.
Yup, the generation before us borrowed all the money and now our generation is having to pay £90-100bn in debt servicing costs, that's money with which we could have lowered tax or spent on education, or CHBs favourite - eliminated the £9k student fees.
Blair's government was by far the worst government ever for the young.
He introduced Tuition Fees as a graduate tax to be paid by future graduates that he himself or his generation of voters wouldn't ever have to pay but the young would.
Its under his government that the house price surge took off as house building failed to keep up with population growth deliberately in order to bribe voters.
His government introduced bribe after bribe for the elderly.
His government borrowed a fortune and created a systemic deficit even during a boom time to be paid by future voters instead of his voters.
Never in history has a government been more rotten to the core pampering its own voters while screwing over the young. The Tories to their shame have copied much but not all of this.
We simply need for the government to do less and for wealthy older people to pay a much larger share of their ongoing costs.
That's not an election winning platform.
Dave and George won on a fiscal responsibility platform in 2010 and 2015. No need to outline the specifics.
Even if gets a party through an election, they are still going to have to make the cuts.
And the magnitude of cuts you're after aren't going to come from waste, diversity officers and foreign aid. And public sector pay is getting to the point where you can't get anybody, let alone anybody good.
So what concrete things should the government stop doing? Because if the answer is "welfare for richer pensioners" or "expensive care that prolongs end-of-life", you may have a point, but good luck sneaking that past the electorate.
(And no, I don't have a better answer. Except maybe to get the band to play "Near my God to thee". Before firing the band as an unaffordable luxury.)
It will take a government with real cojones to do what it takes to axe the size of the state to avoid a high tax low growth future. Neither party seems up to it.
Where do you cut? Schools are underfunded, local government services are close to collapse, infrastructure is degrading, defence will have to rise because of Russia, and working age and child welfare spending is at poverty levels already. Increased state spending is being driven by an ageing population (health, pensions and social care), while almost everything else is already down in real terms. In my view the only way to tackle spending is to raise the pension age and go after savings including housing wealth much more to pay for social care. You're not going to get that from the Tories, aka the Old Age Welfare Gravy Train party.
A few years ago there was (still is, I think but nothing's happened) a plan for a 'sort of' industrial development locally. There was a protest movement, with all sorts of displays etc. I remarked to one protestor that it would at least provide work. But it'll devalue your house she replied. I commented that that would be my heirs problem!
Mrs C and I also commented, while watching the local TV news, on how well-spoken the objectors to the Suffolk nuclear projects were. People with 'local' accents had different concerns!
That's what happens in the Lakes, and to an extent with fracking.
Locals want jobs and an economy, but middle-class rentagobs from elsewhere pile in on a national campaign driven by the likes of Greenpeace.
We simply need for the government to do less and for wealthy older people to pay a much larger share of their ongoing costs.
That's not an election winning platform.
Dave and George won on a fiscal responsibility platform in 2010 and 2015. No need to outline the specifics.
The Tories are abandoning their house building pledges, so fat luck.
House prices boom for the elderly, young people get taxed, student loans pegged to inflation and CoL.
We are fucked. Vote Labour.
Labour are just as bad.
The house price to earning ratio was trashed under Labour and Labour are the ones who introduced Student Loans and started heavily raising National Insurance instead of Income Tax so that young people who work are taxed while pensioners aren't.
So who else can we vote for? The Lib Dems maybe - except they want to pander to NIMBYs in a desperate attempt to be relevant to somebody. So they're no good either.
There's nobody decent to vote for. We are fucked.
This is far more a London / SE problem than a young / old, or a national, problem.
I'm sure people in London / SE love having their mouths stuffed with free money, at a cost to the taxpayer of £35bn a year or so most of which goes there, but it's time they realised the damage they are inflicting.
CGT relief on main homes has to go. It is the single biggest problem in our housing market.
From your own chart the cost multiple even in the North is far higher now than it was at the turn of the century.
Prices collapsing back to 2000 levels (in real terms) would be a great thing to happen....
Given current building standards and costs, is that even possible ?
In most of the north people of all sorts buy and sell homes all the time and it isn't a big issue.
House building is not the only market failure. If a free market worked lots of jobs would gravitate to where affordable houses are.
I suspect that the gravitational pull of London and SE is such that however many homes were built it would make little difference to price; just that more people would join the throng to be there. (Like the ice cream van queue in economics).
Meanwhile the north is just great thanks.
I know, I live in Yorkshire.
My question related to this exchange: "From your own chart the cost multiple even in the North is far higher now than it was at the turn of the century...." "...Prices collapsing back to 2000 levels (in real terms) would be a great thing to happen.."
Well indeed. 2000 levels was sub-3x multiple. Its now 4.5x multiple. 4.5x is worse than less than 3x.
The fact its worse in London doesn't make it better in the North now than it was in the past. Indeed the multiple in the North now is far, far higher than the multiple even in London was in the past.
Yes, also note that 'the North' is very big and covers a multitude of markets. In a few places house prices are almost something like affordable. In many others aspiring homeowners will face the same problems that those in the south east will.
We simply need for the government to do less and for wealthy older people to pay a much larger share of their ongoing costs.
That's not an election winning platform.
Dave and George won on a fiscal responsibility platform in 2010 and 2015. No need to outline the specifics.
The Tories are abandoning their house building pledges, so fat luck.
House prices boom for the elderly, young people get taxed, student loans pegged to inflation and CoL.
We are fucked. Vote Labour.
Labour are just as bad.
The house price to earning ratio was trashed under Labour and Labour are the ones who introduced Student Loans and started heavily raising National Insurance instead of Income Tax so that young people who work are taxed while pensioners aren't.
So who else can we vote for? The Lib Dems maybe - except they want to pander to NIMBYs in a desperate attempt to be relevant to somebody. So they're no good either.
There's nobody decent to vote for. We are fucked.
This is far more a London / SE problem than a young / old, or a national, problem.
I'm sure people in London / SE love having their mouths stuffed with free money, at a cost to the taxpayer of £35bn a year or so most of which goes there, but it's time they realised the damage they are inflicting.
CGT relief on main homes has to go. It is the single biggest problem in our housing market.
From your own chart the cost multiple even in the North is far higher now than it was at the turn of the century.
Prices collapsing back to 2000 levels (in real terms) would be a great thing to happen....
Given current building standards and costs, is that even possible ?
In most of the north people of all sorts buy and sell homes all the time and it isn't a big issue.
House building is not the only market failure. If a free market worked lots of jobs would gravitate to where affordable houses are.
I suspect that the gravitational pull of London and SE is such that however many homes were built it would make little difference to price; just that more people would join the throng to be there. (Like the ice cream van queue in economics).
Meanwhile the north is just great thanks.
I know, I live in Yorkshire.
My question related to this exchange: "From your own chart the cost multiple even in the North is far higher now than it was at the turn of the century...." "...Prices collapsing back to 2000 levels (in real terms) would be a great thing to happen.."
Well indeed. 2000 levels was sub-3x multiple. Its now 4.5x multiple. 4.5x is worse than less than 3x.
The fact its worse in London doesn't make it better in the North now than it was in the past. Indeed the multiple in the North now is far, far higher than the multiple even in London was in the past.
Yes, also note that 'the North' is very big and covers a multitude of markets. In a few places house prices are almost something like affordable. In many others aspiring homeowners will face the same problems that those in the south east will.
All this is interesting, but how much have building costs alone increased in real terms over the last two decades ?
So it is going to be hard to perform cuts (both practically and politically), yet more borrowing is bad.
(dons flameproof coat)
So let's put up taxes.
I know it's unpopular, and politically difficult - especially on the right - but we are all going to have to pay more taxes. And to be honest, it won't just be a few demographics paying more - the rich, inheritors, whatever. It'll be all of us.
We need massive investment to get the economy going again. Austerity doesn't work and the fact this is in the conversation again shows the Tories are out of ideas.
Great.
Where do you get the money from?
We found billions to bail the banks out last time and the Iraq War
Indeed, that's always Labour's solution - borrow the money and let future governments worry about how to repay it.
I remember Gordon Brown budgets where he could announce extra spending funded from the reductions in debt interest payments achieved by paying off the debt. There were articles in the Press about how the shortage of national debt was causing issues for the pensions industry - there weren't enough gilts available.
We simply need for the government to do less and for wealthy older people to pay a much larger share of their ongoing costs.
That's not an election winning platform.
Dave and George won on a fiscal responsibility platform in 2010 and 2015. No need to outline the specifics.
The Tories are abandoning their house building pledges, so fat luck.
House prices boom for the elderly, young people get taxed, student loans pegged to inflation and CoL.
We are fucked. Vote Labour.
Labour are just as bad.
The house price to earning ratio was trashed under Labour and Labour are the ones who introduced Student Loans and started heavily raising National Insurance instead of Income Tax so that young people who work are taxed while pensioners aren't.
So who else can we vote for? The Lib Dems maybe - except they want to pander to NIMBYs in a desperate attempt to be relevant to somebody. So they're no good either.
There's nobody decent to vote for. We are fucked.
This is far more a London / SE problem than a young / old, or a national, problem.
I'm sure people in London / SE love having their mouths stuffed with free money, at a cost to the taxpayer of £35bn a year or so most of which goes there, but it's time they realised the damage they are inflicting.
CGT relief on main homes has to go. It is the single biggest problem in our housing market.
From your own chart the cost multiple even in the North is far higher now than it was at the turn of the century.
Prices collapsing back to 2000 levels (in real terms) would be a great thing to happen....
Given current building standards and costs, is that even possible ?
In most of the north people of all sorts buy and sell homes all the time and it isn't a big issue.
House building is not the only market failure. If a free market worked lots of jobs would gravitate to where affordable houses are.
I suspect that the gravitational pull of London and SE is such that however many homes were built it would make little difference to price; just that more people would join the throng to be there. (Like the ice cream van queue in economics).
Meanwhile the north is just great thanks.
I know, I live in Yorkshire.
My question related to this exchange: "From your own chart the cost multiple even in the North is far higher now than it was at the turn of the century...." "...Prices collapsing back to 2000 levels (in real terms) would be a great thing to happen.."
Well indeed. 2000 levels was sub-3x multiple. Its now 4.5x multiple. 4.5x is worse than less than 3x.
The fact its worse in London doesn't make it better in the North now than it was in the past. Indeed the multiple in the North now is far, far higher than the multiple even in London was in the past.
Yes, also note that 'the North' is very big and covers a multitude of markets. In a few places house prices are almost something like affordable. In many others aspiring homeowners will face the same problems that those in the south east will.
All this is interesting, but how much have building costs alone increased in real terms over the last two decades ?
Not that much is my understanding.
Land prices are far too much of a cost of housing and that is due to our rotten planning system. Land with consent is worth far, far more than land without consent which incentivises land banking.
If consent was readily and easily available then land with consent wouldn't be worth any more than land without it and the cost of developing new homes would collapse.
The South Korean group revenue increased by 28% year over year to $73.2 billion, while Intel’s revenue declined by 0.3% last year at $72.5 billion. This translates to less than a percentage point as Samsung Electronics took a 12.3% market share and Intel 12.2% in 2021.
Intel had regained the No. 1 market position in 2019, as the memory market slowdown had negatively impacted many of the major suppliers, including Samsung Electronics, the top vendor by revenue in 2018 and 2017.
The semiconductor supplier with the steepest drop in 2021 is HiSilicon. “HiSilicon’s revenue declined 81%, from $8.2 billion in 2020 to $1.5 billion in 2021,” said Andrew Norwood, research vice president at Gartner, in a statement. “This was a direct result of the U.S. sanctions against the company and its parent company Huawei.
HiSilicon’s exit from the Top 25 even affected China’s share of the (global) semiconductor market, from 6.7% share in 2020 to 6.5% in 2021....
We need massive investment to get the economy going again. Austerity doesn't work and the fact this is in the conversation again shows the Tories are out of ideas.
Great.
Where do you get the money from?
We found billions to bail the banks out last time and the Iraq War
Indeed, that's always Labour's solution - borrow the money and let future governments worry about how to repay it.
I remember Gordon Brown budgets where he could announce extra spending funded from the reductions in debt interest payments achieved by paying off the debt. There were articles in the Press about how the shortage of national debt was causing issues for the pensions industry - there weren't enough gilts available.
Yes, didn't Gord pay off more debt by selling 3G than had been done since the time of Napoleon or some such (my recollection is hazy)? What happened to all that?
I think this is a case where standing up to a bully is actually a lot safer than giving way to him.
What should the NATO response be if Russia lobs a tactical nuke into Kharkiv?
Lob ten back into Moscow.
Make it clear beforehand that would be our response too.
I don't think that's a correct response - at least at first. We are talking about a 'tactical', not 'strategic', nuke into a non-NATO country. A better reaction would be to make it clear that if Russia was to do that, they would be utter pariahs on the world stage. Make it hard for those few countries that still back Russia to do so, and turn those that are supposedly neutral - China, India etc - into being against them. None of those countries want WWIII.
If they use tactical nukes in this war, then they will be pariahs.
It'd be easier if we'd been stronger against the use of chemical weapons, but we are where we are.
So it is going to be hard to perform cuts (both practically and politically), yet more borrowing is bad.
(dons flameproof coat)
So let's put up taxes.
I know it's unpopular, and politically difficult - especially on the right - but we are all going to have to pay more taxes. And to be honest, it won't just be a few demographics paying more - the rich, inheritors, whatever. It'll be all of us.
No, lets not put up taxes, lets make all pay taxes equitably.
If an employer wants to increase the wage of a middling-income graduate by £1000 then the government will take most of that money in tax. Between income tax, employee NI, employer NI and fuck-the-young-only-graduate-tax the tax on that will be 50%
If a buy-to-let landlord on the same income wants to increase the rent that that graduate has to pay by £1000 then the government will only ask for 20% of that as income tax.
How is it right that landlords face a marginal 20% income tax rate, while workers on the exact same income face a marginal 50% tax rate?
Don't tax more, tax all the same. A flat marginal tax rate for everyone would be far fairer than what we have today.
We simply need for the government to do less and for wealthy older people to pay a much larger share of their ongoing costs.
That's not an election winning platform.
Dave and George won on a fiscal responsibility platform in 2010 and 2015. No need to outline the specifics.
The Tories are abandoning their house building pledges, so fat luck.
House prices boom for the elderly, young people get taxed, student loans pegged to inflation and CoL.
We are fucked. Vote Labour.
Labour are just as bad.
The house price to earning ratio was trashed under Labour and Labour are the ones who introduced Student Loans and started heavily raising National Insurance instead of Income Tax so that young people who work are taxed while pensioners aren't.
So who else can we vote for? The Lib Dems maybe - except they want to pander to NIMBYs in a desperate attempt to be relevant to somebody. So they're no good either.
There's nobody decent to vote for. We are fucked.
This is far more a London / SE problem than a young / old, or a national, problem.
I'm sure people in London / SE love having their mouths stuffed with free money, at a cost to the taxpayer of £35bn a year or so most of which goes there, but it's time they realised the damage they are inflicting.
CGT relief on main homes has to go. It is the single biggest problem in our housing market.
From your own chart the cost multiple even in the North is far higher now than it was at the turn of the century.
Prices collapsing back to 2000 levels (in real terms) would be a great thing to happen....
Given current building standards and costs, is that even possible ?
In most of the north people of all sorts buy and sell homes all the time and it isn't a big issue.
House building is not the only market failure. If a free market worked lots of jobs would gravitate to where affordable houses are.
I suspect that the gravitational pull of London and SE is such that however many homes were built it would make little difference to price; just that more people would join the throng to be there. (Like the ice cream van queue in economics).
Meanwhile the north is just great thanks.
I know, I live in Yorkshire.
My question related to this exchange: "From your own chart the cost multiple even in the North is far higher now than it was at the turn of the century...." "...Prices collapsing back to 2000 levels (in real terms) would be a great thing to happen.."
Well indeed. 2000 levels was sub-3x multiple. Its now 4.5x multiple. 4.5x is worse than less than 3x.
The fact its worse in London doesn't make it better in the North now than it was in the past. Indeed the multiple in the North now is far, far higher than the multiple even in London was in the past.
Yes, also note that 'the North' is very big and covers a multitude of markets. In a few places house prices are almost something like affordable. In many others aspiring homeowners will face the same problems that those in the south east will.
All this is interesting, but how much have building costs alone increased in real terms over the last two decades ?
Not that much is my understanding.
Land prices are far too much of a cost of housing and that is due to our rotten planning system. Land with consent is worth far, far more than land without consent which incentivises land banking.
If consent was readily and easily available then land with consent wouldn't be worth any more than land without it and the cost of developing new homes would collapse.
I think there has been a not insignficant increase in build costs from requirements for more and more energy efficient buildings. Arguably you get a higher value house as a result, particularly in the current climate. But it leads to a more expensive product.
And I wouldn't describe our planning system as 'rotten'. Just very, very slow-moving.
None of this is to disagree with the main thrust of your argument.
We simply need for the government to do less and for wealthy older people to pay a much larger share of their ongoing costs.
That's not an election winning platform.
Dave and George won on a fiscal responsibility platform in 2010 and 2015. No need to outline the specifics.
The Tories are abandoning their house building pledges, so fat luck.
House prices boom for the elderly, young people get taxed, student loans pegged to inflation and CoL.
We are fucked. Vote Labour.
Labour are just as bad.
The house price to earning ratio was trashed under Labour and Labour are the ones who introduced Student Loans and started heavily raising National Insurance instead of Income Tax so that young people who work are taxed while pensioners aren't.
So who else can we vote for? The Lib Dems maybe - except they want to pander to NIMBYs in a desperate attempt to be relevant to somebody. So they're no good either.
There's nobody decent to vote for. We are fucked.
This is far more a London / SE problem than a young / old, or a national, problem.
I'm sure people in London / SE love having their mouths stuffed with free money, at a cost to the taxpayer of £35bn a year or so most of which goes there, but it's time they realised the damage they are inflicting.
CGT relief on main homes has to go. It is the single biggest problem in our housing market.
From your own chart the cost multiple even in the North is far higher now than it was at the turn of the century.
Prices collapsing back to 2000 levels (in real terms) would be a great thing to happen....
Given current building standards and costs, is that even possible ?
In most of the north people of all sorts buy and sell homes all the time and it isn't a big issue.
House building is not the only market failure. If a free market worked lots of jobs would gravitate to where affordable houses are.
I suspect that the gravitational pull of London and SE is such that however many homes were built it would make little difference to price; just that more people would join the throng to be there. (Like the ice cream van queue in economics).
Meanwhile the north is just great thanks.
I know, I live in Yorkshire.
My question related to this exchange: "From your own chart the cost multiple even in the North is far higher now than it was at the turn of the century...." "...Prices collapsing back to 2000 levels (in real terms) would be a great thing to happen.."
Well indeed. 2000 levels was sub-3x multiple. Its now 4.5x multiple. 4.5x is worse than less than 3x.
The fact its worse in London doesn't make it better in the North now than it was in the past. Indeed the multiple in the North now is far, far higher than the multiple even in London was in the past.
Yes, also note that 'the North' is very big and covers a multitude of markets. In a few places house prices are almost something like affordable. In many others aspiring homeowners will face the same problems that those in the south east will.
All this is interesting, but how much have building costs alone increased in real terms over the last two decades ?
Not that much is my understanding....
Without an actual estimate, that's not a very useful answer.
How much approx would it cost to fill up a car’s petrol tank in 1951?
It’s late in the UK but perhaps some older insomniacs can remember…the online stuff I’ve read suggest it was hideously expensive and I’m having trouble believing it…
According to online data (yes, I know), it was apparently 4s 6d per gallon in 1950.
Comparing prices over time is complicated, because inflation-adjusted prices go down over time (in comparison to average earnings and GDP, which have been historically growing faster than inflation - essentially, a constant £10 "real" price was a bigger impact the further back you go.
Via measuringworth.com:
[RPI adjusted]: real price is £8.20/gallon [As a fraction of average wage]: labour value is £22.42/gallon [As a fraction of average income]: income value of that commodity is £30.73/gallon [As a fraction of GDP]: economic share of that commodity is £40.93/gallon
@Gardenwalker , it would be interesting to see any conclusions you reach.
I started driving in 1992, and I remember unleaded tipping above 50p a litre shortly thereafter. My gut feeling is that petrol prices then to now are roughly inflation, though much of that was in the last four months! cf the price of beer, which tipped to above £1 a pint more often than not about 1991 and has, I'd say, increased by a factor of roughly 3.5 - 4.5.
I remember serving petrol as a sixth former in 1978, the price of 4 star was 74p per gallon. My earnings were 85p per hour. There was a tanker drivers dispute on, but the tanker driver said to us he still had half of last weeks pay left and it was payday as well again.
I think this is a case where standing up to a bully is actually a lot safer than giving way to him.
What should the NATO response be if Russia lobs a tactical nuke into Kharkiv?
Lob ten back into Moscow.
Make it clear beforehand that would be our response too.
Right.
What do you think the response to that would be?
This is why I think it's now safer for the military of a nuclear power (US, France or UK) to join the war on Ukraine's side.
If the Welsh fusiliers are in Kharkiv then it's easier to convince Putin that any use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine will be met by a nuclear response. And then either deterrence works or it doesn't.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says Western arms shipments to Ukraine mean Nato is "in essence engaged in war with Russia" and there is "considerable" risk of the conflict going nuclear
This is now a settled theme from Russia,.
Tbh I'm amazed they haven't said this from the outset, and it's part of the reason why I think we've being really disingenuous about the No Fly Zone. We have drawn our own line by saying that it's fine to supply tons of military equipment, intelligence and, even, special 'advisors' (SAS) to Ukraine but it's not fine to install a NFZ. 95% of people on here have gone along with this, often vociferously. They've told themselves that the one will help Ukraine but won't escalate it but the other would lead to WWIII and Armageddon.
But it's cant and hypocrisy basically, isn't it? If we're going to support Ukraine, bloody well support Ukraine. We should have backed Zelensky's request and stood up to Putin.
Just my opinion. Don't flame me.
Not going to flame you, but consider this: all but the most psychopathic criminals retain a demented sense of justice, a point quite neatly illustrated by monty python's piranha brothers who nail someone's head to the floor "because he had transgressed the unwritten code." Putin's unwritten code includes no nfz.
Or of course, he is bluffing and we only think it does. But don't fall into the narrative of Stand up to the bully, give Ivan a bloody nose and he will always cave in to true British grit. That is a school story and there's no nukes in schools.
It's amazing how many people think this is fucking Michael Bay film and that Russia will back down if, in some as yet to be defined manner, Ukraine wins.
There is going to have to be a deal sooner or later and the pressure should be on Ukraine and Russia to make it sooner.
What 'pressure to do a deal' can we put on a Russia that is doing, and saying, what it is?
And what makes you think they'll stick with the deal for a microsecond longer than it takes to get what they want?
Again, even nutters have a sense of justice. You adhere to the unwritten code, you don't get your head nailed to the coffee table. Russia's sabre rattling is consistently if...then, else..., not, we are going to nuke you just for shits n giggles and because we can
But OK you think a deal can't be done, so whats your alternative? Give Ivan a dam' good thrashing because then he'll back down, like bullies always do?
The government and people of Russia believe, with 100% confidence, that they will come out of the other end of a nuclear exchange in far better shape than NATO. This is a recurrent theme on Russian TV.
It's a vast and sparsely populated country with shit infrastructure and people who are used to roughing it anyway.
Oh I'm sure that Putin, his cronies and oligarchs with their luxurious palaces and yachts are completely used to roughing it (!)
I don't think they want to spend the rest of their lives living underground.
Russia may be sparsely populated but much of the population is concentrated in a small number of areas. Nearly 10% of the population lives in Moscow, and another 14% lives in the next fourteen cities. It would not take many warheads to destroy those population centres.
I think this is a case where standing up to a bully is actually a lot safer than giving way to him.
If we would do it. Would we? Does Vlad think we would? Do his people?
Moscow was abandoned and burned to the ground in 1812, Leningrad had a 900 day siege, Stalingrad happened at Stalingrad. Having its cities pulverised to fuck and coming back from it, is just part of the myth.
Somehow, I don't think that either Russia's leaders or masses have a huge desire to commit national suicide.
So it is going to be hard to perform cuts (both practically and politically), yet more borrowing is bad.
(dons flameproof coat)
So let's put up taxes.
I know it's unpopular, and politically difficult - especially on the right - but we are all going to have to pay more taxes. And to be honest, it won't just be a few demographics paying more - the rich, inheritors, whatever. It'll be all of us.
Subsidising CGT so that it is zero on main dwellings costs about £35bn a year ... presumably more now prices having inflated by 15-20% over the last 2 years.
Add that in to Max's package, and leave out the bits that will make poorer people homeless.
How much approx would it cost to fill up a car’s petrol tank in 1951?
It’s late in the UK but perhaps some older insomniacs can remember…the online stuff I’ve read suggest it was hideously expensive and I’m having trouble believing it…
According to online data (yes, I know), it was apparently 4s 6d per gallon in 1950.
Comparing prices over time is complicated, because inflation-adjusted prices go down over time (in comparison to average earnings and GDP, which have been historically growing faster than inflation - essentially, a constant £10 "real" price was a bigger impact the further back you go.
Via measuringworth.com:
[RPI adjusted]: real price is £8.20/gallon [As a fraction of average wage]: labour value is £22.42/gallon [As a fraction of average income]: income value of that commodity is £30.73/gallon [As a fraction of GDP]: economic share of that commodity is £40.93/gallon
@Gardenwalker , it would be interesting to see any conclusions you reach.
I started driving in 1992, and I remember unleaded tipping above 50p a litre shortly thereafter. My gut feeling is that petrol prices then to now are roughly inflation, though much of that was in the last four months! cf the price of beer, which tipped to above £1 a pint more often than not about 1991 and has, I'd say, increased by a factor of roughly 3.5 - 4.5.
I remember serving petrol as a sixth former in 1978, the price of 4 star was 74p per gallon. My earnings were 85p per hour. There was a tanker drivers dispute on, but the tanker driver said to us he still had half of last weeks pay left and it was payday as well again.
So assuming Minimum wage was 85p and that 74p gallon now costs £7.20 (assuming £1.60 a litre)
Minimum wage is now £9.50 so wages have increased above petrol prices over the past 44 years by a tiny bit.
We need massive investment to get the economy going again. Austerity doesn't work and the fact this is in the conversation again shows the Tories are out of ideas.
Great.
Where do you get the money from?
We found billions to bail the banks out last time and the Iraq War
Indeed, that's always Labour's solution - borrow the money and let future governments worry about how to repay it.
Borrowing = Fuck the young.
Yup, the generation before us borrowed all the money and now our generation is having to pay £90-100bn in debt servicing costs, that's money with which we could have lowered tax or spent on education, or CHBs favourite - eliminated the £9k student fees.
It still amazes me how many people fail to grasp that there's only one way a government can raise money, which is taxation. It's a cliche, but cliches become cliches for a reason - government borrowing is just deferred taxation.
Only to an approximation.
As I noted above, some borrowing is possible for investment which both provides a positive return, and the private sector has been incapable of making (large scale tidal projects are an example).
It's also not impossible to borrow cheaply overseas and subsequently benefit from from high domestic inflation reducing your real terms repayments - though the window for that is likely closing.
The essential question is by how much any given additional borrowing is likely to increase economic growth.
We need massive investment to get the economy going again. Austerity doesn't work and the fact this is in the conversation again shows the Tories are out of ideas.
Great.
Where do you get the money from?
We found billions to bail the banks out last time and the Iraq War
Indeed, that's always Labour's solution - borrow the money and let future governments worry about how to repay it.
Borrowing = Fuck the young.
Yup, the generation before us borrowed all the money and now our generation is having to pay £90-100bn in debt servicing costs, that's money with which we could have lowered tax or spent on education, or CHBs favourite - eliminated the £9k student fees.
It still amazes me how many people fail to grasp that there's only one way a government can raise money, which is taxation. It's a cliche, but cliches become cliches for a reason - government borrowing is just deferred taxation.
And this is the problem with Labour. They have got no clue, they claim to be in favour of younger working people yet they're proposing the same huge expansion of the state and spending associated but pretending that younger working people won't have to pay for it.
It's laughable. The only reason they're getting a look in is because Boris is such a disaster and the Tories have adopted the same idiotic "big government can solve all ills" kind of thinking.
We simply need for the government to do less and for wealthy older people to pay a much larger share of their ongoing costs.
That's not an election winning platform.
Dave and George won on a fiscal responsibility platform in 2010 and 2015. No need to outline the specifics.
The Tories are abandoning their house building pledges, so fat luck.
House prices boom for the elderly, young people get taxed, student loans pegged to inflation and CoL.
We are fucked. Vote Labour.
Labour are just as bad.
The house price to earning ratio was trashed under Labour and Labour are the ones who introduced Student Loans and started heavily raising National Insurance instead of Income Tax so that young people who work are taxed while pensioners aren't.
So who else can we vote for? The Lib Dems maybe - except they want to pander to NIMBYs in a desperate attempt to be relevant to somebody. So they're no good either.
There's nobody decent to vote for. We are fucked.
This is far more a London / SE problem than a young / old, or a national, problem.
I'm sure people in London / SE love having their mouths stuffed with free money, at a cost to the taxpayer of £35bn a year or so most of which goes there, but it's time they realised the damage they are inflicting.
CGT relief on main homes has to go. It is the single biggest problem in our housing market.
From your own chart the cost multiple even in the North is far higher now than it was at the turn of the century.
Prices collapsing back to 2000 levels (in real terms) would be a great thing to happen....
Given current building standards and costs, is that even possible ?
In most of the north people of all sorts buy and sell homes all the time and it isn't a big issue.
House building is not the only market failure. If a free market worked lots of jobs would gravitate to where affordable houses are.
I suspect that the gravitational pull of London and SE is such that however many homes were built it would make little difference to price; just that more people would join the throng to be there. (Like the ice cream van queue in economics).
Meanwhile the north is just great thanks.
I know, I live in Yorkshire.
My question related to this exchange: "From your own chart the cost multiple even in the North is far higher now than it was at the turn of the century...." "...Prices collapsing back to 2000 levels (in real terms) would be a great thing to happen.."
Well indeed. 2000 levels was sub-3x multiple. Its now 4.5x multiple. 4.5x is worse than less than 3x.
The fact its worse in London doesn't make it better in the North now than it was in the past. Indeed the multiple in the North now is far, far higher than the multiple even in London was in the past.
Yes, also note that 'the North' is very big and covers a multitude of markets. In a few places house prices are almost something like affordable. In many others aspiring homeowners will face the same problems that those in the south east will.
All this is interesting, but how much have building costs alone increased in real terms over the last two decades ?
Not that much is my understanding.
Land prices are far too much of a cost of housing and that is due to our rotten planning system. Land with consent is worth far, far more than land without consent which incentivises land banking.
If consent was readily and easily available then land with consent wouldn't be worth any more than land without it and the cost of developing new homes would collapse.
I think there has been a not insignficant increase in build costs from requirements for more and more energy efficient buildings. Arguably you get a higher value house as a result, particularly in the current climate. But it leads to a more expensive product.
And I wouldn't describe our planning system as 'rotten'. Just very, very slow-moving.
None of this is to disagree with the main thrust of your argument.
I think there is a problem that the artificial scarcity value of land swallows up an absurd amount of the value of a house these days. Scratch that and a lot of wealth gets freed up for decent buildings and neighbourhood infrastructure.
And capital to invest in other things that might actually create value for the future.
Didn't some anonymous European finance minster say "we know what needs to be done- just not how to get re-elected after doing it" after the 2018 crash? That.
I think this is a case where standing up to a bully is actually a lot safer than giving way to him.
What should the NATO response be if Russia lobs a tactical nuke into Kharkiv?
Lob ten back into Moscow.
Make it clear beforehand that would be our response too.
Right.
What do you think the response to that would be?
This is why I think it's now safer for the military of a nuclear power (US, France or UK) to join the war on Ukraine's side.
If the Welsh fusiliers are in Kharkiv then it's easier to convince Putin that any use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine will be met by a nuclear response. And then either deterrence works or it doesn't.
That certainly argues for an immediate large scale conventional response to a use of a tactical nuclear weapon.
I think this is a case where standing up to a bully is actually a lot safer than giving way to him.
What should the NATO response be if Russia lobs a tactical nuke into Kharkiv?
Lob ten back into Moscow.
Make it clear beforehand that would be our response too.
Right.
What do you think the response to that would be?
They would decline to lob a tactical nuke into Kharkiv.
You do love to get locked in to a comforting future narrative and exclude the alternatives. Covid will get milder and milder and there will never be a vaccine escape. Putin will be deterred by deterrents. Indications from Putin and Kharkov and informed commentary on the state of the Russian nation from all the sources that I have seen like https://reaction.life/wartime-putins-russia-has-become-a-madhouse-threatening-the-world and from our own @Dura_Ace and @Cicero are that that is not obviously the case. You don't do shades of grey.
We need massive investment to get the economy going again. Austerity doesn't work and the fact this is in the conversation again shows the Tories are out of ideas.
Great.
Where do you get the money from?
We found billions to bail the banks out last time and the Iraq War
Indeed, that's always Labour's solution - borrow the money and let future governments worry about how to repay it.
Borrowing = Fuck the young.
Yup, the generation before us borrowed all the money and now our generation is having to pay £90-100bn in debt servicing costs, that's money with which we could have lowered tax or spent on education, or CHBs favourite - eliminated the £9k student fees.
It still amazes me how many people fail to grasp that there's only one way a government can raise money, which is taxation. It's a cliche, but cliches become cliches for a reason - government borrowing is just deferred taxation.
And this is the problem with Labour. They have got no clue, they claim to be in favour of younger working people yet they're proposing the same huge expansion of the state and spending associated but pretending that younger working people won't have to pay for it.
It's laughable. The only reason they're getting a look in is because Boris is such a disaster and the Tories have adopted the same idiotic "big government can solve all ills" kind of thinking.
The other problem is there's an increasing generation of voters who have forgotten what voting Labour actually means as an outcome.
Its hilarious to CHB moan about the government feathering the old, fucking the young, and bemoaning house prices while he simultaneously says that Tony Blair was a good Prime Minister and Vote Labour. This government is bad on this, but Blair and Brown were even worse.
I don't think CHB is doing so in bad faith though, I think he just doesn't remember or realise just how terribly Blair treated our generation.
We simply need for the government to do less and for wealthy older people to pay a much larger share of their ongoing costs.
That's not an election winning platform.
Dave and George won on a fiscal responsibility platform in 2010 and 2015. No need to outline the specifics.
The Tories are abandoning their house building pledges, so fat luck.
House prices boom for the elderly, young people get taxed, student loans pegged to inflation and CoL.
We are fucked. Vote Labour.
Labour are just as bad.
The house price to earning ratio was trashed under Labour and Labour are the ones who introduced Student Loans and started heavily raising National Insurance instead of Income Tax so that young people who work are taxed while pensioners aren't.
So who else can we vote for? The Lib Dems maybe - except they want to pander to NIMBYs in a desperate attempt to be relevant to somebody. So they're no good either.
There's nobody decent to vote for. We are fucked.
This is far more a London / SE problem than a young / old, or a national, problem.
I'm sure people in London / SE love having their mouths stuffed with free money, at a cost to the taxpayer of £35bn a year or so most of which goes there, but it's time they realised the damage they are inflicting.
CGT relief on main homes has to go. It is the single biggest problem in our housing market.
From your own chart the cost multiple even in the North is far higher now than it was at the turn of the century.
Prices collapsing back to 2000 levels (in real terms) would be a great thing to happen....
Given current building standards and costs, is that even possible ?
In most of the north people of all sorts buy and sell homes all the time and it isn't a big issue.
House building is not the only market failure. If a free market worked lots of jobs would gravitate to where affordable houses are.
I suspect that the gravitational pull of London and SE is such that however many homes were built it would make little difference to price; just that more people would join the throng to be there. (Like the ice cream van queue in economics).
Meanwhile the north is just great thanks.
I know, I live in Yorkshire.
My question related to this exchange: "From your own chart the cost multiple even in the North is far higher now than it was at the turn of the century...." "...Prices collapsing back to 2000 levels (in real terms) would be a great thing to happen.."
Well indeed. 2000 levels was sub-3x multiple. Its now 4.5x multiple. 4.5x is worse than less than 3x.
The fact its worse in London doesn't make it better in the North now than it was in the past. Indeed the multiple in the North now is far, far higher than the multiple even in London was in the past.
Yes, also note that 'the North' is very big and covers a multitude of markets. In a few places house prices are almost something like affordable. In many others aspiring homeowners will face the same problems that those in the south east will.
All this is interesting, but how much have building costs alone increased in real terms over the last two decades ?
Not that much is my understanding.
Land prices are far too much of a cost of housing and that is due to our rotten planning system. Land with consent is worth far, far more than land without consent which incentivises land banking.
If consent was readily and easily available then land with consent wouldn't be worth any more than land without it and the cost of developing new homes would collapse.
I think there has been a not insignficant increase in build costs from requirements for more and more energy efficient buildings. Arguably you get a higher value house as a result, particularly in the current climate. But it leads to a more expensive product.
And I wouldn't describe our planning system as 'rotten'. Just very, very slow-moving.
None of this is to disagree with the main thrust of your argument.
I think there is a problem that the artificial scarcity value of land swallows up an absurd amount of the value of a house these days. Scratch that and a lot of wealth gets freed up for decent buildings and neighbourhood infrastructure.
And capital to invest in other things that might actually create value for the future.
Didn't some anonymous European finance minster say "we know what needs to be done- just not how to get re-elected after doing it" after the 2018 crash? That.
Removing or reducing that artificial scarcity is probably the easiest large scale economic intervention a government could make. If they were prepared to live with the consequences.
I think this is a case where standing up to a bully is actually a lot safer than giving way to him.
What should the NATO response be if Russia lobs a tactical nuke into Kharkiv?
Lob ten back into Moscow.
Make it clear beforehand that would be our response too.
Right.
What do you think the response to that would be?
They would decline to lob a tactical nuke into Kharkiv.
You do love to get locked in to a comforting future narrative and exclude the alternatives. Covid will get milder and milder and there will never be a vaccine escape. Putin will be deterred by deterrents. Indications from Putin and Kharkov and informed commentary on the state of the Russian nation from all the sources that I have seen like https://reaction.life/wartime-putins-russia-has-become-a-madhouse-threatening-the-world and from our own @Dura_Ace and @Cicero are that that is not obviously the case. You don't do shades of grey.
No. I never said any of that.
If there is vaccine escape or a more serious strain of Covid then that happens and we need to live with it.
If Putin isn't deterred by deterrents then that happens and we need to live with it.
But we still should do the right thing and roll the dice. I'm OK with taking risk, you may want to take risk-aversion upto 100 and not risk leaving your house due to Covid or standing up to Putin but I am willing to take informed risks.
So it is going to be hard to perform cuts (both practically and politically), yet more borrowing is bad.
(dons flameproof coat)
So let's put up taxes.
I know it's unpopular, and politically difficult - especially on the right - but we are all going to have to pay more taxes. And to be honest, it won't just be a few demographics paying more - the rich, inheritors, whatever. It'll be all of us.
No, lets not put up taxes, lets make all pay taxes equitably.
If an employer wants to increase the wage of a middling-income graduate by £1000 then the government will take most of that money in tax. Between income tax, employee NI, employer NI and fuck-the-young-only-graduate-tax the tax on that will be 50%
If a buy-to-let landlord on the same income wants to increase the rent that that graduate has to pay by £1000 then the government will only ask for 20% of that as income tax.
How is it right that landlords face a marginal 20% income tax rate, while workers on the exact same income face a marginal 50% tax rate?
Don't tax more, tax all the same. A flat marginal tax rate for everyone would be far fairer than what we have today.
Two points:
1) 'Fairer' is very much subjective. One of the biggest fundamental arguments between left and right is exactly how to define the word. Everyone paying the same percentage of income could be seen as 'fair'. Everyone having the same amount left after taxation could be seen as 'fair'. Both of those are extremes, so we squirrel around in the middle.
2) The country needs more money. That can be done via a combination of increased taxation, reduced spending, and increased borrowing. I cannot see a way out of this mess without a significant whack of the former.
We need massive investment to get the economy going again. Austerity doesn't work and the fact this is in the conversation again shows the Tories are out of ideas.
Great.
Where do you get the money from?
We found billions to bail the banks out last time and the Iraq War
Indeed, that's always Labour's solution - borrow the money and let future governments worry about how to repay it.
Borrowing = Fuck the young.
Yup, the generation before us borrowed all the money and now our generation is having to pay £90-100bn in debt servicing costs, that's money with which we could have lowered tax or spent on education, or CHBs favourite - eliminated the £9k student fees.
It still amazes me how many people fail to grasp that there's only one way a government can raise money, which is taxation. It's a cliche, but cliches become cliches for a reason - government borrowing is just deferred taxation.
Only to an approximation.
As I noted above, some borrowing is possible for investment which both provides a positive return, and the private sector has been incapable of making (large scale tidal projects are an example).
It's also not impossible to borrow cheaply overseas and subsequently benefit from from high domestic inflation reducing your real terms repayments - though the window for that is likely closing.
The essential question is by how much any given additional borrowing is likely to increase economic growth.
But that's never happened in the history of this nation. At one point Labour were calling a rise in nurses salaries as "investment" in healthcare services. Or proposing that one off asset sales could fund ongoing increases in spending.
I don't have the answers, but I also know that borrowing more isn't an option for this country. The options are increase tax or cut spending. The borrowing more money option gas run out of road. We're very quietly approaching the point of no return like Italy where the debt servicing cost of our existing stock of gilts requires more money to be borrowed to pay it off. In industry that's the beginning of the end.
We still have a window of a decade to bring spending under control, allow tax receipts to catch up but more spending is the exact opposite of how we will achieve a reduction in our debt servicing costs to manageable levels.
We simply need for the government to do less and for wealthy older people to pay a much larger share of their ongoing costs.
That's not an election winning platform.
Dave and George won on a fiscal responsibility platform in 2010 and 2015. No need to outline the specifics.
The Tories are abandoning their house building pledges, so fat luck.
House prices boom for the elderly, young people get taxed, student loans pegged to inflation and CoL.
We are fucked. Vote Labour.
Labour are just as bad.
The house price to earning ratio was trashed under Labour and Labour are the ones who introduced Student Loans and started heavily raising National Insurance instead of Income Tax so that young people who work are taxed while pensioners aren't.
So who else can we vote for? The Lib Dems maybe - except they want to pander to NIMBYs in a desperate attempt to be relevant to somebody. So they're no good either.
There's nobody decent to vote for. We are fucked.
This is far more a London / SE problem than a young / old, or a national, problem.
CGT relief on main homes has to go. It is the single biggest problem in our housing market.
Good luck getting anyone to vote for that.
Fair point, and it may start with reform; that was how Nigel Lawson dealt with Mortgage Interest Tax Relief.
However it is much more on the agenda than it was.
If rich-by-unearned-house-price-gain people want places for their children to live, they need to smell some coffee.
It is noticeable that FTBs are becoming highly focused in certain areas of London.
We need massive investment to get the economy going again. Austerity doesn't work and the fact this is in the conversation again shows the Tories are out of ideas.
Great.
Where do you get the money from?
We found billions to bail the banks out last time and the Iraq War
Indeed, that's always Labour's solution - borrow the money and let future governments worry about how to repay it.
Borrowing = Fuck the young.
Yup, the generation before us borrowed all the money and now our generation is having to pay £90-100bn in debt servicing costs, that's money with which we could have lowered tax or spent on education, or CHBs favourite - eliminated the £9k student fees.
Blair's government was by far the worst government ever for the young.
He introduced Tuition Fees as a graduate tax to be paid by future graduates that he himself or his generation of voters wouldn't ever have to pay but the young would.
Its under his government that the house price surge took off as house building failed to keep up with population growth deliberately in order to bribe voters.
His government introduced bribe after bribe for the elderly.
His government borrowed a fortune and created a systemic deficit even during a boom time to be paid by future voters instead of his voters.
Never in history has a government been more rotten to the core pampering its own voters while screwing over the young. The Tories to their shame have copied much but not all of this.
Don't forget on top of all the on book debt, all that PFI commitments. All those new schools and hospitals weren't paid out of taxes at the time, they were mortgaged to the 20-30 year future tax payers i.e. the young.
If the Welsh fusiliers are in Kharkiv then it's easier to convince Putin that any use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine will be met by a nuclear response. And then either deterrence works or it doesn't.
That would be a notable development as Des Browne disbanded them in the dying days of the Blair Imperium.
We need massive investment to get the economy going again. Austerity doesn't work and the fact this is in the conversation again shows the Tories are out of ideas.
Bleak news about Lavrov's latest statement. The whole regime has gone mad. They seem determined to escalate this and drag us in. We will be at war by the end of summer I fear.
Most if it is just a regurgitation of what they've been saying for a while. From the start their line has been they have the right to prosecute what is a war of aggression, and that any aid to the victim is a provocation.
They are certainly not subtle in their attempts to claim the mantle of victimhood (whilst also saying how strong, virile and manly they are as a nation)
We need massive investment to get the economy going again. Austerity doesn't work and the fact this is in the conversation again shows the Tories are out of ideas.
How is the economy not already going? We have zero unemployment, if you want a job you can have one.
Agree with with both Bartholomew and Max. Labour's rise in the polls is due entirely to mistakes made by the government and nothing that Labour has done to make themselves more attractive. On the rare occasions that they've made calls on any subject such as the pandemic they have been wrong. It is hard to think of a worse opposition in modern history. Hague's 1997-2001 perhaps?
So it is going to be hard to perform cuts (both practically and politically), yet more borrowing is bad.
(dons flameproof coat)
So let's put up taxes.
I know it's unpopular, and politically difficult - especially on the right - but we are all going to have to pay more taxes. And to be honest, it won't just be a few demographics paying more - the rich, inheritors, whatever. It'll be all of us.
No, lets not put up taxes, lets make all pay taxes equitably.
If an employer wants to increase the wage of a middling-income graduate by £1000 then the government will take most of that money in tax. Between income tax, employee NI, employer NI and fuck-the-young-only-graduate-tax the tax on that will be 50%
If a buy-to-let landlord on the same income wants to increase the rent that that graduate has to pay by £1000 then the government will only ask for 20% of that as income tax.
How is it right that landlords face a marginal 20% income tax rate, while workers on the exact same income face a marginal 50% tax rate?
Don't tax more, tax all the same. A flat marginal tax rate for everyone would be far fairer than what we have today.
Two points:
1) 'Fairer' is very much subjective. One of the biggest fundamental arguments between left and right is exactly how to define the word. Everyone paying the same percentage of income could be seen as 'fair'. Everyone having the same amount left after taxation could be seen as 'fair'. Both of those are extremes, so we squirrel around in the middle.
2) The country needs more money. That can be done via a combination of increased taxation, reduced spending, and increased borrowing. I cannot see a way out of this mess without a significant whack of the former.
Capital rather than income, should bear the brunt of any extra taxes.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says Western arms shipments to Ukraine mean Nato is "in essence engaged in war with Russia" and there is "considerable" risk of the conflict going nuclear
This is now a settled theme from Russia,.
Tbh I'm amazed they haven't said this from the outset, and it's part of the reason why I think we've being really disingenuous about the No Fly Zone. We have drawn our own line by saying that it's fine to supply tons of military equipment, intelligence and, even, special 'advisors' (SAS) to Ukraine but it's not fine to install a NFZ. 95% of people on here have gone along with this, often vociferously. They've told themselves that the one will help Ukraine but won't escalate it but the other would lead to WWIII and Armageddon.
But it's cant and hypocrisy basically, isn't it? If we're going to support Ukraine, bloody well support Ukraine. We should have backed Zelensky's request and stood up to Putin.
Just my opinion. Don't flame me.
Not going to flame you, but consider this: all but the most psychopathic criminals retain a demented sense of justice, a point quite neatly illustrated by monty python's piranha brothers who nail someone's head to the floor "because he had transgressed the unwritten code." Putin's unwritten code includes no nfz.
Or of course, he is bluffing and we only think it does. But don't fall into the narrative of Stand up to the bully, give Ivan a bloody nose and he will always cave in to true British grit. That is a school story and there's no nukes in schools.
It's amazing how many people think this is fucking Michael Bay film and that Russia will back down if, in some as yet to be defined manner, Ukraine wins.
There is going to have to be a deal sooner or later and the pressure should be on Ukraine and Russia to make it sooner.
What 'pressure to do a deal' can we put on a Russia that is doing, and saying, what it is?
And what makes you think they'll stick with the deal for a microsecond longer than it takes to get what they want?
Again, even nutters have a sense of justice. You adhere to the unwritten code, you don't get your head nailed to the coffee table. Russia's sabre rattling is consistently if...then, else..., not, we are going to nuke you just for shits n giggles and because we can
But OK you think a deal can't be done, so whats your alternative? Give Ivan a dam' good thrashing because then he'll back down, like bullies always do?
The government and people of Russia believe, with 100% confidence, that they will come out of the other end of a nuclear exchange in far better shape than NATO. This is a recurrent theme on Russian TV.
It's a vast and sparsely populated country with shit infrastructure and people who are used to roughing it anyway.
Oh I'm sure that Putin, his cronies and oligarchs with their luxurious palaces and yachts are completely used to roughing it (!)
I don't think they want to spend the rest of their lives living underground.
Russia may be sparsely populated but much of the population is concentrated in a small number of areas. Nearly 10% of the population lives in Moscow, and another 14% lives in the next fourteen cities. It would not take many warheads to destroy those population centres.
I think this is a case where standing up to a bully is actually a lot safer than giving way to him.
If we would do it. Would we? Does Vlad think we would? Do his people?
Moscow was abandoned and burned to the ground in 1812, Leningrad had a 900 day siege, Stalingrad happened at Stalingrad. Having its cities pulverised to fuck and coming back from it, is just part of the myth.
Somehow, I don't think that either Russia's leaders or masses have a huge desire to commit national suicide.
Well, fuck it, look at the actual evidence, why not? You might as well say that nobody has ever gone to war because, yes, I know what it says in the history books, but would people really commit themselves to years of large scale slaughter and misery for no clear gain, time after time? There is a whole heap of commentators out there, and any number of clips of state TV on twitter, saying quite explicitly that Russia thinks it can win an all out nuclear war. Now if the Russians are saying that and the Western commentators are saying believe them, I don't see what weight is to be attached to your "somehow" gut feeling on the subject.
If the Welsh fusiliers are in Kharkiv then it's easier to convince Putin that any use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine will be met by a nuclear response. And then either deterrence works or it doesn't.
That would be a notable development as Des Browne disbanded them in the dying days of the Blair Imperium.
We need massive investment to get the economy going again. Austerity doesn't work and the fact this is in the conversation again shows the Tories are out of ideas.
Great.
Where do you get the money from?
We found billions to bail the banks out last time and the Iraq War
Indeed, that's always Labour's solution - borrow the money and let future governments worry about how to repay it.
Borrowing = Fuck the young.
Yup, the generation before us borrowed all the money and now our generation is having to pay £90-100bn in debt servicing costs, that's money with which we could have lowered tax or spent on education, or CHBs favourite - eliminated the £9k student fees.
It still amazes me how many people fail to grasp that there's only one way a government can raise money, which is taxation. It's a cliche, but cliches become cliches for a reason - government borrowing is just deferred taxation.
Only to an approximation.
As I noted above, some borrowing is possible for investment which both provides a positive return, and the private sector has been incapable of making (large scale tidal projects are an example).
It's also not impossible to borrow cheaply overseas and subsequently benefit from from high domestic inflation reducing your real terms repayments - though the window for that is likely closing.
The essential question is by how much any given additional borrowing is likely to increase economic growth.
But that's never happened in the history of this nation. At one point Labour were calling a rise in nurses salaries as "investment" in healthcare services. Or proposing that one off asset sales could fund ongoing increases in spending.
I don't have the answers, but I also know that borrowing more isn't an option for this country. The options are increase tax or cut spending. The borrowing more money option gas run out of road. We're very quietly approaching the point of no return like Italy where the debt servicing cost of our existing stock of gilts requires more money to be borrowed to pay it off. In industry that's the beginning of the end.
We still have a window of a decade to bring spending under control, allow tax receipts to catch up but more spending is the exact opposite of how we will achieve a reduction in our debt servicing costs to manageable levels.
My fear is with the stupid opening of the floodgates by Sunak with introduction of NI++, the temptation will be well we can just add a bit more on there, windfall taxes sold as harmless, plus wealth tax, IHT, capital gains increases. Just loading more and more especially onto business / business owners.
Agree with with both Bartholomew and Max. Labour's rise in the polls is due entirely to mistakes made by the government and nothing that Labour has done to make themselves more attractive. On the rare occasions that they've made calls on any subject such as the pandemic they have been wrong. It is hard to think of a worse opposition in modern history. Hague's 1997-2001 perhaps?
Cant say I agree. Push factors are not enough to explain a rise for the opposition, not just a fall by government (it could have gone to LD for instance).
You need pull factors too. Simply not repelling people can be that.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says Western arms shipments to Ukraine mean Nato is "in essence engaged in war with Russia" and there is "considerable" risk of the conflict going nuclear
This is now a settled theme from Russia,.
Tbh I'm amazed they haven't said this from the outset, and it's part of the reason why I think we've being really disingenuous about the No Fly Zone. We have drawn our own line by saying that it's fine to supply tons of military equipment, intelligence and, even, special 'advisors' (SAS) to Ukraine but it's not fine to install a NFZ. 95% of people on here have gone along with this, often vociferously. They've told themselves that the one will help Ukraine but won't escalate it but the other would lead to WWIII and Armageddon.
But it's cant and hypocrisy basically, isn't it? If we're going to support Ukraine, bloody well support Ukraine. We should have backed Zelensky's request and stood up to Putin.
Just my opinion. Don't flame me.
Not going to flame you, but consider this: all but the most psychopathic criminals retain a demented sense of justice, a point quite neatly illustrated by monty python's piranha brothers who nail someone's head to the floor "because he had transgressed the unwritten code." Putin's unwritten code includes no nfz.
Or of course, he is bluffing and we only think it does. But don't fall into the narrative of Stand up to the bully, give Ivan a bloody nose and he will always cave in to true British grit. That is a school story and there's no nukes in schools.
It's amazing how many people think this is fucking Michael Bay film and that Russia will back down if, in some as yet to be defined manner, Ukraine wins.
There is going to have to be a deal sooner or later and the pressure should be on Ukraine and Russia to make it sooner.
What 'pressure to do a deal' can we put on a Russia that is doing, and saying, what it is?
And what makes you think they'll stick with the deal for a microsecond longer than it takes to get what they want?
Again, even nutters have a sense of justice. You adhere to the unwritten code, you don't get your head nailed to the coffee table. Russia's sabre rattling is consistently if...then, else..., not, we are going to nuke you just for shits n giggles and because we can
But OK you think a deal can't be done, so whats your alternative? Give Ivan a dam' good thrashing because then he'll back down, like bullies always do?
The government and people of Russia believe, with 100% confidence, that they will come out of the other end of a nuclear exchange in far better shape than NATO. This is a recurrent theme on Russian TV.
It's a vast and sparsely populated country with shit infrastructure and people who are used to roughing it anyway.
Oh I'm sure that Putin, his cronies and oligarchs with their luxurious palaces and yachts are completely used to roughing it (!)
I don't think they want to spend the rest of their lives living underground.
Russia may be sparsely populated but much of the population is concentrated in a small number of areas. Nearly 10% of the population lives in Moscow, and another 14% lives in the next fourteen cities. It would not take many warheads to destroy those population centres.
I think this is a case where standing up to a bully is actually a lot safer than giving way to him.
If we would do it. Would we? Does Vlad think we would? Do his people?
Moscow was abandoned and burned to the ground in 1812, Leningrad had a 900 day siege, Stalingrad happened at Stalingrad. Having its cities pulverised to fuck and coming back from it, is just part of the myth.
Somehow, I don't think that either Russia's leaders or masses have a huge desire to commit national suicide.
Well, fuck it, look at the actual evidence, why not? You might as well say that nobody has ever gone to war because, yes, I know what it says in the history books, but would people really commit themselves to years of large scale slaughter and misery for no clear gain, time after time? There is a whole heap of commentators out there, and any number of clips of state TV on twitter, saying quite explicitly that Russia thinks it can win an all out nuclear war. Now if the Russians are saying that and the Western commentators are saying believe them, I don't see what weight is to be attached to your "somehow" gut feeling on the subject.
If they're prepared to commit suicide, they're prepared to do so, and nothing you or I say will change that.
We should still be willing to stand up to them and deter them though. Its a risk, but its a risk we need to take.
I think this is a case where standing up to a bully is actually a lot safer than giving way to him.
What should the NATO response be if Russia lobs a tactical nuke into Kharkiv?
No matter what the response, if it’s more than nothing then the Russians are going to take it as a declaration of war.
So the only response is to immediately hit every O&G facility and military base West of Moscow, with large conventional weapons. Start with Sevastopol, which is the main reason Putin wanted Crimea in the first place.
If we are in the war then we are in the war, and we might as well send our own planes into Ukraine at that point too.
Make it clear that any further nuclear deployments will be met with a nuclear response.
Agree with with both Bartholomew and Max. Labour's rise in the polls is due entirely to mistakes made by the government and nothing that Labour has done to make themselves more attractive. On the rare occasions that they've made calls on any subject such as the pandemic they have been wrong. It is hard to think of a worse opposition in modern history. Hague's 1997-2001 perhaps?
Agree with with both Bartholomew and Max. Labour's rise in the polls is due entirely to mistakes made by the government and nothing that Labour has done to make themselves more attractive. On the rare occasions that they've made calls on any subject such as the pandemic they have been wrong. It is hard to think of a worse opposition in modern history. Hague's 1997-2001 perhaps?
Corbyn’s was worse. They could have voted for Mrs May’s Brexit deal, torn the Tories in half and be in government by now, happily sitting in the backstop still in the EU in all but name.
So it is going to be hard to perform cuts (both practically and politically), yet more borrowing is bad.
(dons flameproof coat)
So let's put up taxes.
I know it's unpopular, and politically difficult - especially on the right - but we are all going to have to pay more taxes. And to be honest, it won't just be a few demographics paying more - the rich, inheritors, whatever. It'll be all of us.
No, lets not put up taxes, lets make all pay taxes equitably.
If an employer wants to increase the wage of a middling-income graduate by £1000 then the government will take most of that money in tax. Between income tax, employee NI, employer NI and fuck-the-young-only-graduate-tax the tax on that will be 50%
If a buy-to-let landlord on the same income wants to increase the rent that that graduate has to pay by £1000 then the government will only ask for 20% of that as income tax.
How is it right that landlords face a marginal 20% income tax rate, while workers on the exact same income face a marginal 50% tax rate?
Don't tax more, tax all the same. A flat marginal tax rate for everyone would be far fairer than what we have today.
Two points:
1) 'Fairer' is very much subjective. One of the biggest fundamental arguments between left and right is exactly how to define the word. Everyone paying the same percentage of income could be seen as 'fair'. Everyone having the same amount left after taxation could be seen as 'fair'. Both of those are extremes, so we squirrel around in the middle.
2) The country needs more money. That can be done via a combination of increased taxation, reduced spending, and increased borrowing. I cannot see a way out of this mess without a significant whack of the former.
That's where I come down. Lobby groups don't help, since they are only one step more nuanced than claiming all taxation is theft. They could put out the same statement about anything, and probably do.
We need massive investment to get the economy going again. Austerity doesn't work and the fact this is in the conversation again shows the Tories are out of ideas.
Great.
Where do you get the money from?
We found billions to bail the banks out last time and the Iraq War
Indeed, that's always Labour's solution - borrow the money and let future governments worry about how to repay it.
Borrowing = Fuck the young.
Yup, the generation before us borrowed all the money and now our generation is having to pay £90-100bn in debt servicing costs, that's money with which we could have lowered tax or spent on education, or CHBs favourite - eliminated the £9k student fees.
It still amazes me how many people fail to grasp that there's only one way a government can raise money, which is taxation. It's a cliche, but cliches become cliches for a reason - government borrowing is just deferred taxation.
Only to an approximation.
As I noted above, some borrowing is possible for investment which both provides a positive return, and the private sector has been incapable of making (large scale tidal projects are an example).
It's also not impossible to borrow cheaply overseas and subsequently benefit from from high domestic inflation reducing your real terms repayments - though the window for that is likely closing.
The essential question is by how much any given additional borrowing is likely to increase economic growth.
But that's never happened in the history of this nation. At one point Labour were calling a rise in nurses salaries as "investment" in healthcare services. Or proposing that one off asset sales could fund ongoing increases in spending.
I don't have the answers, but I also know that borrowing more isn't an option for this country. The options are increase tax or cut spending. The borrowing more money option gas run out of road. We're very quietly approaching the point of no return like Italy where the debt servicing cost of our existing stock of gilts requires more money to be borrowed to pay it off. In industry that's the beginning of the end.
We still have a window of a decade to bring spending under control, allow tax receipts to catch up but more spending is the exact opposite of how we will achieve a reduction in our debt servicing costs to manageable levels.
My fear is with the stupid opening of the floodgates by Sunak with introduction of NI++, the temptation will be well we can just add a bit more on there, windfall taxes sold as harmless, plus wealth tax, IHT, capital gains increases. Just loading more and more especially onto business / business owners.
Absolutely. The stupid Sunak tax is the most harmful and counterproductive thing the Conservatives have ever done.
A penny on NHS tax (which is really 2p on Income Tax) is going to be a rallying cry in the future and since the elderly don't pay that tax and the young don't see an issue with taxes until its too late . . . we're fucked. Sunak fucked us.
China f##king the world again....they have lied about the quality of their vaccines and the levels of the most vulnerable who had been vaccinated. And because of that they have to enact these lockdown policies otherwise they will have bodies piling up in the streets again.
We need massive investment to get the economy going again. Austerity doesn't work and the fact this is in the conversation again shows the Tories are out of ideas.
Great.
Where do you get the money from?
We found billions to bail the banks out last time and the Iraq War
Indeed, that's always Labour's solution - borrow the money and let future governments worry about how to repay it.
Borrowing = Fuck the young.
Yup, the generation before us borrowed all the money and now our generation is having to pay £90-100bn in debt servicing costs, that's money with which we could have lowered tax or spent on education, or CHBs favourite - eliminated the £9k student fees.
It still amazes me how many people fail to grasp that there's only one way a government can raise money, which is taxation. It's a cliche, but cliches become cliches for a reason - government borrowing is just deferred taxation.
Only to an approximation.
As I noted above, some borrowing is possible for investment which both provides a positive return, and the private sector has been incapable of making (large scale tidal projects are an example).
It's also not impossible to borrow cheaply overseas and subsequently benefit from from high domestic inflation reducing your real terms repayments - though the window for that is likely closing.
The essential question is by how much any given additional borrowing is likely to increase economic growth.
But that's never happened in the history of this nation. At one point Labour were calling a rise in nurses salaries as "investment" in healthcare services. Or proposing that one off asset sales could fund ongoing increases in spending.
I don't have the answers, but I also know that borrowing more isn't an option for this country. The options are increase tax or cut spending. The borrowing more money option gas run out of road. We're very quietly approaching the point of no return like Italy where the debt servicing cost of our existing stock of gilts requires more money to be borrowed to pay it off. In industry that's the beginning of the end.
We still have a window of a decade to bring spending under control, allow tax receipts to catch up but more spending is the exact opposite of how we will achieve a reduction in our debt servicing costs to manageable levels.
My fear is with the stupid opening of the floodgates by Sunak with introduction of NI++, the temptation will be well we can just add a bit more on there, windfall taxes sold as harmless, plus wealth tax, IHT, capital gains increases. Just loading more and more especially onto business / business owners.
Absolutely. The stupid Sunak tax is the most harmful and counterproductive thing the Conservatives have ever done.
A penny on NHS tax (which is really 2p on Income Tax) is going to be a rallying cry in the future and since the elderly don't pay that tax and the young don't see an issue with taxes until its too late . . . we're fucked. Sunak fucked us.
If you don't support the rise in the tax then you hate nurses and want them all to die. Why would you want to kill all of the young beautiful nurses? Are you some kind of sick monster?
We need massive investment to get the economy going again. Austerity doesn't work and the fact this is in the conversation again shows the Tories are out of ideas.
Great.
Where do you get the money from?
We found billions to bail the banks out last time and the Iraq War
Indeed, that's always Labour's solution - borrow the money and let future governments worry about how to repay it.
Borrowing = Fuck the young.
Yup, the generation before us borrowed all the money and now our generation is having to pay £90-100bn in debt servicing costs, that's money with which we could have lowered tax or spent on education, or CHBs favourite - eliminated the £9k student fees.
It still amazes me how many people fail to grasp that there's only one way a government can raise money, which is taxation. It's a cliche, but cliches become cliches for a reason - government borrowing is just deferred taxation.
Only to an approximation.
As I noted above, some borrowing is possible for investment which both provides a positive return, and the private sector has been incapable of making (large scale tidal projects are an example).
It's also not impossible to borrow cheaply overseas and subsequently benefit from from high domestic inflation reducing your real terms repayments - though the window for that is likely closing.
The essential question is by how much any given additional borrowing is likely to increase economic growth.
But that's never happened in the history of this nation. At one point Labour were calling a rise in nurses salaries as "investment" in healthcare services. Or proposing that one off asset sales could fund ongoing increases in spending.
I don't have the answers, but I also know that borrowing more isn't an option for this country. The options are increase tax or cut spending. The borrowing more money option gas run out of road. We're very quietly approaching the point of no return like Italy where the debt servicing cost of our existing stock of gilts requires more money to be borrowed to pay it off. In industry that's the beginning of the end.
We still have a window of a decade to bring spending under control, allow tax receipts to catch up but more spending is the exact opposite of how we will achieve a reduction in our debt servicing costs to manageable levels.
My fear is with the stupid opening of the floodgates by Sunak with introduction of NI++, the temptation will be well we can just add a bit more on there, windfall taxes sold as harmless, plus wealth tax, IHT, capital gains increases. Just loading more and more especially onto business / business owners.
Absolutely. The stupid Sunak tax is the most harmful and counterproductive thing the Conservatives have ever done.
A penny on NHS tax (which is really 2p on Income Tax) is going to be a rallying cry in the future and since the elderly don't pay that tax and the young don't see an issue with taxes until its too late . . . we're fucked. Sunak fucked us.
The vast majority of the time, taxes only go one way. History is littered with we are just introducing this minimal tax to do x, it will only be a small amount or only on the rich....And today, most people paying top rate income tax aren't the "rich", they are middle class people with a reasonable career.
So it is going to be hard to perform cuts (both practically and politically), yet more borrowing is bad.
(dons flameproof coat)
So let's put up taxes.
I know it's unpopular, and politically difficult - especially on the right - but we are all going to have to pay more taxes. And to be honest, it won't just be a few demographics paying more - the rich, inheritors, whatever. It'll be all of us.
No, lets not put up taxes, lets make all pay taxes equitably.
If an employer wants to increase the wage of a middling-income graduate by £1000 then the government will take most of that money in tax. Between income tax, employee NI, employer NI and fuck-the-young-only-graduate-tax the tax on that will be 50%
If a buy-to-let landlord on the same income wants to increase the rent that that graduate has to pay by £1000 then the government will only ask for 20% of that as income tax.
How is it right that landlords face a marginal 20% income tax rate, while workers on the exact same income face a marginal 50% tax rate?
Don't tax more, tax all the same. A flat marginal tax rate for everyone would be far fairer than what we have today.
Two points:
1) 'Fairer' is very much subjective. One of the biggest fundamental arguments between left and right is exactly how to define the word. Everyone paying the same percentage of income could be seen as 'fair'. Everyone having the same amount left after taxation could be seen as 'fair'. Both of those are extremes, so we squirrel around in the middle.
2) The country needs more money. That can be done via a combination of increased taxation, reduced spending, and increased borrowing. I cannot see a way out of this mess without a significant whack of the former.
The fundamental issue is the demographic transition. That's why public finances are in such a squeeze.
It's a major challenge for capitalism as a whole. It goes beyond increasing tax as an answer.
So it is going to be hard to perform cuts (both practically and politically), yet more borrowing is bad.
(dons flameproof coat)
So let's put up taxes.
I know it's unpopular, and politically difficult - especially on the right - but we are all going to have to pay more taxes. And to be honest, it won't just be a few demographics paying more - the rich, inheritors, whatever. It'll be all of us.
So it is going to be hard to perform cuts (both practically and politically), yet more borrowing is bad.
(dons flameproof coat)
So let's put up taxes.
I know it's unpopular, and politically difficult - especially on the right - but we are all going to have to pay more taxes. And to be honest, it won't just be a few demographics paying more - the rich, inheritors, whatever. It'll be all of us.
No, lets not put up taxes, lets make all pay taxes equitably.
If an employer wants to increase the wage of a middling-income graduate by £1000 then the government will take most of that money in tax. Between income tax, employee NI, employer NI and fuck-the-young-only-graduate-tax the tax on that will be 50%
If a buy-to-let landlord on the same income wants to increase the rent that that graduate has to pay by £1000 then the government will only ask for 20% of that as income tax.
How is it right that landlords face a marginal 20% income tax rate, while workers on the exact same income face a marginal 50% tax rate?
Don't tax more, tax all the same. A flat marginal tax rate for everyone would be far fairer than what we have today.
Two points:
1) 'Fairer' is very much subjective. One of the biggest fundamental arguments between left and right is exactly how to define the word. Everyone paying the same percentage of income could be seen as 'fair'. Everyone having the same amount left after taxation could be seen as 'fair'. Both of those are extremes, so we squirrel around in the middle.
2) The country needs more money. That can be done via a combination of increased taxation, reduced spending, and increased borrowing. I cannot see a way out of this mess without a significant whack of the former.
Capital rather than income, should bear the brunt of any extra taxes.
Quite possibly. The important thing IMO is to admit that extra taxation is unavoidable. We are all going to hurt; there will be little room for government largesse to the less well off, whilst the better-off will be paying a lot more as a group (individual situations will vary).
I'm fully expecting our personal taxation to increase significantly over the next few years. I would rather it was not the case, but I see little alternative.
I'm more likely to vote for politicians who admit this, than those who pretend there's a magic way out of the mess.
We need massive investment to get the economy going again. Austerity doesn't work and the fact this is in the conversation again shows the Tories are out of ideas.
Great.
Where do you get the money from?
We found billions to bail the banks out last time and the Iraq War
Indeed, that's always Labour's solution - borrow the money and let future governments worry about how to repay it.
Borrowing = Fuck the young.
Yup, the generation before us borrowed all the money and now our generation is having to pay £90-100bn in debt servicing costs, that's money with which we could have lowered tax or spent on education, or CHBs favourite - eliminated the £9k student fees.
It still amazes me how many people fail to grasp that there's only one way a government can raise money, which is taxation. It's a cliche, but cliches become cliches for a reason - government borrowing is just deferred taxation.
Only to an approximation.
As I noted above, some borrowing is possible for investment which both provides a positive return, and the private sector has been incapable of making (large scale tidal projects are an example).
It's also not impossible to borrow cheaply overseas and subsequently benefit from from high domestic inflation reducing your real terms repayments - though the window for that is likely closing.
The essential question is by how much any given additional borrowing is likely to increase economic growth.
But that's never happened in the history of this nation. At one point Labour were calling a rise in nurses salaries as "investment" in healthcare services. Or proposing that one off asset sales could fund ongoing increases in spending.
I don't have the answers, but I also know that borrowing more isn't an option for this country. The options are increase tax or cut spending. The borrowing more money option gas run out of road. We're very quietly approaching the point of no return like Italy where the debt servicing cost of our existing stock of gilts requires more money to be borrowed to pay it off. In industry that's the beginning of the end.
We still have a window of a decade to bring spending under control, allow tax receipts to catch up but more spending is the exact opposite of how we will achieve a reduction in our debt servicing costs to manageable levels.
My fear is with the stupid opening of the floodgates by Sunak with introduction of NI++, the temptation will be well we can just add a bit more on there, windfall taxes sold as harmless, plus wealth tax, IHT, capital gains increases. Just loading more and more especially onto business / business owners.
Absolutely. The stupid Sunak tax is the most harmful and counterproductive thing the Conservatives have ever done.
A penny on NHS tax (which is really 2p on Income Tax) is going to be a rallying cry in the future and since the elderly don't pay that tax and the young don't see an issue with taxes until its too late . . . we're fucked. Sunak fucked us.
The vast majority of the time, taxes only go one way. History is littered with we are just introducing this minimal tax to do x, it will only be a small amount or only on the rich....And today, most people paying top rate income tax aren't the "rich", they are middle class people with a reasonable career.
Income tax was supposed to be temporary, as was the 70mph speed limit.
Fiscal drag will undoubtedly lead to more 40% taxpayers before the next election too - although when I first hit that I saw it as a badge of honour (but did cut down on the overtime).
"Russia is closely following events in Moldova's pro-Russian breakaway region of Transnistria, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said today, adding that news from the region was a cause for serious concern."
Telegraph blog
"cause of concern" my arse as Jim Royale would say. Fecking delighted is the actual phrase they were looking for.
I actually think it's at times like this we need a strong BoE governor who can sit both party leaders down and lay down the law to both of them at the same time. Bailey is not that person, he's a Tory patsy.
So it is going to be hard to perform cuts (both practically and politically), yet more borrowing is bad.
(dons flameproof coat)
So let's put up taxes.
I know it's unpopular, and politically difficult - especially on the right - but we are all going to have to pay more taxes. And to be honest, it won't just be a few demographics paying more - the rich, inheritors, whatever. It'll be all of us.
No, lets not put up taxes, lets make all pay taxes equitably.
If an employer wants to increase the wage of a middling-income graduate by £1000 then the government will take most of that money in tax. Between income tax, employee NI, employer NI and fuck-the-young-only-graduate-tax the tax on that will be 50%
If a buy-to-let landlord on the same income wants to increase the rent that that graduate has to pay by £1000 then the government will only ask for 20% of that as income tax.
How is it right that landlords face a marginal 20% income tax rate, while workers on the exact same income face a marginal 50% tax rate?
Don't tax more, tax all the same. A flat marginal tax rate for everyone would be far fairer than what we have today.
Two points:
1) 'Fairer' is very much subjective. One of the biggest fundamental arguments between left and right is exactly how to define the word. Everyone paying the same percentage of income could be seen as 'fair'. Everyone having the same amount left after taxation could be seen as 'fair'. Both of those are extremes, so we squirrel around in the middle.
2) The country needs more money. That can be done via a combination of increased taxation, reduced spending, and increased borrowing. I cannot see a way out of this mess without a significant whack of the former.
Capital rather than income, should bear the brunt of any extra taxes.
Quite possibly. The important thing IMO is to admit that extra taxation is unavoidable. We are all going to hurt; there will be little room for government largesse to the less well off, whilst the better-off will be paying a lot more as a group (individual situations will vary).
I'm fully expecting our personal taxation to increase significantly over the next few years. I would rather it was not the case, but I see little alternative.
I'm more likely to vote for politicians who admit this, than those who pretend there's a magic way out of the mess.
It depends upon how you define extra taxation.
The problem is that taxation is falling on a smaller and smaller set of people. Instead of everyone paying income tax based upon their income, a subset of the voting public (and the politicians wanting their votes) have realised that they can cut the taxes of some voters while increasing the burden on others. By raising NI and cutting Income Tax, pensioners and rent-seekers get a tax cut while workers get screwed over.
You can quibble about definitions of fairness, but there is no definition that is fair. Taxes are too high on people who are paying their taxes and not high enough on the people who aren't.
A subset of the nation is going to struggle to pay for the entire nation and the more it happens, the more it will break under pressure.
Flatter, lower taxes paid by everyone, instead of only paid by some people, would mean that those who are currently paying taxes aren't as heavily taxed as they are now - but that the voters who think that other people can be made to pay their taxes for them are worse off.
China f##king the world again....they have lied about the quality of their vaccines and the levels of the most vulnerable who had been vaccinated. And because of that they have to enact these lockdown policies otherwise they will have bodies piling up in the streets again.
Can't we persuade them to rebrand AZ as 'MaoVax' and then ship them billions of doses?
I actually think it's at times like this we need a strong BoE governor who can sit both party leaders down and lay down the law to both of them at the same time. Bailey is not that person, he's a Tory patsy.
They tried that. Rees-Mogg slagged him off for being Canadian.
I was saying that on here a month or 2 ago. The current Chinese lockdowns are going to cause a serious recession in the second half of this year. We have not recovered from the last set of trade disruptions and supply shortages yet and this is going to be worse.
There is very little we can do about this in the short term but in the medium it will be a further boost to onshoring production, which will be a good thing.
China f##king the world again....they have lied about the quality of their vaccines and the levels of the most vulnerable who had been vaccinated. And because of that they have to enact these lockdown policies otherwise they will have bodies piling up in the streets again.
Can't we persuade them to rebrand AZ as 'MaoVax' and then ship them billions of doses?
Apparently they offered mRNA vaccines, including western ones in Hong Kong, and people overwhelmingly wouldn't take them, as they have been indoctrinated into fear of Western ones and demanded the Chinese one (or none at all).
So it is going to be hard to perform cuts (both practically and politically), yet more borrowing is bad.
(dons flameproof coat)
So let's put up taxes.
I know it's unpopular, and politically difficult - especially on the right - but we are all going to have to pay more taxes. And to be honest, it won't just be a few demographics paying more - the rich, inheritors, whatever. It'll be all of us.
No, lets not put up taxes, lets make all pay taxes equitably.
If an employer wants to increase the wage of a middling-income graduate by £1000 then the government will take most of that money in tax. Between income tax, employee NI, employer NI and fuck-the-young-only-graduate-tax the tax on that will be 50%
If a buy-to-let landlord on the same income wants to increase the rent that that graduate has to pay by £1000 then the government will only ask for 20% of that as income tax.
How is it right that landlords face a marginal 20% income tax rate, while workers on the exact same income face a marginal 50% tax rate?
Don't tax more, tax all the same. A flat marginal tax rate for everyone would be far fairer than what we have today.
Two points:
1) 'Fairer' is very much subjective. One of the biggest fundamental arguments between left and right is exactly how to define the word. Everyone paying the same percentage of income could be seen as 'fair'. Everyone having the same amount left after taxation could be seen as 'fair'. Both of those are extremes, so we squirrel around in the middle.
2) The country needs more money. That can be done via a combination of increased taxation, reduced spending, and increased borrowing. I cannot see a way out of this mess without a significant whack of the former.
The fundamental issue is the demographic transition. That's why public finances are in such a squeeze.
It's a major challenge for capitalism as a whole. It goes beyond increasing tax as an answer.
I think this is a case where standing up to a bully is actually a lot safer than giving way to him.
What should the NATO response be if Russia lobs a tactical nuke into Kharkiv?
Lob ten back into Moscow.
Make it clear beforehand that would be our response too.
Right.
What do you think the response to that would be?
They would decline to lob a tactical nuke into Kharkiv.
You do love to get locked in to a comforting future narrative and exclude the alternatives. Covid will get milder and milder and there will never be a vaccine escape. Putin will be deterred by deterrents. Indications from Putin and Kharkov and informed commentary on the state of the Russian nation from all the sources that I have seen like https://reaction.life/wartime-putins-russia-has-become-a-madhouse-threatening-the-world and from our own @Dura_Ace and @Cicero are that that is not obviously the case. You don't do shades of grey.
No. I never said any of that.
If there is vaccine escape or a more serious strain of Covid then that happens and we need to live with it.
If Putin isn't deterred by deterrents then that happens and we need to live with it.
But we still should do the right thing and roll the dice. I'm OK with taking risk, you may want to take risk-aversion upto 100 and not risk leaving your house due to Covid or standing up to Putin but I am willing to take informed risks.
A disappointment there, I hoped "not risk leaving your house" was going to turn into an extended nimbyism-and-inheritance number. I don't for one moment question your personal bravery, but I don't see that it really comes into this one way or the other. I myself am immensely old and spend my spare time doing things so dangerous that I have had a friend and two acquaintances killed doing the same things in the last 4 years, so I am not personally overly fussed at the thought of getting nuked, but I'd quite like it not to happen to my children, and everybody else.
I find it a bit bizarre how Elon is such a hate figure.
They really believe that anyone who doesn't agree with them is literally Hitler.
They spend too much time on twitter :-)
For all the wokey talk of a toxic work environment, it absolutely sounds like one, if a load of your employees are having a total meltdown over somebody who is a bit of weird dude but really isn't extreme politically. Its not like Putin is taking over. He is a bloke who has a fantastic track record of success.
I find it a bit bizarre how Elon is such a hate figure.
The funniest is all the people who have spent the last few years praising cancel culture, saying that Twitter is a private company who can do whatever they want without justification, now going completely mad that there’s new management in place that they don’t like.
Hope you are keeping well @MaxPB, have you moved yet?
Happily we're inching closer to not going 🥳
My wife won't say it yet but she doesn't want to go, I think the thought of living within the vicinity of her mum has finally been realised.
How has life been treating you?
We'd be very lucky to keep you in London my friend.
Very good thanks, had our first cricket match last night, even though I got out LBW second ball it was good fine. My first shot was a lovely pull for four.
I am now off the anti-depressants and feeling good.
We need massive investment to get the economy going again. Austerity doesn't work and the fact this is in the conversation again shows the Tories are out of ideas.
Hey @MrEd okay here thanks, glad to see you are still posting despite the continued abuse. I am appalled and sorry this keeps happening to you. Some people are nasty.
I think this is a case where standing up to a bully is actually a lot safer than giving way to him.
What should the NATO response be if Russia lobs a tactical nuke into Kharkiv?
Lob ten back into Moscow.
Make it clear beforehand that would be our response too.
Right.
What do you think the response to that would be?
They would decline to lob a tactical nuke into Kharkiv.
You do love to get locked in to a comforting future narrative and exclude the alternatives. Covid will get milder and milder and there will never be a vaccine escape. Putin will be deterred by deterrents. Indications from Putin and Kharkov and informed commentary on the state of the Russian nation from all the sources that I have seen like https://reaction.life/wartime-putins-russia-has-become-a-madhouse-threatening-the-world and from our own @Dura_Ace and @Cicero are that that is not obviously the case. You don't do shades of grey.
No. I never said any of that.
If there is vaccine escape or a more serious strain of Covid then that happens and we need to live with it.
If Putin isn't deterred by deterrents then that happens and we need to live with it.
But we still should do the right thing and roll the dice. I'm OK with taking risk, you may want to take risk-aversion upto 100 and not risk leaving your house due to Covid or standing up to Putin but I am willing to take informed risks.
A disappointment there, I hoped "not risk leaving your house" was going to turn into an extended nimbyism-and-inheritance number. I don't for one moment question your personal bravery, but I don't see that it really comes into this one way or the other. I myself am immensely old and spend my spare time doing things so dangerous that I have had a friend and two acquaintances killed doing the same things in the last 4 years, so I am not personally overly fussed at the thought of getting nuked, but I'd quite like it not to happen to my children, and everybody else.
I'd like to not be nuked either, but if Putin wants to press the button then that's not in my control is it?
What we can do is maximise the deterrence so that hopefully he doesn't. That means ensuring he knows that we will obliterate Russia if they fire any nukes.
Hopefully he won't, but backing down on that only increases the risk that nukes will be fired it doesn't lower it.
We simply need for the government to do less and for wealthy older people to pay a much larger share of their ongoing costs.
That's not an election winning platform.
Dave and George won on a fiscal responsibility platform in 2010 and 2015. No need to outline the specifics.
The Tories are abandoning their house building pledges, so fat luck.
House prices boom for the elderly, young people get taxed, student loans pegged to inflation and CoL.
We are fucked. Vote Labour.
Labour are just as bad.
The house price to earning ratio was trashed under Labour and Labour are the ones who introduced Student Loans and started heavily raising National Insurance instead of Income Tax so that young people who work are taxed while pensioners aren't.
So who else can we vote for? The Lib Dems maybe - except they want to pander to NIMBYs in a desperate attempt to be relevant to somebody. So they're no good either.
There's nobody decent to vote for. We are fucked.
This is far more a London / SE problem than a young / old, or a national, problem.
I'm sure people in London / SE love having their mouths stuffed with free money, at a cost to the taxpayer of £35bn a year or so most of which goes there, but it's time they realised the damage they are inflicting.
CGT relief on main homes has to go. It is the single biggest problem in our housing market.
From your own chart the cost multiple even in the North is far higher now than it was at the turn of the century.
Prices collapsing back to 2000 levels (in real terms) would be a great thing to happen....
Given current building standards and costs, is that even possible ?
In most of the north people of all sorts buy and sell homes all the time and it isn't a big issue.
House building is not the only market failure. If a free market worked lots of jobs would gravitate to where affordable houses are.
I suspect that the gravitational pull of London and SE is such that however many homes were built it would make little difference to price; just that more people would join the throng to be there. (Like the ice cream van queue in economics).
Meanwhile the north is just great thanks.
I know, I live in Yorkshire.
My question related to this exchange: "From your own chart the cost multiple even in the North is far higher now than it was at the turn of the century...." "...Prices collapsing back to 2000 levels (in real terms) would be a great thing to happen.."
Well indeed. 2000 levels was sub-3x multiple. Its now 4.5x multiple. 4.5x is worse than less than 3x.
The fact its worse in London doesn't make it better in the North now than it was in the past. Indeed the multiple in the North now is far, far higher than the multiple even in London was in the past.
Yes, also note that 'the North' is very big and covers a multitude of markets. In a few places house prices are almost something like affordable. In many others aspiring homeowners will face the same problems that those in the south east will.
All this is interesting, but how much have building costs alone increased in real terms over the last two decades ?
Not that much is my understanding.
Land prices are far too much of a cost of housing and that is due to our rotten planning system. Land with consent is worth far, far more than land without consent which incentivises land banking.
If consent was readily and easily available then land with consent wouldn't be worth any more than land without it and the cost of developing new homes would collapse.
I think there has been a not insignficant increase in build costs from requirements for more and more energy efficient buildings. Arguably you get a higher value house as a result, particularly in the current climate. But it leads to a more expensive product.
And I wouldn't describe our planning system as 'rotten'. Just very, very slow-moving.
None of this is to disagree with the main thrust of your argument.
In terms of fabric cost, that is just a very small percentage.
I find it a bit bizarre how Elon is such a hate figure.
The funniest is all the people who have spent the last few years praising cancel culture, saying that Twitter is a private company who can do whatever they want without justification, now going completely mad that there’s new management in place that they don’t like.
Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor is one....couple of years ago saying well its a private company they can do what they want, past 2 days, total meltdown of billionaires having unprecedented control to set terms of debate etc, calling Musk an oligarch, saying its not fair twitter is a platform monopoly....
Agree with with both Bartholomew and Max. Labour's rise in the polls is due entirely to mistakes made by the government and nothing that Labour has done to make themselves more attractive. On the rare occasions that they've made calls on any subject such as the pandemic they have been wrong. It is hard to think of a worse opposition in modern history. Hague's 1997-2001 perhaps?
Cant say I agree. Push factors are not enough to explain a rise for the opposition, not just a fall by government (it could have gone to LD for instance).
You need pull factors too. Simply not repelling people can be that.
Keir's personal ratings are going up, he is doing a good job.
And to be honest, the least unpopular party nearly always wins.
Idly looking at the local rightmove I note a flat for sale to "Buy To Let Purchasers Only." What sort of scumbag imposes this sort of condition and why? Is it enforceable?
Well, you can choose not to sell something you own for any reason you like, so of course it's enforceable, except a buyer could lie to an extent.
The only reason I can think of for such a condition is that it might be expected that a buy-to-let purchaser might be less hassle in terms of mortgage approvals, completion dates, etc.
Ah, TheWhiteRabbit has the likely answer - a sitting tenant.
Are there any tax advantages in selling a property between businesses?
Hope you are keeping well @MaxPB, have you moved yet?
Happily we're inching closer to not going 🥳
My wife won't say it yet but she doesn't want to go, I think the thought of living within the vicinity of her mum has finally been realised.
How has life been treating you?
We'd be very lucky to keep you in London my friend.
Very good thanks, had our first cricket match last night, even though I got out LBW second ball it was good fine. My first shot was a lovely pull for four.
I am now off the anti-depressants and feeling good.
Thanks, fingers crossed.
Good to hear about the anti-depressants, real progress there!
I've given up on cricket this summer, preparing for the baby to arrive, which is making me very nervous.
Comments
If you want to increase spending further from the current levels then you need to start outlining who pays for it, this is exactly where Jez for unstuck because no one believes that an additional £200bn per year can be funded from the "1%" or whatever he termed.
Bear in mind that the UK is already likely to pay £90-100bn in debt interest this year, loading up more debt is no longer an option.
Point is, it's not an unrealistic forecast.
I started driving in 1992, and I remember unleaded tipping above 50p a litre shortly thereafter. My gut feeling is that petrol prices then to now are roughly inflation, though much of that was in the last four months!
cf the price of beer, which tipped to above £1 a pint more often than not about 1991 and has, I'd say, increased by a factor of roughly 3.5 - 4.5.
Large parts of the civil service are totally unfit for purpose, and governments of all colours have failed to contain the expansion in recent decades.
Moscow was abandoned and burned to the ground in 1812, Leningrad had a 900 day siege, Stalingrad happened at Stalingrad. Having its cities pulverised to fuck and coming back from it, is just part of the myth.
He introduced Tuition Fees as a graduate tax to be paid by future graduates that he himself or his generation of voters wouldn't ever have to pay but the young would.
Its under his government that the house price surge took off as house building failed to keep up with population growth deliberately in order to bribe voters.
His government introduced bribe after bribe for the elderly.
His government borrowed a fortune and created a systemic deficit even during a boom time to be paid by future voters instead of his voters.
Never in history has a government been more rotten to the core pampering its own voters while screwing over the young. The Tories to their shame have copied much but not all of this.
Locals want jobs and an economy, but middle-class rentagobs from elsewhere pile in on a national campaign driven by the likes of Greenpeace.
Make it clear beforehand that would be our response too.
(dons flameproof coat)
So let's put up taxes.
I know it's unpopular, and politically difficult - especially on the right - but we are all going to have to pay more taxes. And to be honest, it won't just be a few demographics paying more - the rich, inheritors, whatever. It'll be all of us.
Land prices are far too much of a cost of housing and that is due to our rotten planning system. Land with consent is worth far, far more than land without consent which incentivises land banking.
If consent was readily and easily available then land with consent wouldn't be worth any more than land without it and the cost of developing new homes would collapse.
https://www.eetimes.eu/global-semiconductor-revenue-up-26-in-2021-says-gartner/
...For the first time in three years, Samsung Electronics topped U.S. competitor Intel in Gartner’s Top 10 semiconductor vendors in 2021. Europe, however, remained absent from the ranking.
The South Korean group revenue increased by 28% year over year to $73.2 billion, while Intel’s revenue declined by 0.3% last year at $72.5 billion. This translates to less than a percentage point as Samsung Electronics took a 12.3% market share and Intel 12.2% in 2021.
Intel had regained the No. 1 market position in 2019, as the memory market slowdown had negatively impacted many of the major suppliers, including Samsung Electronics, the top vendor by revenue in 2018 and 2017.
The semiconductor supplier with the steepest drop in 2021 is HiSilicon. “HiSilicon’s revenue declined 81%, from $8.2 billion in 2020 to $1.5 billion in 2021,” said Andrew Norwood, research vice president at Gartner, in a statement. “This was a direct result of the U.S. sanctions against the company and its parent company Huawei.
HiSilicon’s exit from the Top 25 even affected China’s share of the (global) semiconductor market, from 6.7% share in 2020 to 6.5% in 2021....
What do you think the response to that would be?
At a minimum, NATO conventional engagement in Ukraine to destroy the entire Russian invasion force, I'd guess.
If they use tactical nukes in this war, then they will be pariahs.
It'd be easier if we'd been stronger against the use of chemical weapons, but we are where we are.
If an employer wants to increase the wage of a middling-income graduate by £1000 then the government will take most of that money in tax. Between income tax, employee NI, employer NI and fuck-the-young-only-graduate-tax the tax on that will be 50%
If a buy-to-let landlord on the same income wants to increase the rent that that graduate has to pay by £1000 then the government will only ask for 20% of that as income tax.
How is it right that landlords face a marginal 20% income tax rate, while workers on the exact same income face a marginal 50% tax rate?
Don't tax more, tax all the same. A flat marginal tax rate for everyone would be far fairer than what we have today.
And I wouldn't describe our planning system as 'rotten'. Just very, very slow-moving.
None of this is to disagree with the main thrust of your argument.
If the Welsh fusiliers are in Kharkiv then it's easier to convince Putin that any use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine will be met by a nuclear response. And then either deterrence works or it doesn't.
Add that in to Max's package, and leave out the bits that will make poorer people homeless.
Minimum wage is now £9.50 so wages have increased above petrol prices over the past 44 years by a tiny bit.
As I noted above, some borrowing is possible for investment which both provides a positive return, and the private sector has been incapable of making (large scale tidal projects are an example).
It's also not impossible to borrow cheaply overseas and subsequently benefit from from high domestic inflation reducing your real terms repayments - though the window for that is likely closing.
The essential question is by how much any given additional borrowing is likely to increase economic growth.
It's laughable. The only reason they're getting a look in is because Boris is such a disaster and the Tories have adopted the same idiotic "big government can solve all ills" kind of thinking.
And capital to invest in other things that might actually create value for the future.
Didn't some anonymous European finance minster say "we know what needs to be done- just not how to get re-elected after doing it" after the 2018 crash? That.
Its hilarious to CHB moan about the government feathering the old, fucking the young, and bemoaning house prices while he simultaneously says that Tony Blair was a good Prime Minister and Vote Labour. This government is bad on this, but Blair and Brown were even worse.
I don't think CHB is doing so in bad faith though, I think he just doesn't remember or realise just how terribly Blair treated our generation.
If there is vaccine escape or a more serious strain of Covid then that happens and we need to live with it.
If Putin isn't deterred by deterrents then that happens and we need to live with it.
But we still should do the right thing and roll the dice. I'm OK with taking risk, you may want to take risk-aversion upto 100 and not risk leaving your house due to Covid or standing up to Putin but I am willing to take informed risks.
1) 'Fairer' is very much subjective. One of the biggest fundamental arguments between left and right is exactly how to define the word. Everyone paying the same percentage of income could be seen as 'fair'. Everyone having the same amount left after taxation could be seen as 'fair'. Both of those are extremes, so we squirrel around in the middle.
2) The country needs more money. That can be done via a combination of increased taxation, reduced spending, and increased borrowing. I cannot see a way out of this mess without a significant whack of the former.
I don't have the answers, but I also know that borrowing more isn't an option for this country. The options are increase tax or cut spending. The borrowing more money option gas run out of road. We're very quietly approaching the point of no return like Italy where the debt servicing cost of our existing stock of gilts requires more money to be borrowed to pay it off. In industry that's the beginning of the end.
We still have a window of a decade to bring spending under control, allow tax receipts to catch up but more spending is the exact opposite of how we will achieve a reduction in our debt servicing costs to manageable levels.
However it is much more on the agenda than it was.
If rich-by-unearned-house-price-gain people want places for their children to live, they need to smell some coffee.
It is noticeable that FTBs are becoming highly focused in certain areas of London.
My wife won't say it yet but she doesn't want to go, I think the thought of living within the vicinity of her mum has finally been realised.
How has life been treating you?
You need pull factors too. Simply not repelling people can be that.
We should still be willing to stand up to them and deter them though. Its a risk, but its a risk we need to take.
Life isn't risk free.
So the only response is to immediately hit every O&G facility and military base West of Moscow, with large conventional weapons. Start with Sevastopol, which is the main reason Putin wanted Crimea in the first place.
If we are in the war then we are in the war, and we might as well send our own planes into Ukraine at that point too.
Make it clear that any further nuclear deployments will be met with a nuclear response.
Stephen Stapczynski
@SStapczynski
·
2h
This is why you should care about China's stringent virus restrictions 🇨🇳👇
Beijing’s zero-tolerance approach is snarling key ports, jeopardizing the $22 trillion trade in global goods with months of severe disruptions 🚢
Via
@b_muzz
,
@MessageAnnKoh
https://twitter.com/SStapczynski/status/1518871947786227712
A penny on NHS tax (which is really 2p on Income Tax) is going to be a rallying cry in the future and since the elderly don't pay that tax and the young don't see an issue with taxes until its too late . . . we're fucked. Sunak fucked us.
It's a major challenge for capitalism as a whole. It goes beyond increasing tax as an answer.
I'm fully expecting our personal taxation to increase significantly over the next few years. I would rather it was not the case, but I see little alternative.
I'm more likely to vote for politicians who admit this, than those who pretend there's a magic way out of the mess.
Fiscal drag will undoubtedly lead to more 40% taxpayers before the next election too - although when I first hit that I saw it as a badge of honour (but did cut down on the overtime).
Telegraph blog
"cause of concern" my arse as Jim Royale would say. Fecking delighted is the actual phrase they were looking for.
The problem is that taxation is falling on a smaller and smaller set of people. Instead of everyone paying income tax based upon their income, a subset of the voting public (and the politicians wanting their votes) have realised that they can cut the taxes of some voters while increasing the burden on others. By raising NI and cutting Income Tax, pensioners and rent-seekers get a tax cut while workers get screwed over.
You can quibble about definitions of fairness, but there is no definition that is fair. Taxes are too high on people who are paying their taxes and not high enough on the people who aren't.
A subset of the nation is going to struggle to pay for the entire nation and the more it happens, the more it will break under pressure.
Flatter, lower taxes paid by everyone, instead of only paid by some people, would mean that those who are currently paying taxes aren't as heavily taxed as they are now - but that the voters who think that other people can be made to pay their taxes for them are worse off.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10754055/Elon-Musks-Twitter-revolution-Rebellious-staff-claim-new-boss-dangerous-democracy.html
I find it a bit bizarre how Elon is such a hate figure.
There is very little we can do about this in the short term but in the medium it will be a further boost to onshoring production, which will be a good thing.
I have a vague memory that the Ukr troops call the RU troops "the orcs".
For all the wokey talk of a toxic work environment, it absolutely sounds like one, if a load of your employees are having a total meltdown over somebody who is a bit of weird dude but really isn't extreme politically. Its not like Putin is taking over. He is a bloke who has a fantastic track record of success.
Very good thanks, had our first cricket match last night, even though I got out LBW second ball it was good fine. My first shot was a lovely pull for four.
I am now off the anti-depressants and feeling good.
What we can do is maximise the deterrence so that hopefully he doesn't. That means ensuring he knows that we will obliterate Russia if they fire any nukes.
Hopefully he won't, but backing down on that only increases the risk that nukes will be fired it doesn't lower it.
And to be honest, the least unpopular party nearly always wins.
Good to hear about the anti-depressants, real progress there!
I've given up on cricket this summer, preparing for the baby to arrive, which is making me very nervous.