Liz Truss confirmed in the hustings last week she would not call a general election until 2024 at the earliest. Given the polls suggest Labour would win a majority at the moment that is wise but even if she got a huge bounce and took a clear poll lead (despite polls now having her trailing Starmer as preferred PM) an early election would not be wise as she would still likely lose seats and as 2017 showed voters do not like unnecessary elections called by parties with clear majorities
"2024 at the earliest"
If she's planning on having it after 2024, we might have a teensy bit of problem.
It's hardly a surprise that a finance person has no answer to the energy crisis. Probably not many economists do either, because the solution is upstream, in Moscow and it is military. We depend on Kyiv to sort it out, and Boris has been in the man on the spot while the chicken-lickens at home are crying that the sky is falling in.
Although even a defeat of Russia doesn't solve the problem, unless you want Western countries to go straight back to making deals with Putin.
A post-defeat Russia will be desperate to sell its hydrocarbons.
Maybe, but should we refinance them so they can try again?
Finance hasn't been their constraint. It has been inadequacy in almost every other sphere you can think of.
Bravely bold Sir Leon rode forth from Camden Town He was not afraid to die, oh, brave Sir Leon He was not at all afraid Labour would win Brave, brave, brave, brave Sir Leon
He was not in the least bit scared to be once more in the EU Or to have his friends all vote Lib Dem and his neighbours be all Wokey To have the Tories split and his passport took away And be forced to watch Keir Starmer 24 hours a day, brave Sir Leon
It's hardly a surprise that a finance person has no answer to the energy crisis. Probably not many economists do either, because the solution is upstream, in Moscow and it is military. We depend on Kyiv to sort it out, and Boris has been in the man on the spot while the chicken-lickens at home are crying that the sky is falling in.
Although even a defeat of Russia doesn't solve the problem, unless you want Western countries to go straight back to making deals with Putin.
Even if the defeat were to topple Putin, he'd be replaced by someone wanting a tougher line probably.
On thread. No, she won't. If for no other reason than I cannot see the circumstances in which the Tories get a 'big' lead - double figures. And why would you risk the current 70 odd majority on a bumsqueaker? She will hope for a reset to small lead/close to evens and that from this time next year swingback keeps them competitive then throw money at a late 2024 vote. She needs to engage the third of 2019 voters sitting on their hands (not just to keep warm)
Bravely bold Sir Leon rode forth from Camden Town He was not afraid to die, oh, brave Sir Leon He was not at all afraid Labour would win Brave, brave, brave, brave Sir Leon
He was not in the least bit scared to be once more in the EU Or to have his friends all vote Lib Dem and his neighbours be all Wokey To have the Tories split and his passport took away And be forced to watch Keir Starmer 24 hours a day, brave Sir Leon
Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.
We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.
We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.
Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.
If not now, then when?
Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).
Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.
Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.
Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.
An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.
The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.
If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.
That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.
You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.
Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
The problem we have is that whilst our population has got older - and healthier in old age - our society and systems have not adapted to match.
At the time we brought in the state pension it was not too far from the truth to say that at fifty you were fucked, at sixty you were senile and at seventy you snuffed it (with a healthy dollop of poetic licence of course). What we have missed from our changing society is to accept that not only are people living longer but they are, on the whole living healthily longer as well. A fifty year old is not old, nor even a sixty year old. Many seventy year olds are perfectly capable of holding down a job, if not a very physically demanding one.
And yet when the Government less than a decade ago tried to deal with this by increasing pension ages they were met with screams of anguish and invective.
When the National Insurance Act providing for Old Age Pensions was introduced in 1946, average male life expectancy was 66. That meant you lived on average a year after you retired. Average life expectancy for men now is 79 - 13 years longer. But the pension age has only gone up by 2 years. We need to significantly increase pension age to more reasonably match the increase in life expectancy and the longer healthy, active lives we now live.
To compensate I would make similar changes at he other end of life. Have children start school at 7 rather than 5. Have them do GCSEs at 18 rather than 16 (thus avoiding having to cope with important schooling and the tail end of puberty at the same time) and have them go to University at 20 rather than 18.
Obviously this is not a perfect answer but it would at least go some way to easing the demographic pressures.
Given the increasing popularity of part time work in 50s, 60s and 70s I would suggest phasing in the state pension to reflect that. Perhaps 20% at 62, 40% at 65, 75% at 70 and 100% at 75. Not sure it saves much money off those numbers but think it better fits how people retire.
I had a meeting with a Santander Personal Financial Advisor today. Nice guy, amiable, quite interesting
We got talking about the energy crisis, and he said his solution was "nationalise the energy providers, and take their profits"
I pointed out that Yes you could do that, but it didn't address the fundamental issue, gas and oil is very expensive, because Putin, so the nationalised companies would still have to pay shedloads for energy. He hadn't really thought of this, or so it seemed
After that, he was stumped for ideas. And he is a pro financial expert?
In his defence, I'm not sure anyone has any ideas, and for the rest of the meeting he gave me excellent advice
A "Santander Personal Financial Advisor" is not a pro financial expert.
Christ, you do love your footling pedantry. You know what I mean
That's not pedantry. The man is an expert at selling Santander products, he knows next to nothing about finance beyond what generates him a bonus.
Not true. He was really good with mortgage and pension stuff, and didn't try to sell me anything - in fact he steered me away from Santander Products. And he did this for free, for an hour (as a service to some Santander customers)
I had a meeting with a Santander Personal Financial Advisor today. Nice guy, amiable, quite interesting
We got talking about the energy crisis, and he said his solution was "nationalise the energy providers, and take their profits"
I pointed out that Yes you could do that, but it didn't address the fundamental issue, gas and oil is very expensive, because Putin, so the nationalised companies would still have to pay shedloads for energy. He hadn't really thought of this, or so it seemed
After that, he was stumped for ideas. And he is a pro financial expert?
In his defence, I'm not sure anyone has any ideas, and for the rest of the meeting he gave me excellent advice
But if they do make record profits this year, something is clearly very wrong with the consumer energy market that needs sorting. Profit isn't a dirty word, but big profits, with no competition, is not good - Adam Smith himself had a lot to say on monopolies and overpowerful corporations.
Energy suppliers are going bust left, right and center - so I'm not sure where Santander's "expert" gets his information.
It is upstream producers - Shell, Apache, Anadarko, etc. - who are making out like banditos.
Well the large renewables operators won't be doing too bad, too.
Quite. The small operators seem to have been squeezed out, and the big guys are just riding the cap, which, when it gets too high for ordinary people to pay, will be made up by the taxpayer. Nobody has any incentive to offer lower prices because fleecing current customers is far more lucrative than attracting new ones. That's how it seems to me, but I am very open to alternative summaries.
Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.
We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.
We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.
Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.
If not now, then when?
Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).
Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.
Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.
Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.
An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.
The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.
If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.
That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.
You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.
Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
The problem we have is that whilst our population has got older - and healthier in old age - our society and systems have not adapted to match.
At the time we brought in the state pension it was not too far from the truth to say that at fifty you were fucked, at sixty you were senile and at seventy you snuffed it (with a healthy dollop of poetic licence of course). What we have missed from our changing society is to accept that not only are people living longer but they are, on the whole living healthily longer as well. A fifty year old is not old, nor even a sixty year old. Many seventy year olds are perfectly capable of holding down a job, if not a very physically demanding one.
And yet when the Government less than a decade ago tried to deal with this by increasing pension ages they were met with screams of anguish and invective.
When the National Insurance Act providing for Old Age Pensions was introduced in 1946, average male life expectancy was 66. That meant you lived on average a year after you retired. Average life expectancy for men now is 79 - 13 years longer. But the pension age has only gone up by 2 years. We need to significantly increase pension age to more reasonably match the increase in life expectancy and the longer healthy, active lives we now live.
To compensate I would make similar changes at he other end of life. Have children start school at 7 rather than 5. Have them do GCSEs at 18 rather than 16 (thus avoiding having to cope with important schooling and the tail end of puberty at the same time) and have them go to University at 20 rather than 18.
Obviously this is not a perfect answer but it would at least go some way to easing the demographic pressures.
Given the increasing popularity of part time work in 50s, 60s and 70s I would suggest phasing in the state pension to reflect that. Perhaps 20% at 62, 40% at 65, 75% at 70 and 100% at 75. Not sure it saves much money off those numbers but think it better fits how people retire.
I was doing a bit of research about this prior to posting that last comment and I saw that in Japan you can take your state pension between 60 and 70 and the later you leave it the more you get. That fits well with your suggestion and seems a very good idea.
Two immediate further easures for me though would be
Get rid of the Triple Lock Everyone who is working pays National Insurance even if they are past retirement age.
Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.
We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.
We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.
Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.
If not now, then when?
Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).
Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.
Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.
Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.
An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.
The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.
If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.
That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.
You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.
Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
This reminds me of something I posted a couple of days ago. Comments from telegraph readers on the cost of living crisis.
"Thousands of you took to our comments section to air your thoughts on the matter and, while many readers expressed sympathy with the young, there was also outrage – outrage that having to endure food rationing, ballooning inflation, power shortages and myriad financial crashes in previous decades should be seen as “having it easy”. Not to mention the decades of fiscal responsibility, careful saving and hard graft that have translated into comfortable retirements. Advice was freely and generously given on how the young might face down economic hardship. Here is what you had to say... "
"When we were young, we paid for the pensions of the old and retired. Now it’s for the young to pay for us and shut up complaining.”
..."Modern generations, due to, no matter the cost, wanting everything now, have put themselves dangerously in debt and when an unexpected financial crisis happens, they are left all at sea, unable to pay the essential bills first. I am lucky to not be seriously affected by next year’s enormous fuel bills, but why should my savings be raided and my pension frozen to subsidise the fiscally incompetent?”
I'd suggest three measures:
1) Increase immigration by allowing British-descended foreigners the right to live and work in the UK
Italy and Ireland make it very easy for descendents of emigrants to move there. We should do the same. Importing lots of semi-literate Somalis or homeless Romanians is politically and socially impossible, but I've never heard any objections to Canadians or Australians. Most of those who take advantage of this would be young and productive. Also we should remove the remaining restrictions on Hong Kongers living and working here.
2) Promote the building of large family houses where people actually want to live
The current planning system is far too skewed towards "density", i.e. stack-a-chav concrete boxes. We need to build more houses that families want to live in to get the country having children again.
3) Stop taxing work and start taxing idleness
It is insane that employment income is taxed more heavily than retirement income, though the old use government services far more than those of working age.
I disagree with 2. In my experience, large houses are bought up by people in their 50's / 60's who have massive pensions, and equity from house price inflation. 4/5 bedrooms for the grandchildren, guests etc. Most families can't actually afford these type of houses. We need to build more high density houses, which is actually the stuff that the volume housebuilders turn out, because this is the type of places that families ultimately move to, because it is what they can afford (particularly with help to buy subsidies etc). That is how I see it all working out, anyway.
I think 1 may be regarded as a 'racist' policy by some. Of course, the best solution was arguably free movement in the EU, the problem was always that we were not building enough houses to cope with it.
https://twitter.com/sundersays/status/1563205029070512130 I do think the scale of contrast between the 1990 polling (holding the contest zapped Labour's lead before the result) and the 2022 contest has been very little discussed, adding to the idea that the 2022 pattern is simply natural
It's hardly a surprise that a finance person has no answer to the energy crisis. Probably not many economists do either, because the solution is upstream, in Moscow and it is military. We depend on Kyiv to sort it out, and Boris has been in the man on the spot while the chicken-lickens at home are crying that the sky is falling in.
Between 1976 and 1983, world oil consumption dropped 15%. And yet the world economy was significantly larger in '83.
When you have a supply shock like this, people start getting a lot more efficient in their usage. The demand curve moves to the left.
Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.
We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.
We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.
Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.
If not now, then when?
Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).
Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.
Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.
Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.
An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.
The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.
If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.
That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.
You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.
Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
The problem we have is that whilst our population has got older - and healthier in old age - our society and systems have not adapted to match.
At the time we brought in the state pension it was not too far from the truth to say that at fifty you were fucked, at sixty you were senile and at seventy you snuffed it (with a healthy dollop of poetic licence of course). What we have missed from our changing society is to accept that not only are people living longer but they are, on the whole living healthily longer as well. A fifty year old is not old, nor even a sixty year old. Many seventy year olds are perfectly capable of holding down a job, if not a very physically demanding one.
And yet when the Government less than a decade ago tried to deal with this by increasing pension ages they were met with screams of anguish and invective.
When the National Insurance Act providing for Old Age Pensions was introduced in 1946, average male life expectancy was 66. That meant you lived on average a year after you retired. Average life expectancy for men now is 79 - 13 years longer. But the pension age has only gone up by 2 years. We need to significantly increase pension age to more reasonably match the increase in life expectancy and the longer healthy, active lives we now live.
To compensate I would make similar changes at he other end of life. Have children start school at 7 rather than 5. Have them do GCSEs at 18 rather than 16 (thus avoiding having to cope with important schooling and the tail end of puberty at the same time) and have them go to University at 20 rather than 18.
Obviously this is not a perfect answer but it would at least go some way to easing the demographic pressures.
Given the increasing popularity of part time work in 50s, 60s and 70s I would suggest phasing in the state pension to reflect that. Perhaps 20% at 62, 40% at 65, 75% at 70 and 100% at 75. Not sure it saves much money off those numbers but think it better fits how people retire.
I was doing a bit of research about this prior to posting that last comment and I saw that in Japan you can take your state pension between 60 and 70 and the later you leave it the more you get. That fits well with your suggestion and seems a very good idea.
Two immediate further easures for me though would be
Get rid of the Triple Lock Everyone who is working pays National Insurance even if they are past retirement age.
Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.
We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.
We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.
Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.
If not now, then when?
Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).
Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.
Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.
Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.
An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.
The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.
If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.
That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.
You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.
Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
The problem we have is that whilst our population has got older - and healthier in old age - our society and systems have not adapted to match.
At the time we brought in the state pension it was not too far from the truth to say that at fifty you were fucked, at sixty you were senile and at seventy you snuffed it (with a healthy dollop of poetic licence of course). What we have missed from our changing society is to accept that not only are people living longer but they are, on the whole living healthily longer as well. A fifty year old is not old, nor even a sixty year old. Many seventy year olds are perfectly capable of holding down a job, if not a very physically demanding one.
And yet when the Government less than a decade ago tried to deal with this by increasing pension ages they were met with screams of anguish and invective.
When the National Insurance Act providing for Old Age Pensions was introduced in 1946, average male life expectancy was 66. That meant you lived on average a year after you retired. Average life expectancy for men now is 79 - 13 years longer. But the pension age has only gone up by 2 years. We need to significantly increase pension age to more reasonably match the increase in life expectancy and the longer healthy, active lives we now live.
To compensate I would make similar changes at he other end of life. Have children start school at 7 rather than 5. Have them do GCSEs at 18 rather than 16 (thus avoiding having to cope with important schooling and the tail end of puberty at the same time) and have them go to University at 20 rather than 18.
Obviously this is not a perfect answer but it would at least go some way to easing the demographic pressures.
Given the increasing popularity of part time work in 50s, 60s and 70s I would suggest phasing in the state pension to reflect that. Perhaps 20% at 62, 40% at 65, 75% at 70 and 100% at 75. Not sure it saves much money off those numbers but think it better fits how people retire.
I was doing a bit of research about this prior to posting that last comment and I saw that in Japan you can take your state pension between 60 and 70 and the later you leave it the more you get. That fits well with your suggestion and seems a very good idea.
Two immediate further easures for me though would be
Get rid of the Triple Lock Everyone who is working pays National Insurance even if they are past retirement age.
Currently checking my own SP, as it happens, so have been reading up.
The UK already offers such a deferral scheme, but it is not good value from what I can see, so not much incentive there (you need to live a long time to get the benefit), unless there is some special issue such as a temporarily high rate of income pushing one into higher rate tax. There is a variant where you can get a lump sum at the end of the year, I think.
“We are a small 5m by 10m takeaway-only premises. The renewal on our gas has just come through. It has gone from £9,000 to £32,000 a year. I can’t sleep at night.”...
...Evans’s shop is one of 10,500 across Britain employing about 100,000 people and serving 182m fish and chip portions per annum. He says his customers simply won’t be able to afford the huge price rises needed if they want to stay in business.
“I’d have to charge £12.95 for a fillet of haddock just to break even,”....
Liz Truss confirmed in the hustings last week she would not call a general election until 2024 at the earliest. Given the polls suggest Labour would win a majority at the moment that is wise but even if she got a huge bounce and took a clear poll lead (despite polls now having her trailing Starmer as preferred PM) an early election would not be wise as she would still likely lose seats and as 2017 showed voters do not like unnecessary elections called by parties with clear majorities
"2024 at the earliest"
If she's planning on having it after 2024, we might have a teensy bit of problem.
The Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Act 2022 provides that "If it has not been dissolved earlier, a Parliament dissolves at the beginning of the day that is the fifth anniversary of the day on which it first met." The present Parliament met on 17 December 2019. The last possible polling date is 25 working days after the 5th anniversary on 17 December 2024, i.e 24 January 2025. That day’s a Friday, and given the convention now is to have elections on a Thursday we’re looking at 23 Jan 2025 as the last possible date. Just after the next US presidential inauguration.
Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.
We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.
We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.
Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.
If not now, then when?
Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).
Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.
Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.
Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.
An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.
The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.
If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.
That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.
You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.
Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
The problem we have is that whilst our population has got older - and healthier in old age - our society and systems have not adapted to match.
At the time we brought in the state pension it was not too far from the truth to say that at fifty you were fucked, at sixty you were senile and at seventy you snuffed it (with a healthy dollop of poetic licence of course). What we have missed from our changing society is to accept that not only are people living longer but they are, on the whole living healthily longer as well. A fifty year old is not old, nor even a sixty year old. Many seventy year olds are perfectly capable of holding down a job, if not a very physically demanding one.
And yet when the Government less than a decade ago tried to deal with this by increasing pension ages they were met with screams of anguish and invective.
When the National Insurance Act providing for Old Age Pensions was introduced in 1946, average male life expectancy was 66. That meant you lived on average a year after you retired. Average life expectancy for men now is 79 - 13 years longer. But the pension age has only gone up by 2 years. We need to significantly increase pension age to more reasonably match the increase in life expectancy and the longer healthy, active lives we now live.
To compensate I would make similar changes at he other end of life. Have children start school at 7 rather than 5. Have them do GCSEs at 18 rather than 16 (thus avoiding having to cope with important schooling and the tail end of puberty at the same time) and have them go to University at 20 rather than 18.
Obviously this is not a perfect answer but it would at least go some way to easing the demographic pressures.
Given the increasing popularity of part time work in 50s, 60s and 70s I would suggest phasing in the state pension to reflect that. Perhaps 20% at 62, 40% at 65, 75% at 70 and 100% at 75. Not sure it saves much money off those numbers but think it better fits how people retire.
I was doing a bit of research about this prior to posting that last comment and I saw that in Japan you can take your state pension between 60 and 70 and the later you leave it the more you get. That fits well with your suggestion and seems a very good idea.
Two immediate further easures for me though would be
Get rid of the Triple Lock Everyone who is working pays National Insurance even if they are past retirement age.
Yes to the latter two. And a variant of the Japanese example already operates in the UK, as always we have tailored it to benefit the rich who can afford to defer (and cost the incumbent politicians less at the same time).
It's hardly a surprise that a finance person has no answer to the energy crisis. Probably not many economists do either, because the solution is upstream, in Moscow and it is military. We depend on Kyiv to sort it out, and Boris has been in the man on the spot while the chicken-lickens at home are crying that the sky is falling in.
They call them personal financial advisors but all they really are is sales people, mostly selling high margin rip off products.
This was my experience last week. I got a 'free' call with a financial advisor as a 'benefit from my employer'. It led to an attempt to sell me a pension scheme where their annual fees were about 4%, there was a 6 year exclusivity period with large exit penalties, and there were only about 8 different funds I could choose to invest the money in. To my mind this meets the definition of a rip off product.
Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.
We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.
We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.
Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.
If not now, then when?
Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).
Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.
Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.
Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.
An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.
The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.
If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.
That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.
You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.
Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
The problem we have is that whilst our population has got older - and healthier in old age - our society and systems have not adapted to match.
At the time we brought in the state pension it was not too far from the truth to say that at fifty you were fucked, at sixty you were senile and at seventy you snuffed it (with a healthy dollop of poetic licence of course). What we have missed from our changing society is to accept that not only are people living longer but they are, on the whole living healthily longer as well. A fifty year old is not old, nor even a sixty year old. Many seventy year olds are perfectly capable of holding down a job, if not a very physically demanding one.
And yet when the Government less than a decade ago tried to deal with this by increasing pension ages they were met with screams of anguish and invective.
When the National Insurance Act providing for Old Age Pensions was introduced in 1946, average male life expectancy was 66. That meant you lived on average a year after you retired. Average life expectancy for men now is 79 - 13 years longer. But the pension age has only gone up by 2 years. We need to significantly increase pension age to more reasonably match the increase in life expectancy and the longer healthy, active lives we now live.
To compensate I would make similar changes at he other end of life. Have children start school at 7 rather than 5. Have them do GCSEs at 18 rather than 16 (thus avoiding having to cope with important schooling and the tail end of puberty at the same time) and have them go to University at 20 rather than 18.
Obviously this is not a perfect answer but it would at least go some way to easing the demographic pressures.
I don't disagree with your point but, just to be pedantic, an average life expectancy at birth of 66 years doesn't mean you lived on average a year after you retired. A certain number of people would have died between birth and the age of 65, so the average life expectancy at 65 would have been substantially more than 1 year (though not as long as today, obviously).
It's hardly a surprise that a finance person has no answer to the energy crisis. Probably not many economists do either, because the solution is upstream, in Moscow and it is military. We depend on Kyiv to sort it out, and Boris has been in the man on the spot while the chicken-lickens at home are crying that the sky is falling in.
Although even a defeat of Russia doesn't solve the problem, unless you want Western countries to go straight back to making deals with Putin.
A post-defeat Russia will be desperate to sell its hydrocarbons.
And if they're going to pay reparations, they will need the export revenue.
It's hardly a surprise that a finance person has no answer to the energy crisis. Probably not many economists do either, because the solution is upstream, in Moscow and it is military. We depend on Kyiv to sort it out, and Boris has been in the man on the spot while the chicken-lickens at home are crying that the sky is falling in.
Between 1976 and 1983, world oil consumption dropped 15%. And yet the world economy was significantly larger in '83.
When you have a supply shock like this, people start getting a lot more efficient in their usage. The demand curve moves to the left.
Sure, but how may businesses have seven years at these rates ? To go back to the status quo ante, we need a 15% drop in the next couple of months.
“We are a small 5m by 10m takeaway-only premises. The renewal on our gas has just come through. It has gone from £9,000 to £32,000 a year. I can’t sleep at night.”...
...Evans’s shop is one of 10,500 across Britain employing about 100,000 people and serving 182m fish and chip portions per annum. He says his customers simply won’t be able to afford the huge price rises needed if they want to stay in business.
“I’d have to charge £12.95 for a fillet of haddock just to break even,”....
It’s our noble duty according to our former PM.
What an idiot.
Mitigate in the short term, alternative sources in the medium.
Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.
We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.
We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.
Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.
If not now, then when?
Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).
Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.
Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.
Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.
An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.
The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.
If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.
That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.
You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.
Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
This reminds me of something I posted a couple of days ago. Comments from telegraph readers on the cost of living crisis.
"Thousands of you took to our comments section to air your thoughts on the matter and, while many readers expressed sympathy with the young, there was also outrage – outrage that having to endure food rationing, ballooning inflation, power shortages and myriad financial crashes in previous decades should be seen as “having it easy”. Not to mention the decades of fiscal responsibility, careful saving and hard graft that have translated into comfortable retirements. Advice was freely and generously given on how the young might face down economic hardship. Here is what you had to say... "
"When we were young, we paid for the pensions of the old and retired. Now it’s for the young to pay for us and shut up complaining.”
..."Modern generations, due to, no matter the cost, wanting everything now, have put themselves dangerously in debt and when an unexpected financial crisis happens, they are left all at sea, unable to pay the essential bills first. I am lucky to not be seriously affected by next year’s enormous fuel bills, but why should my savings be raided and my pension frozen to subsidise the fiscally incompetent?”
I'd suggest three measures:
1) Increase immigration by allowing British-descended foreigners the right to live and work in the UK
Italy and Ireland make it very easy for descendents of emigrants to move there. We should do the same. Importing lots of semi-literate Somalis or homeless Romanians is politically and socially impossible, but I've never heard any objections to Canadians or Australians. Most of those who take advantage of this would be young and productive. Also we should remove the remaining restrictions on Hong Kongers living and working here.
2) Promote the building of large family houses where people actually want to live
The current planning system is far too skewed towards "density", i.e. stack-a-chav concrete boxes. We need to build more houses that families want to live in to get the country having children again.
3) Stop taxing work and start taxing idleness
It is insane that employment income is taxed more heavily than retirement income, though the old use government services far more than those of working age.
I disagree with 2. In my experience, large houses are bought up by people in their 50's / 60's who have massive pensions, and equity from house price inflation. 4/5 bedrooms for the grandchildren, guests etc. Most families can't actually afford these type of houses. We need to build more high density houses, which is actually the stuff that the volume housebuilders turn out, because this is the type of places that families ultimately move to, because it is what they can afford (particularly with help to buy subsidies etc). That is how I see it all working out, anyway.
I think 1 may be regarded as a 'racist' policy by some. Of course, the best solution was arguably free movement in the EU, the problem was always that we were not building enough houses to cope with it.
Ireland achieves #1 through nationality law and not migration policy as such, namely conservation of nationality across two generations. The reason the UK won't take this route is to keep out all the descendants of people whose grandparents had Empire nationality at one time.
It's hardly a surprise that a finance person has no answer to the energy crisis. Probably not many economists do either, because the solution is upstream, in Moscow and it is military. We depend on Kyiv to sort it out, and Boris has been in the man on the spot while the chicken-lickens at home are crying that the sky is falling in.
They call them personal financial advisors but all they really are is sales people, mostly selling high margin rip off products.
This was my experience last week. I got a 'free' call with a financial advisor as a 'benefit from my employer'. It led to an attempt to sell me a pension scheme where their annual fees were about 4%, there was a 6 year exclusivity period with large exit penalties, and there were only about 8 different funds I could choose to invest the money in. To my mind this meets the definition of a rip off product.
If those numbers are true should be illegal. No better than a loan shark.
Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.
We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.
We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.
Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.
If not now, then when?
Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).
Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.
Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.
Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.
An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.
The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.
If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.
That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.
You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.
Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
The problem we have is that whilst our population has got older - and healthier in old age - our society and systems have not adapted to match.
At the time we brought in the state pension it was not too far from the truth to say that at fifty you were fucked, at sixty you were senile and at seventy you snuffed it (with a healthy dollop of poetic licence of course). What we have missed from our changing society is to accept that not only are people living longer but they are, on the whole living healthily longer as well. A fifty year old is not old, nor even a sixty year old. Many seventy year olds are perfectly capable of holding down a job, if not a very physically demanding one.
And yet when the Government less than a decade ago tried to deal with this by increasing pension ages they were met with screams of anguish and invective.
When the National Insurance Act providing for Old Age Pensions was introduced in 1946, average male life expectancy was 66. That meant you lived on average a year after you retired. Average life expectancy for men now is 79 - 13 years longer. But the pension age has only gone up by 2 years. We need to significantly increase pension age to more reasonably match the increase in life expectancy and the longer healthy, active lives we now live.
To compensate I would make similar changes at he other end of life. Have children start school at 7 rather than 5. Have them do GCSEs at 18 rather than 16 (thus avoiding having to cope with important schooling and the tail end of puberty at the same time) and have them go to University at 20 rather than 18.
Obviously this is not a perfect answer but it would at least go some way to easing the demographic pressures.
I don't disagree with your point but, just to be pedantic, an average life expectancy at birth of 66 years doesn't mean you lived on average a year after you retired. A certain number of people would have died between birth and the age of 65, so the average life expectancy at 65 would have been substantially more than 1 year (though not as long as today, obviously).
No, absolutely fair point. It would be interesting to see the numbers for that if they exist. I suspect that you are right and people did live several years longer than what I quoted if they had already reached retirement age. But I think the basic principle is still a sound one.
https://twitter.com/sundersays/status/1563205029070512130 I do think the scale of contrast between the 1990 polling (holding the contest zapped Labour's lead before the result) and the 2022 contest has been very little discussed, adding to the idea that the 2022 pattern is simply natural
Not really - in 1990, it was quite clear the "problem" was Margaret Thatcher, not the Conservative Party. She was an electoral anchor dragging the party down and the MPs realised it (Eastbourne would have told them that as well). I well remember knocking on doors in 1990 and the negative responses she engendered told you everything.
I realis some on here still worship her but after her eleven and a half years, for good or ill, the majority of the country was sick and tired of her increasingly hectoring style.
That didn't mean they didn't like the policies as 1992 demonstrated.
By 1997, it was the exact opposite - a lot of people liked and had sympathy for John Major but had come to despise the Conservative Party.
What is yet to be resolved is whether 2022 was either primarily a rejection of Boris Johnson or whether it was both a rejection of him and the Party. The problem is the degree to which the Party has come to identify with Boris Johnson makes differentiating between the one and the other almost impossible.
It's hardly a surprise that a finance person has no answer to the energy crisis. Probably not many economists do either, because the solution is upstream, in Moscow and it is military. We depend on Kyiv to sort it out, and Boris has been in the man on the spot while the chicken-lickens at home are crying that the sky is falling in.
Although even a defeat of Russia doesn't solve the problem, unless you want Western countries to go straight back to making deals with Putin.
A post-defeat Russia will be desperate to sell its hydrocarbons.
And if they're going to pay reparations, they will need the export revenue.
'Buy gas from Russia to rebuild Ukraine' has a nice ring to it.
And the beauty of it is, if it's exported to Europe then Ukraine has control over its distribution anyway!
I had a meeting with a Santander Personal Financial Advisor today. Nice guy, amiable, quite interesting
We got talking about the energy crisis, and he said his solution was "nationalise the energy providers, and take their profits"
I pointed out that Yes you could do that, but it didn't address the fundamental issue, gas and oil is very expensive, because Putin, so the nationalised companies would still have to pay shedloads for energy. He hadn't really thought of this, or so it seemed
After that, he was stumped for ideas. And he is a pro financial expert?
In his defence, I'm not sure anyone has any ideas, and for the rest of the meeting he gave me excellent advice
A "Santander Personal Financial Advisor" is not a pro financial expert.
Christ, you do love your footling pedantry. You know what I mean
This guy is playing a two handed game of poker with you, and if it is not clear to you who the sucker in the game is...
please, very seriously, spend an hour getting the gist of what http://monevator.com/ is on about and what it has to say about fund managers, and look very carefully at the fees in any Santander proposal. 1.5% of a fuck of a lot is a fuck of a lot for doing nothing you can't do yourself.
It's hardly a surprise that a finance person has no answer to the energy crisis. Probably not many economists do either, because the solution is upstream, in Moscow and it is military. We depend on Kyiv to sort it out, and Boris has been in the man on the spot while the chicken-lickens at home are crying that the sky is falling in.
Between 1976 and 1983, world oil consumption dropped 15%. And yet the world economy was significantly larger in '83.
When you have a supply shock like this, people start getting a lot more efficient in their usage. The demand curve moves to the left.
Sure, but how may businesses have seven years at these rates ? To go back to the status quo ante, we need a 15% drop in the next couple of months.
In the first six months of the year, German gas demand fell 14%. Now, sure, they have more heavy industry to turn off. But just a modest amount of energy efficiency can cut a surprising amount from natural gas usage.
It's hardly a surprise that a finance person has no answer to the energy crisis. Probably not many economists do either, because the solution is upstream, in Moscow and it is military. We depend on Kyiv to sort it out, and Boris has been in the man on the spot while the chicken-lickens at home are crying that the sky is falling in.
They call them personal financial advisors but all they really are is sales people, mostly selling high margin rip off products.
This was my experience last week. I got a 'free' call with a financial advisor as a 'benefit from my employer'. It led to an attempt to sell me a pension scheme where their annual fees were about 4%, there was a 6 year exclusivity period with large exit penalties, and there were only about 8 different funds I could choose to invest the money in. To my mind this meets the definition of a rip off product.
When the National Insurance Act providing for Old Age Pensions was introduced in 1946, average male life expectancy was 66. That meant you lived on average a year after you retired.
Can I just point out that we had old age pensions from 1908 and National Insurance from 1911. 1946 was a reform, not an introduction.
Old Age Pensions in 1908 were only paid for over 70s though, this at a time when average life expectancy was around 45 (allowing for points around infant mortality etc).
It's hardly a surprise that a finance person has no answer to the energy crisis. Probably not many economists do either, because the solution is upstream, in Moscow and it is military. We depend on Kyiv to sort it out, and Boris has been in the man on the spot while the chicken-lickens at home are crying that the sky is falling in.
They call them personal financial advisors but all they really are is sales people, mostly selling high margin rip off products.
This was my experience last week. I got a 'free' call with a financial advisor as a 'benefit from my employer'. It led to an attempt to sell me a pension scheme where their annual fees were about 4%, there was a 6 year exclusivity period with large exit penalties, and there were only about 8 different funds I could choose to invest the money in. To my mind this meets the definition of a rip off product.
It's hardly a surprise that a finance person has no answer to the energy crisis. Probably not many economists do either, because the solution is upstream, in Moscow and it is military. We depend on Kyiv to sort it out, and Boris has been in the man on the spot while the chicken-lickens at home are crying that the sky is falling in.
They call them personal financial advisors but all they really are is sales people, mostly selling high margin rip off products.
This was my experience last week. I got a 'free' call with a financial advisor as a 'benefit from my employer'. It led to an attempt to sell me a pension scheme where their annual fees were about 4%, there was a 6 year exclusivity period with large exit penalties, and there were only about 8 different funds I could choose to invest the money in. To my mind this meets the definition of a rip off product.
Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.
We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.
We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.
Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.
If not now, then when?
Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).
Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.
Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.
Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.
An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.
The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.
If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.
That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.
You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.
Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
The problem we have is that whilst our population has got older - and healthier in old age - our society and systems have not adapted to match.
At the time we brought in the state pension it was not too far from the truth to say that at fifty you were fucked, at sixty you were senile and at seventy you snuffed it (with a healthy dollop of poetic licence of course). What we have missed from our changing society is to accept that not only are people living longer but they are, on the whole living healthily longer as well. A fifty year old is not old, nor even a sixty year old. Many seventy year olds are perfectly capable of holding down a job, if not a very physically demanding one.
And yet when the Government less than a decade ago tried to deal with this by increasing pension ages they were met with screams of anguish and invective.
When the National Insurance Act providing for Old Age Pensions was introduced in 1946, average male life expectancy was 66. That meant you lived on average a year after you retired. Average life expectancy for men now is 79 - 13 years longer. But the pension age has only gone up by 2 years. We need to significantly increase pension age to more reasonably match the increase in life expectancy and the longer healthy, active lives we now live.
To compensate I would make similar changes at he other end of life. Have children start school at 7 rather than 5. Have them do GCSEs at 18 rather than 16 (thus avoiding having to cope with important schooling and the tail end of puberty at the same time) and have them go to University at 20 rather than 18.
Obviously this is not a perfect answer but it would at least go some way to easing the demographic pressures.
I don't disagree with your point but, just to be pedantic, an average life expectancy at birth of 66 years doesn't mean you lived on average a year after you retired. A certain number of people would have died between birth and the age of 65, so the average life expectancy at 65 would have been substantially more than 1 year (though not as long as today, obviously).
No, absolutely fair point. It would be interesting to see the numbers for that if they exist. I suspect that you are right and people did live several years longer than what I quoted if they had already reached retirement age. But I think the basic principle is still a sound one.
A few things on this:
- a very large chunk of health expenditure goes on last 12 months if life. Extended life expectancy doesn't change that - There is an ongoing increase in healthcare, unexplained by demographics. This could be technology, increased chronic conditions (obesity), politics, or something weird like Baumol cost disease - the dependency ratio is useful. Make sure you use old-age only - the total one makes countries with few children look good (ahem, Scotland)
It's hardly a surprise that a finance person has no answer to the energy crisis. Probably not many economists do either, because the solution is upstream, in Moscow and it is military. We depend on Kyiv to sort it out, and Boris has been in the man on the spot while the chicken-lickens at home are crying that the sky is falling in.
They call them personal financial advisors but all they really are is sales people, mostly selling high margin rip off products.
This was my experience last week. I got a 'free' call with a financial advisor as a 'benefit from my employer'. It led to an attempt to sell me a pension scheme where their annual fees were about 4%, there was a 6 year exclusivity period with large exit penalties, and there were only about 8 different funds I could choose to invest the money in. To my mind this meets the definition of a rip off product.
St James's Place?
FOUR PER CENT?
Surely there's a law against that shit?
There should be.
Given real equity returns tend to be in 6-7% range over time, if someone is taking 4% in fees, you are being absolutely shafted.
The Aussies have got this one right. The big superannuation schemes pay 0.4% for active equities, and less for bonds and passive. And - by and large - they've done a pretty good job.
When the National Insurance Act providing for Old Age Pensions was introduced in 1946, average male life expectancy was 66. That meant you lived on average a year after you retired.
Can I just point out that we had old age pensions from 1908 and National Insurance from 1911. 1946 was a reform, not an introduction.
Old Age Pensions in 1908 were only paid for over 70s though, this at a time when average life expectancy was around 45 (allowing for points around infant mortality etc).
You can btw defer a UK pension in exchange for an uplift (someone, not you, was suggesting this was a ?Japan thing)
It's hardly a surprise that a finance person has no answer to the energy crisis. Probably not many economists do either, because the solution is upstream, in Moscow and it is military. We depend on Kyiv to sort it out, and Boris has been in the man on the spot while the chicken-lickens at home are crying that the sky is falling in.
They call them personal financial advisors but all they really are is sales people, mostly selling high margin rip off products.
This was my experience last week. I got a 'free' call with a financial advisor as a 'benefit from my employer'. It led to an attempt to sell me a pension scheme where their annual fees were about 4%, there was a 6 year exclusivity period with large exit penalties, and there were only about 8 different funds I could choose to invest the money in. To my mind this meets the definition of a rip off product.
St James's Place?
If you buy their "special" products, you can end up at that kind of rate. But I don't think most people are paying that across their complete portfolio.
When the National Insurance Act providing for Old Age Pensions was introduced in 1946, average male life expectancy was 66. That meant you lived on average a year after you retired.
Can I just point out that we had old age pensions from 1908 and National Insurance from 1911. 1946 was a reform, not an introduction.
Old Age Pensions in 1908 were only paid for over 70s though, this at a time when average life expectancy was around 45 (allowing for points around infant mortality etc).
You can btw defer a UK pension in exchange for an uplift (someone, not you, was suggesting this was a ?Japan thing)
It's hardly a surprise that a finance person has no answer to the energy crisis. Probably not many economists do either, because the solution is upstream, in Moscow and it is military. We depend on Kyiv to sort it out, and Boris has been in the man on the spot while the chicken-lickens at home are crying that the sky is falling in.
They call them personal financial advisors but all they really are is sales people, mostly selling high margin rip off products.
This was my experience last week. I got a 'free' call with a financial advisor as a 'benefit from my employer'. It led to an attempt to sell me a pension scheme where their annual fees were about 4%, there was a 6 year exclusivity period with large exit penalties, and there were only about 8 different funds I could choose to invest the money in. To my mind this meets the definition of a rip off product.
St James's Place?
FOUR PER CENT?
Surely there's a law against that shit?
There should be.
Given real equity returns tend to be in 6-7% range over time, if someone is taking 4% in fees, you are being absolutely shafted.
The Aussies have got this one right. The big superannuation schemes pay 0.4% for active equities, and less for bonds and passive. And - by and large - they've done a pretty good job.
I think the days of 6-7% real equity returns are probably behind us. It is quite possible at 4% they are taking all or nearly all your expected returns.
I had a meeting with a Santander Personal Financial Advisor today. Nice guy, amiable, quite interesting
We got talking about the energy crisis, and he said his solution was "nationalise the energy providers, and take their profits"
I pointed out that Yes you could do that, but it didn't address the fundamental issue, gas and oil is very expensive, because Putin, so the nationalised companies would still have to pay shedloads for energy. He hadn't really thought of this, or so it seemed
After that, he was stumped for ideas. And he is a pro financial expert?
In his defence, I'm not sure anyone has any ideas, and for the rest of the meeting he gave me excellent advice
A "Santander Personal Financial Advisor" is not a pro financial expert.
Christ, you do love your footling pedantry. You know what I mean
This guy is playing a two handed game of poker with you, and if it is not clear to you who the sucker in the game is...
please, very seriously, spend an hour getting the gist of what http://monevator.com/ is on about and what it has to say about fund managers, and look very carefully at the fees in any Santander proposal. 1.5% of a fuck of a lot is a fuck of a lot for doing nothing you can't do yourself.
But I know this. He showed me upfront: they take 2% of whatever I invest. lol. As if. I can do it all myself
As soon as I told him I'd made decent money with shares in the last few years he realised I wasn't a dupe and was very unlikely to invest in his products. Did he end the meeting early? No. He sat down with me and gave me good solid advice about pensions/mortgages, stuff which was not in his brief, indeed he said "I can't sell you a pension, please go to a pension expert and try unbiased.co.uk" - he steered me AWAY from Santander
I know a lot of people in finance are evil greedy whatnots, but he wasn't. And that was nice
Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.
We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.
We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.
Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.
If not now, then when?
Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).
Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.
Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.
Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.
An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.
The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.
If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.
That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.
You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.
Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
The problem we have is that whilst our population has got older - and healthier in old age - our society and systems have not adapted to match.
At the time we brought in the state pension it was not too far from the truth to say that at fifty you were fucked, at sixty you were senile and at seventy you snuffed it (with a healthy dollop of poetic licence of course). What we have missed from our changing society is to accept that not only are people living longer but they are, on the whole living healthily longer as well. A fifty year old is not old, nor even a sixty year old. Many seventy year olds are perfectly capable of holding down a job, if not a very physically demanding one.
And yet when the Government less than a decade ago tried to deal with this by increasing pension ages they were met with screams of anguish and invective.
When the National Insurance Act providing for Old Age Pensions was introduced in 1946, average male life expectancy was 66. That meant you lived on average a year after you retired. Average life expectancy for men now is 79 - 13 years longer. But the pension age has only gone up by 2 years. We need to significantly increase pension age to more reasonably match the increase in life expectancy and the longer healthy, active lives we now live.
To compensate I would make similar changes at he other end of life. Have children start school at 7 rather than 5. Have them do GCSEs at 18 rather than 16 (thus avoiding having to cope with important schooling and the tail end of puberty at the same time) and have them go to University at 20 rather than 18.
Obviously this is not a perfect answer but it would at least go some way to easing the demographic pressures.
You are making an acturial mistake there.
In '49 the averagre age of death might have been 66 but the lengrh of time an average 65 year old male would be expected to live for woild have been far higher than 1 year.
The mode age of death for people up until 1965 was 0, that is before their first birthday. Thay massively skews the average.
I had a meeting with a Santander Personal Financial Advisor today. Nice guy, amiable, quite interesting
We got talking about the energy crisis, and he said his solution was "nationalise the energy providers, and take their profits"
I pointed out that Yes you could do that, but it didn't address the fundamental issue, gas and oil is very expensive, because Putin, so the nationalised companies would still have to pay shedloads for energy. He hadn't really thought of this, or so it seemed
After that, he was stumped for ideas. And he is a pro financial expert?
In his defence, I'm not sure anyone has any ideas, and for the rest of the meeting he gave me excellent advice
A "Santander Personal Financial Advisor" is not a pro financial expert.
Christ, you do love your footling pedantry. You know what I mean
This guy is playing a two handed game of poker with you, and if it is not clear to you who the sucker in the game is...
please, very seriously, spend an hour getting the gist of what http://monevator.com/ is on about and what it has to say about fund managers, and look very carefully at the fees in any Santander proposal. 1.5% of a fuck of a lot is a fuck of a lot for doing nothing you can't do yourself.
But I know this. He showed me upfront: they take 2% of whatever I invest. lol. As if. I can do it all myself
As soon as I told him I'd made decent money with shares in the last few years he realised I wasn't a dupe and was very unlikely to invest in his products. Did he end the meeting early? No. He sat down with me and gave me good solid advice about pensions/mortgages, stuff which was not in his brief, indeed he said "I can't sell you a pension, please go to a pension expert and try unbiased.co.uk" - he steered me AWAY from Santander
I know a lot of people in finance are evil greedy whatnots, but he wasn't. And that was nice
Oh good. Teaching my grandmother to suck eggs then, but worried in case you didn't know all that
Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.
We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.
We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.
Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.
If not now, then when?
Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).
Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.
Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.
Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.
An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.
The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.
If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.
That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.
You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.
Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
The problem we have is that whilst our population has got older - and healthier in old age - our society and systems have not adapted to match.
At the time we brought in the state pension it was not too far from the truth to say that at fifty you were fucked, at sixty you were senile and at seventy you snuffed it (with a healthy dollop of poetic licence of course). What we have missed from our changing society is to accept that not only are people living longer but they are, on the whole living healthily longer as well. A fifty year old is not old, nor even a sixty year old. Many seventy year olds are perfectly capable of holding down a job, if not a very physically demanding one.
And yet when the Government less than a decade ago tried to deal with this by increasing pension ages they were met with screams of anguish and invective.
When the National Insurance Act providing for Old Age Pensions was introduced in 1946, average male life expectancy was 66. That meant you lived on average a year after you retired. Average life expectancy for men now is 79 - 13 years longer. But the pension age has only gone up by 2 years. We need to significantly increase pension age to more reasonably match the increase in life expectancy and the longer healthy, active lives we now live.
To compensate I would make similar changes at he other end of life. Have children start school at 7 rather than 5. Have them do GCSEs at 18 rather than 16 (thus avoiding having to cope with important schooling and the tail end of puberty at the same time) and have them go to University at 20 rather than 18.
Obviously this is not a perfect answer but it would at least go some way to easing the demographic pressures.
Hum. Problems. Already young people are relationally squeezed so that after gap year, first degree, masters, other professional training, doing down cul-de-sacs, meeting the wrong partner, trying to afford a one bedroom flat in a war zone etc millions find they are early thirties or later before they are ready for starting a family. This plan pushes it back further. Overall this is not a good plan.
Clocks tick. IMHO we need more of the cleverer house and family ready earlier not later. The pressure of young women especially is immense.
This is not only an emotional pressure on our great young people, (about whom I have nothing but good to say) but also demographically challenging. By this time for millions 2 children is the max not the minimum possible. Which has already led to the inevitable consequence.
I dont think Truss is ready for the absolute shitstorm coming her way if she blunders this. The economy is becoming detatched from the ability of many to exist within it. If she plays this 'i have a plan but its a secret' game and it turns out to be fucking daft and half arsed tax cuts i can see the country erupting.
FPT and to @Nigelb re the Democrats and VP candidates. Actually, I think you might be right although we may have differing ways we have reached the conclusion.
If you look at what is happening with the Democrats recently, one of the more subtle but certainly more noticeable features is that the centrists are gradually regaining control of the party, at least at the primary level. Progressive candidates have generally been knocked back. To take an example, the fact that a gay, black congressman like Mondaire Jones only came 3rd in the 10th NY Democrat primary is something that probably wouldn't have happened two years back (yes, it's not his district but still...). Identity politics seems to be subtly, but firmly, being eased out of the Democrats' policy agenda.
Trans rights - everyone's favourite subject on pb.com - is probably the most noticeable sign of this. Yes, the administration will still claim it is committed to these rights. But, like the dog that didn't bark in Sherlock Holmes, the more noticeable feature is how little the administration - and Biden in particularly - is saying publicly on this issue recently. Part probably because it hasn't played well in the suburbs, as seen in Virginia. However, I suspect a greater issue lies with Roe v Wade - it's hard intellectually to use the SC decision as an attack on womens' right to choose if you are also shouting loud and proud that anyone can self-affirm as a woman. Biden et al have clearly decided there's more votes aligning with women in a 'traditional' sense than pushing the trans ideology.
So, yes, I can see the idea that a VP candidate has to be black and female as becoming less relevant to Biden. Still leaves the issue of want to do with Harris but it probably does mean you don't have to replace like with like.
Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.
We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.
We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.
Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.
If not now, then when?
Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).
Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.
Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.
Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.
An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.
The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.
If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.
That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.
You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.
Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
The problem we have is that whilst our population has got older - and healthier in old age - our society and systems have not adapted to match.
At the time we brought in the state pension it was not too far from the truth to say that at fifty you were fucked, at sixty you were senile and at seventy you snuffed it (with a healthy dollop of poetic licence of course). What we have missed from our changing society is to accept that not only are people living longer but they are, on the whole living healthily longer as well. A fifty year old is not old, nor even a sixty year old. Many seventy year olds are perfectly capable of holding down a job, if not a very physically demanding one.
And yet when the Government less than a decade ago tried to deal with this by increasing pension ages they were met with screams of anguish and invective.
When the National Insurance Act providing for Old Age Pensions was introduced in 1946, average male life expectancy was 66. That meant you lived on average a year after you retired. Average life expectancy for men now is 79 - 13 years longer. But the pension age has only gone up by 2 years. We need to significantly increase pension age to more reasonably match the increase in life expectancy and the longer healthy, active lives we now live.
To compensate I would make similar changes at he other end of life. Have children start school at 7 rather than 5. Have them do GCSEs at 18 rather than 16 (thus avoiding having to cope with important schooling and the tail end of puberty at the same time) and have them go to University at 20 rather than 18.
Obviously this is not a perfect answer but it would at least go some way to easing the demographic pressures.
I don't disagree with your point but, just to be pedantic, an average life expectancy at birth of 66 years doesn't mean you lived on average a year after you retired. A certain number of people would have died between birth and the age of 65, so the average life expectancy at 65 would have been substantially more than 1 year (though not as long as today, obviously).
No, absolutely fair point. It would be interesting to see the numbers for that if they exist. I suspect that you are right and people did live several years longer than what I quoted if they had already reached retirement age. But I think the basic principle is still a sound one.
A few things on this:
- a very large chunk of health expenditure goes on last 12 months if life. Extended life expectancy doesn't change that - There is an ongoing increase in healthcare, unexplained by demographics. This could be technology, increased chronic conditions (obesity), politics, or something weird like Baumol cost disease - the dependency ratio is useful. Make sure you use old-age only - the total one makes countries with few children look good (ahem, Scotland)
I agree with these points. I was referring more to dealing with the extended retirement age rather than health care. Basically we can no longer afford to have people sitting around for 20 years in good health claiming a pension when 50 years ago they would only be sat around for 5 years doing the same thing. People are healthier for longer these days and we should make use of that by expecting them to work longer as well to pay for their longer retirement.
Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.
We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.
We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.
Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.
If not now, then when?
Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).
Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.
Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.
Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.
An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.
The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.
If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.
That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.
You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.
Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
The problem we have is that whilst our population has got older - and healthier in old age - our society and systems have not adapted to match.
At the time we brought in the state pension it was not too far from the truth to say that at fifty you were fucked, at sixty you were senile and at seventy you snuffed it (with a healthy dollop of poetic licence of course). What we have missed from our changing society is to accept that not only are people living longer but they are, on the whole living healthily longer as well. A fifty year old is not old, nor even a sixty year old. Many seventy year olds are perfectly capable of holding down a job, if not a very physically demanding one.
And yet when the Government less than a decade ago tried to deal with this by increasing pension ages they were met with screams of anguish and invective.
When the National Insurance Act providing for Old Age Pensions was introduced in 1946, average male life expectancy was 66. That meant you lived on average a year after you retired. Average life expectancy for men now is 79 - 13 years longer. But the pension age has only gone up by 2 years. We need to significantly increase pension age to more reasonably match the increase in life expectancy and the longer healthy, active lives we now live.
To compensate I would make similar changes at he other end of life. Have children start school at 7 rather than 5. Have them do GCSEs at 18 rather than 16 (thus avoiding having to cope with important schooling and the tail end of puberty at the same time) and have them go to University at 20 rather than 18.
Obviously this is not a perfect answer but it would at least go some way to easing the demographic pressures.
You are making an acturial mistake there.
In '49 the averagre age of death might have been 66 but the lengrh of time an average 65 year old male would be expected to live for woild have been far higher than 1 year.
I'd need to dpuble check but I'm fairly certain that in 1949 the mode age of death for men would be 0, that is before their first birthday. Thay massively skews the average.
So, what you're saying is that back in 1949, the vast majority of people lived longer than average.
Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.
We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.
We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.
Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.
If not now, then when?
Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).
Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.
Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.
Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.
An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.
The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.
If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.
That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.
You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.
Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
The problem we have is that whilst our population has got older - and healthier in old age - our society and systems have not adapted to match.
At the time we brought in the state pension it was not too far from the truth to say that at fifty you were fucked, at sixty you were senile and at seventy you snuffed it (with a healthy dollop of poetic licence of course). What we have missed from our changing society is to accept that not only are people living longer but they are, on the whole living healthily longer as well. A fifty year old is not old, nor even a sixty year old. Many seventy year olds are perfectly capable of holding down a job, if not a very physically demanding one.
And yet when the Government less than a decade ago tried to deal with this by increasing pension ages they were met with screams of anguish and invective.
When the National Insurance Act providing for Old Age Pensions was introduced in 1946, average male life expectancy was 66. That meant you lived on average a year after you retired. Average life expectancy for men now is 79 - 13 years longer. But the pension age has only gone up by 2 years. We need to significantly increase pension age to more reasonably match the increase in life expectancy and the longer healthy, active lives we now live.
To compensate I would make similar changes at he other end of life. Have children start school at 7 rather than 5. Have them do GCSEs at 18 rather than 16 (thus avoiding having to cope with important schooling and the tail end of puberty at the same time) and have them go to University at 20 rather than 18.
Obviously this is not a perfect answer but it would at least go some way to easing the demographic pressures.
You are making an acturial mistake there.
In '49 the averagre age of death might have been 66 but the lengrh of time an average 65 year old male would be expected to live for woild have been far higher than 1 year.
I'd need to dpuble check but I'm fairly certain that in 1949 the mode age of death for men would be 0, that is before their first birthday. Thay massively skews the average.
So, what you're saying is that back in 1949, the vast majority of people lived longer than average.
If only we could get back to those heady days.
The year I was born, 1966, was the last year in which the average age of death was zero. Mode of course.
I had a meeting with a Santander Personal Financial Advisor today. Nice guy, amiable, quite interesting
We got talking about the energy crisis, and he said his solution was "nationalise the energy providers, and take their profits"
I pointed out that Yes you could do that, but it didn't address the fundamental issue, gas and oil is very expensive, because Putin, so the nationalised companies would still have to pay shedloads for energy. He hadn't really thought of this, or so it seemed
After that, he was stumped for ideas. And he is a pro financial expert?
In his defence, I'm not sure anyone has any ideas, and for the rest of the meeting he gave me excellent advice
A "Santander Personal Financial Advisor" is not a pro financial expert.
Christ, you do love your footling pedantry. You know what I mean
This guy is playing a two handed game of poker with you, and if it is not clear to you who the sucker in the game is...
please, very seriously, spend an hour getting the gist of what http://monevator.com/ is on about and what it has to say about fund managers, and look very carefully at the fees in any Santander proposal. 1.5% of a fuck of a lot is a fuck of a lot for doing nothing you can't do yourself.
But I know this. He showed me upfront: they take 2% of whatever I invest. lol. As if. I can do it all myself
As soon as I told him I'd made decent money with shares in the last few years he realised I wasn't a dupe and was very unlikely to invest in his products. Did he end the meeting early? No. He sat down with me and gave me good solid advice about pensions/mortgages, stuff which was not in his brief, indeed he said "I can't sell you a pension, please go to a pension expert and try unbiased.co.uk" - he steered me AWAY from Santander
I know a lot of people in finance are evil greedy whatnots, but he wasn't. And that was nice
Oh good. Teaching my grandmother to suck eggs then, but worried in case you didn't know all that
I appreciate your concern!
But being on PB has been a financial education in itself, for which, many thanks to PB
I genuinely believe he was doing his best for me, not just for himself and Santander; he even advised me to dump the car, and he crunched the numbers and talked me through exactly how much I was spending per day on a car I drive three times a month. Made me think. How does that benefit Santander?
And yet of course there is commercial sense in him being helpful and altruistic - it made me think better of Santander, so they gain that way even if I don't buy any products
Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.
We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.
We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.
Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.
If not now, then when?
Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).
Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.
Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.
Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.
An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.
The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.
If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.
That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.
You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.
Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
The problem we have is that whilst our population has got older - and healthier in old age - our society and systems have not adapted to match.
At the time we brought in the state pension it was not too far from the truth to say that at fifty you were fucked, at sixty you were senile and at seventy you snuffed it (with a healthy dollop of poetic licence of course). What we have missed from our changing society is to accept that not only are people living longer but they are, on the whole living healthily longer as well. A fifty year old is not old, nor even a sixty year old. Many seventy year olds are perfectly capable of holding down a job, if not a very physically demanding one.
And yet when the Government less than a decade ago tried to deal with this by increasing pension ages they were met with screams of anguish and invective.
When the National Insurance Act providing for Old Age Pensions was introduced in 1946, average male life expectancy was 66. That meant you lived on average a year after you retired. Average life expectancy for men now is 79 - 13 years longer. But the pension age has only gone up by 2 years. We need to significantly increase pension age to more reasonably match the increase in life expectancy and the longer healthy, active lives we now live.
To compensate I would make similar changes at he other end of life. Have children start school at 7 rather than 5. Have them do GCSEs at 18 rather than 16 (thus avoiding having to cope with important schooling and the tail end of puberty at the same time) and have them go to University at 20 rather than 18.
Obviously this is not a perfect answer but it would at least go some way to easing the demographic pressures.
You are making an acturial mistake there.
In '49 the averagre age of death might have been 66 but the lengrh of time an average 65 year old male would be expected to live for woild have been far higher than 1 year.
I'd need to dpuble check but I'm fairly certain that in 1949 the mode age of death for men would be 0, that is before their first birthday. Thay massively skews the average.
So, what you're saying is that back in 1949, the vast majority of people lived longer than average.
It's hardly a surprise that a finance person has no answer to the energy crisis. Probably not many economists do either, because the solution is upstream, in Moscow and it is military. We depend on Kyiv to sort it out, and Boris has been in the man on the spot while the chicken-lickens at home are crying that the sky is falling in.
Between 1976 and 1983, world oil consumption dropped 15%. And yet the world economy was significantly larger in '83.
When you have a supply shock like this, people start getting a lot more efficient in their usage. The demand curve moves to the left.
Sure, but how may businesses have seven years at these rates ? To go back to the status quo ante, we need a 15% drop in the next couple of months.
In the first six months of the year, German gas demand fell 14%. Now, sure, they have more heavy industry to turn off. But just a modest amount of energy efficiency can cut a surprising amount from natural gas usage.
German electric generation was only around 15% reliant on natural gas, though. Aren't we about 50% ?
Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.
We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.
We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.
Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.
If not now, then when?
Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).
Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.
Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.
Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.
An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.
The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.
If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.
That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.
You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.
Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
The problem we have is that whilst our population has got older - and healthier in old age - our society and systems have not adapted to match.
At the time we brought in the state pension it was not too far from the truth to say that at fifty you were fucked, at sixty you were senile and at seventy you snuffed it (with a healthy dollop of poetic licence of course). What we have missed from our changing society is to accept that not only are people living longer but they are, on the whole living healthily longer as well. A fifty year old is not old, nor even a sixty year old. Many seventy year olds are perfectly capable of holding down a job, if not a very physically demanding one.
And yet when the Government less than a decade ago tried to deal with this by increasing pension ages they were met with screams of anguish and invective.
When the National Insurance Act providing for Old Age Pensions was introduced in 1946, average male life expectancy was 66. That meant you lived on average a year after you retired. Average life expectancy for men now is 79 - 13 years longer. But the pension age has only gone up by 2 years. We need to significantly increase pension age to more reasonably match the increase in life expectancy and the longer healthy, active lives we now live.
To compensate I would make similar changes at he other end of life. Have children start school at 7 rather than 5. Have them do GCSEs at 18 rather than 16 (thus avoiding having to cope with important schooling and the tail end of puberty at the same time) and have them go to University at 20 rather than 18.
Obviously this is not a perfect answer but it would at least go some way to easing the demographic pressures.
You are making an acturial mistake there.
In '49 the averagre age of death might have been 66 but the lengrh of time an average 65 year old male would be expected to live for woild have been far higher than 1 year.
I'd need to dpuble check but I'm fairly certain that in 1949 the mode age of death for men would be 0, that is before their first birthday. Thay massively skews the average.
So, what you're saying is that back in 1949, the vast majority of people lived longer than average.
If only we could get back to those heady days.
The vast majority of people still have more legs and arms than the average person.
Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.
We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.
We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.
Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.
If not now, then when?
Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).
Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.
Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.
Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.
An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.
The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.
If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.
That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.
You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.
Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
The problem we have is that whilst our population has got older - and healthier in old age - our society and systems have not adapted to match.
At the time we brought in the state pension it was not too far from the truth to say that at fifty you were fucked, at sixty you were senile and at seventy you snuffed it (with a healthy dollop of poetic licence of course). What we have missed from our changing society is to accept that not only are people living longer but they are, on the whole living healthily longer as well. A fifty year old is not old, nor even a sixty year old. Many seventy year olds are perfectly capable of holding down a job, if not a very physically demanding one.
And yet when the Government less than a decade ago tried to deal with this by increasing pension ages they were met with screams of anguish and invective.
When the National Insurance Act providing for Old Age Pensions was introduced in 1946, average male life expectancy was 66. That meant you lived on average a year after you retired. Average life expectancy for men now is 79 - 13 years longer. But the pension age has only gone up by 2 years. We need to significantly increase pension age to more reasonably match the increase in life expectancy and the longer healthy, active lives we now live.
To compensate I would make similar changes at he other end of life. Have children start school at 7 rather than 5. Have them do GCSEs at 18 rather than 16 (thus avoiding having to cope with important schooling and the tail end of puberty at the same time) and have them go to University at 20 rather than 18.
Obviously this is not a perfect answer but it would at least go some way to easing the demographic pressures.
You are making an acturial mistake there.
In '49 the averagre age of death might have been 66 but the lengrh of time an average 65 year old male would be expected to live for woild have been far higher than 1 year.
I'd need to dpuble check but I'm fairly certain that in 1949 the mode age of death for men would be 0, that is before their first birthday. Thay massively skews the average.
So, what you're saying is that back in 1949, the vast majority of people lived longer than average.
If only we could get back to those heady days.
The year I was born, 1966, was the last year in which the average age of death was zero. Mode of course.
I had no idea the transition was so late, in 1966. But that makes sense when one thinks about it. Everyone is zero when they are born, and it is a risky time.
When clearing my father's papers, I found the Prudential life policy his mum took out on his life *when he was born in 1925* - specifically to pay the funeral costs if/when he died as a baby/in childhood. Very common in the late Victorian and early C20, before antibiotics and vaccines other than smallpox.
Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.
We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.
We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.
Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.
If not now, then when?
Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).
Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.
Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.
Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.
An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.
The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.
If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.
That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.
You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.
Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
The problem we have is that whilst our population has got older - and healthier in old age - our society and systems have not adapted to match.
At the time we brought in the state pension it was not too far from the truth to say that at fifty you were fucked, at sixty you were senile and at seventy you snuffed it (with a healthy dollop of poetic licence of course). What we have missed from our changing society is to accept that not only are people living longer but they are, on the whole living healthily longer as well. A fifty year old is not old, nor even a sixty year old. Many seventy year olds are perfectly capable of holding down a job, if not a very physically demanding one.
And yet when the Government less than a decade ago tried to deal with this by increasing pension ages they were met with screams of anguish and invective.
When the National Insurance Act providing for Old Age Pensions was introduced in 1946, average male life expectancy was 66. That meant you lived on average a year after you retired. Average life expectancy for men now is 79 - 13 years longer. But the pension age has only gone up by 2 years. We need to significantly increase pension age to more reasonably match the increase in life expectancy and the longer healthy, active lives we now live.
To compensate I would make similar changes at he other end of life. Have children start school at 7 rather than 5. Have them do GCSEs at 18 rather than 16 (thus avoiding having to cope with important schooling and the tail end of puberty at the same time) and have them go to University at 20 rather than 18.
Obviously this is not a perfect answer but it would at least go some way to easing the demographic pressures.
Hum. Problems. Already young people are relationally squeezed so that after gap year, first degree, masters, other professional training, doing down cul-de-sacs, meeting the wrong partner, trying to afford a one bedroom flat in a war zone etc millions find they are early thirties or later before they are ready for starting a family. This plan pushes it back further. Overall this is not a good plan.
Clocks tick. IMHO we need more of the cleverer house and family ready earlier not later. The pressure of young women especially is immense.
This is not only an emotional pressure on our great young people, (about whom I have nothing but good to say) but also demographically challenging. By this time for millions 2 children is the max not the minimum possible. Which has already led to the inevitable consequence.
"gap year, first degree, masters, other professional training, doing down cul-de-sacs, meeting the wrong partner"
Just to pick up a few of those, I am not sure we should be deciding long term demographic policy on the basis of whether someone has a gap year or does a masters. Most don't.
As it currently stands we ask our children to do some of their most important learning at exactly the wrong time - when they are going through emotional and physical turmoil of their teens. It seems to me that shifting this to when they are slightly older is no bad thing. Moreover, if you are going to ask older people to work longer then you either need to create more jobs or have the younger generation start later.
FPT and to @Nigelb re the Democrats and VP candidates. Actually, I think you might be right although we may have differing ways we have reached the conclusion...
For now, I was just interested in having a bet on the guy at long odds, if available. Sadly there wasn't the option.
Who the candidates are actually going to be is something I'm not going to have a go at predicting until after the midterms at the earliest.
It's hardly a surprise that a finance person has no answer to the energy crisis. Probably not many economists do either, because the solution is upstream, in Moscow and it is military. We depend on Kyiv to sort it out, and Boris has been in the man on the spot while the chicken-lickens at home are crying that the sky is falling in.
Between 1976 and 1983, world oil consumption dropped 15%. And yet the world economy was significantly larger in '83.
When you have a supply shock like this, people start getting a lot more efficient in their usage. The demand curve moves to the left.
Sure, but how may businesses have seven years at these rates ? To go back to the status quo ante, we need a 15% drop in the next couple of months.
In the first six months of the year, German gas demand fell 14%. Now, sure, they have more heavy industry to turn off. But just a modest amount of energy efficiency can cut a surprising amount from natural gas usage.
German electric generation was only around 15% reliant on natural gas, though. Aren't we about 50% ?
Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.
We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.
We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.
Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.
If not now, then when?
Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).
Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.
Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.
Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.
An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.
The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.
If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.
That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.
You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.
Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
The problem we have is that whilst our population has got older - and healthier in old age - our society and systems have not adapted to match.
At the time we brought in the state pension it was not too far from the truth to say that at fifty you were fucked, at sixty you were senile and at seventy you snuffed it (with a healthy dollop of poetic licence of course). What we have missed from our changing society is to accept that not only are people living longer but they are, on the whole living healthily longer as well. A fifty year old is not old, nor even a sixty year old. Many seventy year olds are perfectly capable of holding down a job, if not a very physically demanding one.
And yet when the Government less than a decade ago tried to deal with this by increasing pension ages they were met with screams of anguish and invective.
When the National Insurance Act providing for Old Age Pensions was introduced in 1946, average male life expectancy was 66. That meant you lived on average a year after you retired. Average life expectancy for men now is 79 - 13 years longer. But the pension age has only gone up by 2 years. We need to significantly increase pension age to more reasonably match the increase in life expectancy and the longer healthy, active lives we now live.
To compensate I would make similar changes at he other end of life. Have children start school at 7 rather than 5. Have them do GCSEs at 18 rather than 16 (thus avoiding having to cope with important schooling and the tail end of puberty at the same time) and have them go to University at 20 rather than 18.
Obviously this is not a perfect answer but it would at least go some way to easing the demographic pressures.
You are making an acturial mistake there.
In '49 the averagre age of death might have been 66 but the lengrh of time an average 65 year old male would be expected to live for woild have been far higher than 1 year.
I'd need to dpuble check but I'm fairly certain that in 1949 the mode age of death for men would be 0, that is before their first birthday. Thay massively skews the average.
So, what you're saying is that back in 1949, the vast majority of people lived longer than average.
If only we could get back to those heady days.
The vast majority of people still have more legs and arms than the average person.
Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.
We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.
We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.
Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.
If not now, then when?
Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).
Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.
Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.
Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.
An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.
The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.
If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.
That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.
You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.
Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
The problem we have is that whilst our population has got older - and healthier in old age - our society and systems have not adapted to match.
At the time we brought in the state pension it was not too far from the truth to say that at fifty you were fucked, at sixty you were senile and at seventy you snuffed it (with a healthy dollop of poetic licence of course). What we have missed from our changing society is to accept that not only are people living longer but they are, on the whole living healthily longer as well. A fifty year old is not old, nor even a sixty year old. Many seventy year olds are perfectly capable of holding down a job, if not a very physically demanding one.
And yet when the Government less than a decade ago tried to deal with this by increasing pension ages they were met with screams of anguish and invective.
When the National Insurance Act providing for Old Age Pensions was introduced in 1946, average male life expectancy was 66. That meant you lived on average a year after you retired. Average life expectancy for men now is 79 - 13 years longer. But the pension age has only gone up by 2 years. We need to significantly increase pension age to more reasonably match the increase in life expectancy and the longer healthy, active lives we now live.
To compensate I would make similar changes at he other end of life. Have children start school at 7 rather than 5. Have them do GCSEs at 18 rather than 16 (thus avoiding having to cope with important schooling and the tail end of puberty at the same time) and have them go to University at 20 rather than 18.
Obviously this is not a perfect answer but it would at least go some way to easing the demographic pressures.
You are making an acturial mistake there.
In '49 the averagre age of death might have been 66 but the lengrh of time an average 65 year old male would be expected to live for woild have been far higher than 1 year.
I'd need to dpuble check but I'm fairly certain that in 1949 the mode age of death for men would be 0, that is before their first birthday. Thay massively skews the average.
So, what you're saying is that back in 1949, the vast majority of people lived longer than average.
If only we could get back to those heady days.
The year I was born, 1966, was the last year in which the average age of death was zero. Mode of course.
Although as I understand it that doesn't affect the Average Life Expectancy figures as infant mortality under the age of 1 is not included in those calculations. At least it never used to be.
I dont think Truss is ready for the absolute shitstorm coming her way if she blunders this. The economy is becoming detatched from the ability of many to exist within it. If she plays this 'i have a plan but its a secret' game and it turns out to be fucking daft and half arsed tax cuts i can see the country erupting.
She doesn't just have the country to think of. There's also the Tory Party membership, which is a very different demographic on average, with different priorities.
Presumably the Tory MPs have to find some sort of mediated compromise between those ...
It's hardly a surprise that a finance person has no answer to the energy crisis. Probably not many economists do either, because the solution is upstream, in Moscow and it is military. We depend on Kyiv to sort it out, and Boris has been in the man on the spot while the chicken-lickens at home are crying that the sky is falling in.
Between 1976 and 1983, world oil consumption dropped 15%. And yet the world economy was significantly larger in '83.
When you have a supply shock like this, people start getting a lot more efficient in their usage. The demand curve moves to the left.
Sure, but how may businesses have seven years at these rates ? To go back to the status quo ante, we need a 15% drop in the next couple of months.
In the first six months of the year, German gas demand fell 14%. Now, sure, they have more heavy industry to turn off. But just a modest amount of energy efficiency can cut a surprising amount from natural gas usage.
German electric generation was only around 15% reliant on natural gas, though. Aren't we about 50% ?
Braunkohle is what keeps the lights on in Germany
Even lignite use has dropped in Germany, albeit they have lots of capacity
Why not? The Labour Party have been so abject between Prime Ministers, an early election and a 20 to 40 seat Conservative majority is not beyond the realms of probability.
Starmer has been AWOL. Nothing on the CoL crisis, nothing on the gang warfare in our cities. The tragedy is everyone else in the Labour Party have been silent too. Oh, except the King of the North who is organising some marches. " Marching, marching, marching up and down. Marching, marching, marching all around" What a dickhead!
Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.
We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.
We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.
Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.
If not now, then when?
Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).
Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.
Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.
Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.
An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.
The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.
If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.
That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.
You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.
Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
The problem we have is that whilst our population has got older - and healthier in old age - our society and systems have not adapted to match.
At the time we brought in the state pension it was not too far from the truth to say that at fifty you were fucked, at sixty you were senile and at seventy you snuffed it (with a healthy dollop of poetic licence of course). What we have missed from our changing society is to accept that not only are people living longer but they are, on the whole living healthily longer as well. A fifty year old is not old, nor even a sixty year old. Many seventy year olds are perfectly capable of holding down a job, if not a very physically demanding one.
And yet when the Government less than a decade ago tried to deal with this by increasing pension ages they were met with screams of anguish and invective.
When the National Insurance Act providing for Old Age Pensions was introduced in 1946, average male life expectancy was 66. That meant you lived on average a year after you retired. Average life expectancy for men now is 79 - 13 years longer. But the pension age has only gone up by 2 years. We need to significantly increase pension age to more reasonably match the increase in life expectancy and the longer healthy, active lives we now live.
To compensate I would make similar changes at he other end of life. Have children start school at 7 rather than 5. Have them do GCSEs at 18 rather than 16 (thus avoiding having to cope with important schooling and the tail end of puberty at the same time) and have them go to University at 20 rather than 18.
Obviously this is not a perfect answer but it would at least go some way to easing the demographic pressures.
You are making an acturial mistake there.
In '49 the averagre age of death might have been 66 but the lengrh of time an average 65 year old male would be expected to live for woild have been far higher than 1 year.
I'd need to dpuble check but I'm fairly certain that in 1949 the mode age of death for men would be 0, that is before their first birthday. Thay massively skews the average.
So, what you're saying is that back in 1949, the vast majority of people lived longer than average.
If only we could get back to those heady days.
The vast majority of people still have more legs and arms than the average person.
It's hardly a surprise that a finance person has no answer to the energy crisis. Probably not many economists do either, because the solution is upstream, in Moscow and it is military. We depend on Kyiv to sort it out, and Boris has been in the man on the spot while the chicken-lickens at home are crying that the sky is falling in.
They call them personal financial advisors but all they really are is sales people, mostly selling high margin rip off products.
This was my experience last week. I got a 'free' call with a financial advisor as a 'benefit from my employer'. It led to an attempt to sell me a pension scheme where their annual fees were about 4%, there was a 6 year exclusivity period with large exit penalties, and there were only about 8 different funds I could choose to invest the money in. To my mind this meets the definition of a rip off product.
St James's Place?
If you buy their "special" products, you can end up at that kind of rate. But I don't think most people are paying that across their complete portfolio.
It started off at an 'all inclusive fee' of 2%, then changed to 2 - 4.5% depending on the product. I didn't like the direction it was going in. The exit fees were a big red flag.
It's hardly a surprise that a finance person has no answer to the energy crisis. Probably not many economists do either, because the solution is upstream, in Moscow and it is military. We depend on Kyiv to sort it out, and Boris has been in the man on the spot while the chicken-lickens at home are crying that the sky is falling in.
Between 1976 and 1983, world oil consumption dropped 15%. And yet the world economy was significantly larger in '83.
When you have a supply shock like this, people start getting a lot more efficient in their usage. The demand curve moves to the left.
Sure, but how may businesses have seven years at these rates ? To go back to the status quo ante, we need a 15% drop in the next couple of months.
In the first six months of the year, German gas demand fell 14%. Now, sure, they have more heavy industry to turn off. But just a modest amount of energy efficiency can cut a surprising amount from natural gas usage.
German electric generation was only around 15% reliant on natural gas, though. Aren't we about 50% ?
Braunkohle is what keeps the lights on in Germany
Even lignite use has dropped in Germany, albeit they have lots of capacity
Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.
We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.
We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.
Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.
If not now, then when?
Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).
Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.
Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.
Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.
An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.
The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.
If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.
That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.
You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.
Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
The problem we have is that whilst our population has got older - and healthier in old age - our society and systems have not adapted to match.
At the time we brought in the state pension it was not too far from the truth to say that at fifty you were fucked, at sixty you were senile and at seventy you snuffed it (with a healthy dollop of poetic licence of course). What we have missed from our changing society is to accept that not only are people living longer but they are, on the whole living healthily longer as well. A fifty year old is not old, nor even a sixty year old. Many seventy year olds are perfectly capable of holding down a job, if not a very physically demanding one.
And yet when the Government less than a decade ago tried to deal with this by increasing pension ages they were met with screams of anguish and invective.
When the National Insurance Act providing for Old Age Pensions was introduced in 1946, average male life expectancy was 66. That meant you lived on average a year after you retired. Average life expectancy for men now is 79 - 13 years longer. But the pension age has only gone up by 2 years. We need to significantly increase pension age to more reasonably match the increase in life expectancy and the longer healthy, active lives we now live.
To compensate I would make similar changes at he other end of life. Have children start school at 7 rather than 5. Have them do GCSEs at 18 rather than 16 (thus avoiding having to cope with important schooling and the tail end of puberty at the same time) and have them go to University at 20 rather than 18.
Obviously this is not a perfect answer but it would at least go some way to easing the demographic pressures.
Given the increasing popularity of part time work in 50s, 60s and 70s I would suggest phasing in the state pension to reflect that. Perhaps 20% at 62, 40% at 65, 75% at 70 and 100% at 75. Not sure it saves much money off those numbers but think it better fits how people retire.
I was doing a bit of research about this prior to posting that last comment and I saw that in Japan you can take your state pension between 60 and 70 and the later you leave it the more you get. That fits well with your suggestion and seems a very good idea.
Two immediate further easures for me though would be
Get rid of the Triple Lock Everyone who is working pays National Insurance even if they are past retirement age.
I deferred taking the state pension until I was 67. I could do this because I already had a teacher's pension and was a borough councillor from age 63 to 67.
Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.
We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.
We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.
Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.
If not now, then when?
Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).
Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.
Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.
Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.
An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.
The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.
If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.
That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.
You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.
Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
The problem we have is that whilst our population has got older - and healthier in old age - our society and systems have not adapted to match.
At the time we brought in the state pension it was not too far from the truth to say that at fifty you were fucked, at sixty you were senile and at seventy you snuffed it (with a healthy dollop of poetic licence of course). What we have missed from our changing society is to accept that not only are people living longer but they are, on the whole living healthily longer as well. A fifty year old is not old, nor even a sixty year old. Many seventy year olds are perfectly capable of holding down a job, if not a very physically demanding one.
And yet when the Government less than a decade ago tried to deal with this by increasing pension ages they were met with screams of anguish and invective.
When the National Insurance Act providing for Old Age Pensions was introduced in 1946, average male life expectancy was 66. That meant you lived on average a year after you retired. Average life expectancy for men now is 79 - 13 years longer. But the pension age has only gone up by 2 years. We need to significantly increase pension age to more reasonably match the increase in life expectancy and the longer healthy, active lives we now live.
To compensate I would make similar changes at he other end of life. Have children start school at 7 rather than 5. Have them do GCSEs at 18 rather than 16 (thus avoiding having to cope with important schooling and the tail end of puberty at the same time) and have them go to University at 20 rather than 18.
Obviously this is not a perfect answer but it would at least go some way to easing the demographic pressures.
Given the increasing popularity of part time work in 50s, 60s and 70s I would suggest phasing in the state pension to reflect that. Perhaps 20% at 62, 40% at 65, 75% at 70 and 100% at 75. Not sure it saves much money off those numbers but think it better fits how people retire.
I was doing a bit of research about this prior to posting that last comment and I saw that in Japan you can take your state pension between 60 and 70 and the later you leave it the more you get. That fits well with your suggestion and seems a very good idea.
Two immediate further easures for me though would be
Get rid of the Triple Lock Everyone who is working pays National Insurance even if they are past retirement age.
I deferred taking the state pension until I was 67. I could do this because I already had a teacher's pension and was a borough councillor from age 63 to 67.
George Osborne deferred my taking the state pension until I am 67. Very thoughtful of him.
I had a meeting with a Santander Personal Financial Advisor today. Nice guy, amiable, quite interesting
We got talking about the energy crisis, and he said his solution was "nationalise the energy providers, and take their profits"
I pointed out that Yes you could do that, but it didn't address the fundamental issue, gas and oil is very expensive, because Putin, so the nationalised companies would still have to pay shedloads for energy. He hadn't really thought of this, or so it seemed
After that, he was stumped for ideas. And he is a pro financial expert?
In his defence, I'm not sure anyone has any ideas, and for the rest of the meeting he gave me excellent advice
A "Santander Personal Financial Advisor" is not a pro financial expert.
Christ, you do love your footling pedantry. You know what I mean
That's not pedantry. The man is an expert at selling Santander products, he knows next to nothing about finance beyond what generates him a bonus.
Not true. He was really good with mortgage and pension stuff, and didn't try to sell me anything - in fact he steered me away from Santander Products. And he did this for free, for an hour (as a service to some Santander customers)
It's hardly a surprise that a finance person has no answer to the energy crisis. Probably not many economists do either, because the solution is upstream, in Moscow and it is military. We depend on Kyiv to sort it out, and Boris has been in the man on the spot while the chicken-lickens at home are crying that the sky is falling in.
Although even a defeat of Russia doesn't solve the problem, unless you want Western countries to go straight back to making deals with Putin.
A post-defeat Russia will be desperate to sell its hydrocarbons.
And if they're going to pay reparations, they will need the export revenue.
'Buy gas from Russia to rebuild Ukraine' has a nice ring to it.
And the beauty of it is, if it's exported to Europe then Ukraine has control over its distribution anyway!
I think you're all indulging in fantasy of the highest order.
On the subject of pensions, my understanding is that in Finland you and your employer pay in 24% of your gross income to a pension fund. You get back 1.5% of your annual pay per year after retirement, adjusted for inflation. So if you earned 30,000 euros per year for 40 years, you would get a pension of 18,000 euros per year (adjusted for inflation).
This seems quite a lot better than our system of national insurance (state pension) plus workplace pensions of varying quality.
It's hardly a surprise that a finance person has no answer to the energy crisis. Probably not many economists do either, because the solution is upstream, in Moscow and it is military. We depend on Kyiv to sort it out, and Boris has been in the man on the spot while the chicken-lickens at home are crying that the sky is falling in.
Between 1976 and 1983, world oil consumption dropped 15%. And yet the world economy was significantly larger in '83.
When you have a supply shock like this, people start getting a lot more efficient in their usage. The demand curve moves to the left.
Sure, but how may businesses have seven years at these rates ? To go back to the status quo ante, we need a 15% drop in the next couple of months.
In the first six months of the year, German gas demand fell 14%. Now, sure, they have more heavy industry to turn off. But just a modest amount of energy efficiency can cut a surprising amount from natural gas usage.
German electric generation was only around 15% reliant on natural gas, though. Aren't we about 50% ?
We seem to have almost uniquely gone all in on gas
On the subject of pensions, my understanding is that in Finland you and your employer pay in 24% of your gross income to a pension fund. You get back 1.5% of your annual pay per year after retirement, adjusted for inflation. So if you earned 30,000 euros per year for 40 years, you would get a pension of 18,000 euros per year (adjusted for inflation).
This seems quite a lot better than our system of national insurance (state pension) plus workplace pensions of varying quality.
On the subject of pensions, my understanding is that in Finland you and your employer pay in 24% of your gross income to a pension fund. You get back 1.5% of your annual pay per year after retirement, adjusted for inflation. So if you earned 30,000 euros per year for 40 years, you would get a pension of 18,000 euros per year (adjusted for inflation).
This seems quite a lot better than our system of national insurance (state pension) plus workplace pensions of varying quality.
There are also workplace pensions I'm Finland.
Is there any point when the state provision is that good? It seems like the state provides the equivalent of a civil service career average pension for everyone.
It's hardly a surprise that a finance person has no answer to the energy crisis. Probably not many economists do either, because the solution is upstream, in Moscow and it is military. We depend on Kyiv to sort it out, and Boris has been in the man on the spot while the chicken-lickens at home are crying that the sky is falling in.
Between 1976 and 1983, world oil consumption dropped 15%. And yet the world economy was significantly larger in '83.
When you have a supply shock like this, people start getting a lot more efficient in their usage. The demand curve moves to the left.
Sure, but how may businesses have seven years at these rates ? To go back to the status quo ante, we need a 15% drop in the next couple of months.
In the first six months of the year, German gas demand fell 14%. Now, sure, they have more heavy industry to turn off. But just a modest amount of energy efficiency can cut a surprising amount from natural gas usage.
German electric generation was only around 15% reliant on natural gas, though. Aren't we about 50% ?
We seem to have almost uniquely gone all in on gas
To be fair, Boris certainly added plenty of hot air to the mix.
It's hardly a surprise that a finance person has no answer to the energy crisis. Probably not many economists do either, because the solution is upstream, in Moscow and it is military. We depend on Kyiv to sort it out, and Boris has been in the man on the spot while the chicken-lickens at home are crying that the sky is falling in.
Between 1976 and 1983, world oil consumption dropped 15%. And yet the world economy was significantly larger in '83.
When you have a supply shock like this, people start getting a lot more efficient in their usage. The demand curve moves to the left.
Sure, but how may businesses have seven years at these rates ? To go back to the status quo ante, we need a 15% drop in the next couple of months.
In the first six months of the year, German gas demand fell 14%. Now, sure, they have more heavy industry to turn off. But just a modest amount of energy efficiency can cut a surprising amount from natural gas usage.
German electric generation was only around 15% reliant on natural gas, though. Aren't we about 50% ?
Braunkohle is what keeps the lights on in Germany
Even lignite use has dropped in Germany, albeit they have lots of capacity
In the current economic climate, why aren't they running their lignite flat out 24/7 and exporting the surplus - ultimately it would mean someone isn't burning scarce and expensive gas?
It's hardly a surprise that a finance person has no answer to the energy crisis. Probably not many economists do either, because the solution is upstream, in Moscow and it is military. We depend on Kyiv to sort it out, and Boris has been in the man on the spot while the chicken-lickens at home are crying that the sky is falling in.
Between 1976 and 1983, world oil consumption dropped 15%. And yet the world economy was significantly larger in '83.
When you have a supply shock like this, people start getting a lot more efficient in their usage. The demand curve moves to the left.
Sure, but how may businesses have seven years at these rates ? To go back to the status quo ante, we need a 15% drop in the next couple of months.
In the first six months of the year, German gas demand fell 14%. Now, sure, they have more heavy industry to turn off. But just a modest amount of energy efficiency can cut a surprising amount from natural gas usage.
German electric generation was only around 15% reliant on natural gas, though. Aren't we about 50% ?
Braunkohle is what keeps the lights on in Germany
Even lignite use has dropped in Germany, albeit they have lots of capacity
In the current economic climate, why aren't they running their lignite flat out 24/7 and exporting the surplus - ultimately it would mean someone isn't burning scarce and expensive gas?
Very low grade stuff, so inherently costly to mine and transport per final joule? Not worth exporting?
It's hardly a surprise that a finance person has no answer to the energy crisis. Probably not many economists do either, because the solution is upstream, in Moscow and it is military. We depend on Kyiv to sort it out, and Boris has been in the man on the spot while the chicken-lickens at home are crying that the sky is falling in.
Between 1976 and 1983, world oil consumption dropped 15%. And yet the world economy was significantly larger in '83.
When you have a supply shock like this, people start getting a lot more efficient in their usage. The demand curve moves to the left.
Sure, but how may businesses have seven years at these rates ? To go back to the status quo ante, we need a 15% drop in the next couple of months.
In the first six months of the year, German gas demand fell 14%. Now, sure, they have more heavy industry to turn off. But just a modest amount of energy efficiency can cut a surprising amount from natural gas usage.
German electric generation was only around 15% reliant on natural gas, though. Aren't we about 50% ?
Braunkohle is what keeps the lights on in Germany
Even lignite use has dropped in Germany, albeit they have lots of capacity
In the current economic climate, why aren't they running their lignite flat out 24/7 and exporting the surplus - ultimately it would mean someone isn't burning scarce and expensive gas?
Very low grade stuff, so inherently costly to mine and transport per final joule? Not worth exporting?
PS That graph ends with 2021, too.
As in - burn it in German power stations run maxed out all the time, and export the electricity to the rest of Europe (given I think we're currently burning scarce gas to export electricity to France, burning lignite and storing the gas would make much more sense).
I dont think Truss is ready for the absolute shitstorm coming her way if she blunders this. The economy is becoming detatched from the ability of many to exist within it. If she plays this 'i have a plan but its a secret' game and it turns out to be fucking daft and half arsed tax cuts i can see the country erupting.
Setting fire to Parliament would certainly be one way for some of the desperate to keep warm for a few hours.
Truss might simply shit on her supporters the nanosecond that she secures the leadership, dump all the tax cuts and find £50bn down the back of the sofa to stop half the country from freezing to death, or she might be a complete swivel-eyed loon. We only have to wait another fortnight or so for the Tories to finish dicking about before the truth is revealed, I suppose. Unless we get stonewalled after that with waffle about emergency budgets, in which case it could be three weeks. Or a month.
C4News. No-one representing Truss prepared to come on. Instead a statement about how tax cuts will put more money in people’s pockets. Fuc*ing ridiculous!
Liz Truss confirmed in the hustings last week she would not call a general election until 2024 at the earliest. Given the polls suggest Labour would win a majority at the moment that is wise but even if she got a huge bounce and took a clear poll lead (despite polls now having her trailing Starmer as preferred PM) an early election would not be wise as she would still likely lose seats and as 2017 showed voters do not like unnecessary elections called by parties with clear majorities
"2024 at the earliest"
If she's planning on having it after 2024, we might have a teensy bit of problem.
The Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Act 2022 provides that "If it has not been dissolved earlier, a Parliament dissolves at the beginning of the day that is the fifth anniversary of the day on which it first met." The present Parliament met on 17 December 2019. The last possible polling date is 25 working days after the 5th anniversary on 17 December 2024, i.e 24 January 2025. That day’s a Friday, and given the convention now is to have elections on a Thursday we’re looking at 23 Jan 2025 as the last possible date. Just after the next US presidential inauguration.
Its a reasonable play for Truss. Despite all she has done people will turn out and vote Tory in fear after watching Trump reappointed president.
Betting wise, might be worthwhile - if there is a market - having a bet on another Conservative leadership election in 2023.
My feeling increasingly is that Truss is going to fuck this up massively, primarily over the issue of energy bills (which would please Putin, Lavrov et al no end). The idea of JRM coming on the airwaves to explain why the Government won't help out is guaranteed to cause apoplexy.
I also think anger over energy issues will feed into other areas which is why we are starting to get tirades about the ambulance service.
The Green Party's transport policy doesn't seem to be very coherent. They're opposed to HS2, complain that trains to Birmingham are too full but also that tickets are too expensive, and think the solution is public ownership:
Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.
We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.
We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.
Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.
If not now, then when?
Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).
Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.
Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.
Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.
An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.
The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.
If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.
That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.
You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.
Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
I see four obvious options:
1) Increase retirement age much quicker. A bit unfair on those under 67, but makes things more sustainable.
2) Increase the charges for health and social care, even if cashflow is deferred and paid from assets when they pass away. Thereby stopping the increasing tax burden from falling on the economically productive part of the population.
3) Wealth taxes to achieve a similar goal to point 2 but shared across more people (but still biased to older generations). Abolishing NI and making part of income tax has a similar effect.
4) Continue to put all the tax burden on an ever shrinking working population as the economy gradually gets less productive and slowly decline into a shadow of our former self.
"Tunisia migrants: TikTok stars and a crumbling economy fuel exodus across the Mediterranean new Children, white collar workers and social media influencers are joining the record number of people making the perilous voyage, Tom Kington writes" (£)
Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.
We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.
We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.
Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.
If not now, then when?
Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).
Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.
Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.
Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.
An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.
The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.
If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.
That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.
You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.
Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
This reminds me of something I posted a couple of days ago. Comments from telegraph readers on the cost of living crisis.
"Thousands of you took to our comments section to air your thoughts on the matter and, while many readers expressed sympathy with the young, there was also outrage – outrage that having to endure food rationing, ballooning inflation, power shortages and myriad financial crashes in previous decades should be seen as “having it easy”. Not to mention the decades of fiscal responsibility, careful saving and hard graft that have translated into comfortable retirements. Advice was freely and generously given on how the young might face down economic hardship. Here is what you had to say... "
"When we were young, we paid for the pensions of the old and retired. Now it’s for the young to pay for us and shut up complaining.”
..."Modern generations, due to, no matter the cost, wanting everything now, have put themselves dangerously in debt and when an unexpected financial crisis happens, they are left all at sea, unable to pay the essential bills first. I am lucky to not be seriously affected by next year’s enormous fuel bills, but why should my savings be raided and my pension frozen to subsidise the fiscally incompetent?”
I'd suggest three measures:
1) Increase immigration by allowing British-descended foreigners the right to live and work in the UK
Italy and Ireland make it very easy for descendents of emigrants to move there. We should do the same. Importing lots of semi-literate Somalis or homeless Romanians is politically and socially impossible, but I've never heard any objections to Canadians or Australians. Most of those who take advantage of this would be young and productive. Also we should remove the remaining restrictions on Hong Kongers living and working here.
2) Promote the building of large family houses where people actually want to live
The current planning system is far too skewed towards "density", i.e. stack-a-chav concrete boxes. We need to build more houses that families want to live in to get the country having children again.
3) Stop taxing work and start taxing idleness
It is insane that employment income is taxed more heavily than retirement income, though the old use government services far more than those of working age.
I disagree with 2. In my experience, large houses are bought up by people in their 50's / 60's who have massive pensions, and equity from house price inflation. 4/5 bedrooms for the grandchildren, guests etc. Most families can't actually afford these type of houses. We need to build more high density houses, which is actually the stuff that the volume housebuilders turn out, because this is the type of places that families ultimately move to, because it is what they can afford (particularly with help to buy subsidies etc). That is how I see it all working out, anyway.
I think 1 may be regarded as a 'racist' policy by some. Of course, the best solution was arguably free movement in the EU, the problem was always that we were not building enough houses to cope with it.
Ireland achieves #1 through nationality law and not migration policy as such, namely conservation of nationality across two generations. The reason the UK won't take this route is to keep out all the descendants of people whose grandparents had Empire nationality at one time.
We can simply define it as those who can produce a birth certificate of an ancestor showing that that ancestor was born in the (now) UK. That's what the Italians do. A Brazilian friend of mine is going through this process now.
We Are All Snowflakes Now. This is how it will pan out: Truss will hold out for a week offering tax cuts and austerity and then cave and say all Must Have Heating, after its too late to salvage much political capital by doing so. and unless she emulates the underrated Lord North and takes the CotE job in-house everyone will say what a lovely man Kwasi is, and she'll be looking at the Next Leader betting and glancing over her shoulder at him.
Read an interesting comment from a rather annoyed man on Conhome:
'Astonishing; that you have the brass neck to accuse other people of "not cottoning onto reality" - yet you don't mention the 500 ton elephant in the room. The vast quantities of gas, right under our feet in the Bowland Basin! A survey was done in 2013 by the British Geological Survey. If their most conservative estimate of the gas reserves is correct, there's enough gas to supply the whole of the UK at 2018 rates of consumption, for 275 years!'
@Richard_Tyndall ; @rcs1000 - this is very much at odds with prevailing opinion. Has the commentor got this totally wrong, and if so, how has he got it so wrong? Or is the gas he is referring to just really hard to winkle out?
Edit: of course anybody else with relevant info or thoughts is welcome to offer an opinion.
We Are All Snowflakes Now. This is how it will pan out: Truss will hold out for a week offering tax cuts and austerity and then cave and say all Must Have Heating, after its too late to salvage much political capital by doing so. and unless she emulates the underrated Lord North and takes the CotE job in-house everyone will say what a lovely man Kwasi is, and she'll be looking at the Next Leader betting and glancing over her shoulder at him.
Do you mean hold out till a week from now, or hold out a week once in the job? Don't see why she'd do the latter.
The Green Party's transport policy doesn't seem to be very coherent. They're opposed to HS2, complain that trains to Birmingham are too full but also that tickets are too expensive, and think the solution is public ownership:
Read an interesting comment from a rather annoyed man on Conhome:
'Astonishing; that you have the brass neck to accuse other people of "not cottoning onto reality" - yet you don't mention the 500 ton elephant in the room. The vast quantities of gas, right under our feet in the Bowland Basin! A survey was done in 2013 by the British Geological Survey. If their most conservative estimate of the gas reserves is correct, there's enough gas to supply the whole of the UK at 2018 rates of consumption, for 275 years!'
@Richard_Tyndall ; @rcs1000 - this is very much at odds with prevailing opinion. Has the commentor got this totally wrong, and if so, how has he got it so wrong? Or is the gas he is referring to just really hard to winkle out?
Edit: of course anybody else with relevant info or thoughts is welcome to offer an opinion.
According to this article a later study vastly downgraded that estimate.
@nycjim The U.S. State Department and Yale identify 21 detention/deportation sites in Russian-controlled territory. *Satellite images show signs of mass graves.
We Are All Snowflakes Now. This is how it will pan out: Truss will hold out for a week offering tax cuts and austerity and then cave and say all Must Have Heating, after its too late to salvage much political capital by doing so. and unless she emulates the underrated Lord North and takes the CotE job in-house everyone will say what a lovely man Kwasi is, and she'll be looking at the Next Leader betting and glancing over her shoulder at him.
Do you mean hold out till a week from now, or hold out a week once in the job? Don't see why she'd do the latter.
A week into the job, she really has to put that bare minimum into faking that she was sincere AF throughout the contest.
We Are All Snowflakes Now. This is how it will pan out: Truss will hold out for a week offering tax cuts and austerity and then cave and say all Must Have Heating, after its too late to salvage much political capital by doing so. and unless she emulates the underrated Lord North and takes the CotE job in-house everyone will say what a lovely man Kwasi is, and she'll be looking at the Next Leader betting and glancing over her shoulder at him.
Do you mean hold out till a week from now, or hold out a week once in the job? Don't see why she'd do the latter.
Entirely possible she is holding out at the moment from any kind of serious announcement so that on Day One of Truss Administration she can go for a Big Bang and make a sweeping statement involving tens of billions and get her premiership off to a + start in the media.
Truss' problem is not that she's barking mad (although she has a bit of the messianic about her), it's that she's pushing a creed - neo-Thatcherism - that is turning completely out of fashion.
We are now at the end of the 40 year+ Reagan / Thatcher consensus on how the world should be run. Covid put the final nail in the coffin, with its massive support of individuals and businesses ruining the idea Governments shouldn't intervene while businesses have done a great job at convincing people that the idea they can be trusted to be self-regulating is a complete fallacy. To quote an example, the fact that Dido Harding survived for years as a CEO with such compensation is a sign of how much the system is broken.
We are now likely to see a return to some form of the post-1945 social democracy consensus in some form or another. Whoever gets that formula right will have electoral alchemy.
Some of us take the opposite view of course. That after years of ever increasing taxes, expenditure and interventionism, leading to the highest tax rate in 74 years, that now is precisely the time that the Conservatives need to be making the argument for lower taxation and interventionism.
If not now, then when?
Sunak wants to raise taxes like Gordon Brown, raise NI like Gordon Brown raise Corporation Tax like Gordon Brown and views everything through a prism of all money belonging to the Treasury like Gordon Brown. I opposed Gordon Brown, I'd be a pure hypocrite if I supported Gordon Sunak (I nearly wrote Rishi Brown but that sounds racist).
Yes it may lose the next election, but I'm ok with that. I'd rather the Tories lose than win as Labour.
I've posted the chart in the past, but it is worth remembering that spending on the military, on education, on transport, on law & order etc. has all declined, while spending on pensions and healthcare has risen.
Let's leave aside the last couple of year because Covid, and you see that State Pension spending has risen from about 3% of GDP in 1990 to almost 8% now. Thanks to the triple lock, it is pretty much guaranteed to reach 12% by the end of the decade.
Health care costs have followed a similar pattern: from 4% of GDP in 1990 to 7% in 2019. This isn't because we're showering doctors with money (most have seen drops in earnings since 2010), but because the annual health care costs of an 80-year-old are 10-15x that of a 20-year-old. And we have an ever greater proportion of the country who are in the older cohort.
An ageing population means more recipients of pensions, fewer people in work paying taxes, and greater demands for healthcare.
The result is that we have a situation where there is austerity across large parts of government spending, and yet government spending and the tax burdens on working people continue to rise. By 2030, we could well have health care and pensions accounting for 20% of GDP. That's 3x the relative level of 1990 and it means 12 minutes of every hour of work you do goes in paying the pensions and healthcare of retirees.
If you look around the world, the developed economies with the worst economic performance in the last fifteen years have been the ones with the worst demographics - Japan and Italy.
That neither Ms Truss nor Mr Sunak nor Mr Starmer seems willing to address the massive fucking elephant in the room tells you a great deal about the seriousness of British politics right now.
My comment may seem unnecessarily negative, but actually things are even worse.
You see an ageing population means a greater proportion of workers are spending their time cleaning the bottoms of the elderly.
Now this is important work (if you have an aged population), but it also means that a greater proportion of the workforce is engaged in activities that are fundamentally low productivity and which do not garner any export earnings. Plus, of course, it means that exporting businesses have to pay more to get employees: perhaps they are better off setting up in countries without major demographic drag.
I see four obvious options:
1) Increase retirement age much quicker. A bit unfair on those under 67, but makes things more sustainable.
2) Increase the charges for health and social care, even if cashflow is deferred and paid from assets when they pass away. Thereby stopping the increasing tax burden from falling on the economically productive part of the population.
3) Wealth taxes to achieve a similar goal to point 2 but shared across more people (but still biased to older generations). Abolishing NI and making part of income tax has a similar effect.
4) Continue to put all the tax burden on an ever shrinking working population as the economy gradually gets less productive and slowly decline into a shadow of our former self.
I predict that number 4 will be chosen.
The triple lock has to go. All it does is redistribute income from those who need it to those who don't.
Comments
He was not afraid to die, oh, brave Sir Leon
He was not at all afraid Labour would win
Brave, brave, brave, brave Sir Leon
He was not in the least bit scared to be once more in the EU
Or to have his friends all vote Lib Dem and his neighbours be all Wokey
To have the Tories split and his passport took away
And be forced to watch Keir Starmer 24 hours a day, brave Sir Leon
Shut up!
Decent bloke. Liked him. Well done Santander
Two immediate further easures for me though would be
Get rid of the Triple Lock
Everyone who is working pays National Insurance even if they are past retirement age.
I think 1 may be regarded as a 'racist' policy by some. Of course, the best solution was arguably free movement in the EU, the problem was always that we were not building enough houses to cope with it.
https://twitter.com/sundersays/status/1563205029070512130
I do think the scale of contrast between the 1990 polling (holding the contest zapped Labour's lead before the result) and the 2022 contest has been very little discussed, adding to the idea that the 2022 pattern is simply natural
When you have a supply shock like this, people start getting a lot more efficient in their usage. The demand curve moves to the left.
https://www.gov.uk/deferring-state-pension/what-you-get#:~:text=Your State Pension will increase,your regular State Pension payment.
The UK already offers such a deferral scheme, but it is not good value from what I can see, so not much incentive there (you need to live a long time to get the benefit), unless there is some special issue such as a temporarily high rate of income pushing one into higher rate tax. There is a variant where you can get a lump sum at the end of the year, I think.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/26/i-cant-sleep-the-small-business-owners-struggling-to-pay-energy-bills
...“I just don’t know how I can stay in business,” says John Evans of the Weeping Cross Fish Bar in Stafford.
“We are a small 5m by 10m takeaway-only premises. The renewal on our gas has just come through. It has gone from £9,000 to £32,000 a year. I can’t sleep at night.”...
...Evans’s shop is one of 10,500 across Britain employing about 100,000 people and serving 182m fish and chip portions per annum. He says his customers simply won’t be able to afford the huge price rises needed if they want to stay in business.
“I’d have to charge £12.95 for a fillet of haddock just to break even,”....
https://www.gov.uk/deferring-state-pension
To go back to the status quo ante, we need a 15% drop in the next couple of months.
What an idiot.
Mitigate in the short term, alternative sources in the medium.
I realis some on here still worship her but after her eleven and a half years, for good or ill, the majority of the country was sick and tired of her increasingly hectoring style.
That didn't mean they didn't like the policies as 1992 demonstrated.
By 1997, it was the exact opposite - a lot of people liked and had sympathy for John Major but had come to despise the Conservative Party.
What is yet to be resolved is whether 2022 was either primarily a rejection of Boris Johnson or whether it was both a rejection of him and the Party. The problem is the degree to which the Party has come to identify with Boris Johnson makes differentiating between the one and the other almost impossible.
And the beauty of it is, if it's exported to Europe then Ukraine has control over its distribution anyway!
please, very seriously, spend an hour getting the gist of what http://monevator.com/ is on about and what it has to say about fund managers, and look very carefully at the fees in any Santander proposal. 1.5% of a fuck of a lot is a fuck of a lot for doing nothing you can't do yourself.
Old Age Pensions in 1908 were only paid for over 70s though, this at a time when average life expectancy was around 45 (allowing for points around infant mortality etc).
Surely there's a law against that shit?
Isn't SJP higher (5-6%) or maybe they have taken their fees down?
- a very large chunk of health expenditure goes on last 12 months if life. Extended life expectancy doesn't change that
- There is an ongoing increase in healthcare, unexplained by demographics. This could be technology, increased chronic conditions (obesity), politics, or something weird like Baumol cost disease
- the dependency ratio is useful. Make sure you use old-age only - the total one makes countries with few children look good (ahem, Scotland)
Given real equity returns tend to be in 6-7% range over time, if someone is taking 4% in fees, you are being absolutely shafted.
The Aussies have got this one right. The big superannuation schemes pay 0.4% for active equities, and less for bonds and passive. And - by and large - they've done a pretty good job.
https://www.gov.uk/deferring-state-pension
Dunno the specifics or if itz wurf it.
As soon as I told him I'd made decent money with shares in the last few years he realised I wasn't a dupe and was very unlikely to invest in his products. Did he end the meeting early? No. He sat down with me and gave me good solid advice about pensions/mortgages, stuff which was not in his brief, indeed he said "I can't sell you a pension, please go to a pension expert and try unbiased.co.uk" - he steered me AWAY from Santander
I know a lot of people in finance are evil greedy whatnots, but he wasn't. And that was nice
In '49 the averagre age of death might have been 66 but the lengrh of time an average 65 year old male would be expected to live for woild have been far higher than 1 year.
The mode age of death for people up until 1965 was 0, that is before their first birthday. Thay massively skews the average.
Clocks tick. IMHO we need more of the cleverer house and family ready earlier not later. The pressure of young women especially is immense.
This is not only an emotional pressure on our great young people, (about whom I have nothing but good to say) but also demographically challenging. By this time for millions 2 children is the max not the minimum possible. Which has already led to the inevitable consequence.
Deep-cover agent fled to Moscow in 2018 after a decade of spying in Europe for the Kremlin
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/08/26/socialite-peruvian-jeweller-who-charmed-nato-staff-russian-spy/ (£££)
If you look at what is happening with the Democrats recently, one of the more subtle but certainly more noticeable features is that the centrists are gradually regaining control of the party, at least at the primary level. Progressive candidates have generally been knocked back. To take an example, the fact that a gay, black congressman like Mondaire Jones only came 3rd in the 10th NY Democrat primary is something that probably wouldn't have happened two years back (yes, it's not his district but still...). Identity politics seems to be subtly, but firmly, being eased out of the Democrats' policy agenda.
Trans rights - everyone's favourite subject on pb.com - is probably the most noticeable sign of this. Yes, the administration will still claim it is committed to these rights. But, like the dog that didn't bark in Sherlock Holmes, the more noticeable feature is how little the administration - and Biden in particularly - is
saying publicly on this issue recently. Part probably because it hasn't played well in the suburbs, as seen in Virginia. However, I suspect a greater issue lies with Roe v Wade - it's hard intellectually to use the SC decision as an attack on womens' right to choose if you are also shouting loud and proud that anyone can self-affirm as a woman. Biden et al have clearly decided there's more votes aligning with women in a 'traditional' sense than pushing the trans ideology.
So, yes, I can see the idea that a VP candidate has to be black and female as becoming less relevant to Biden. Still leaves the issue of want to do with Harris but it probably does mean you don't have to replace like with like.
If only we could get back to those heady days.
Mode of course.
But being on PB has been a financial education in itself, for which, many thanks to PB
I genuinely believe he was doing his best for me, not just for himself and Santander; he even advised me to dump the car, and he crunched the numbers and talked me through exactly how much I was spending per day on a car I drive three times a month. Made me think. How does that benefit Santander?
And yet of course there is commercial sense in him being helpful and altruistic - it made me think better of Santander, so they gain that way even if I don't buy any products
Also, pensions. Hmm
Aren't we about 50% ?
When clearing my father's papers, I found the Prudential life policy his mum took out on his life *when he was born in 1925* - specifically to pay the funeral costs if/when he died as a baby/in childhood. Very common in the late Victorian and early C20, before antibiotics and vaccines other than smallpox.
Just to pick up a few of those, I am not sure we should be deciding long term demographic policy on the basis of whether someone has a gap year or does a masters. Most don't.
As it currently stands we ask our children to do some of their most important learning at exactly the wrong time - when they are going through emotional and physical turmoil of their teens. It seems to me that shifting this to when they are slightly older is no bad thing. Moreover, if you are going to ask older people to work longer then you either need to create more jobs or have the younger generation start later.
Sadly there wasn't the option.
Who the candidates are actually going to be is something I'm not going to have a go at predicting until after the midterms at the earliest.
Presumably the Tory MPs have to find some sort of mediated compromise between those ...
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/gallery_image/public/paragraphs/images/fig2-gross-power-production-germany-1990-2021.png?itok=15hkw6zI
Starmer has been AWOL. Nothing on the CoL crisis, nothing on the gang warfare in our cities. The tragedy is everyone else in the Labour Party have been silent too. Oh, except the King of the North who is organising some marches. " Marching, marching, marching up and down. Marching, marching, marching all around" What a dickhead!
You get back 1.5% of your annual pay per year after retirement, adjusted for inflation.
So if you earned 30,000 euros per year for 40 years, you would get a pension of 18,000 euros per year (adjusted for inflation).
This seems quite a lot better than our system of national insurance (state pension) plus workplace pensions of varying quality.
PS That graph ends with 2021, too.
NY Times live blog
Truss = Poundshop Theresa May.
Truss might simply shit on her supporters the nanosecond that she secures the leadership, dump all the tax cuts and find £50bn down the back of the sofa to stop half the country from freezing to death, or she might be a complete swivel-eyed loon. We only have to wait another fortnight or so for the Tories to finish dicking about before the truth is revealed, I suppose. Unless we get stonewalled after that with waffle about emergency budgets, in which case it could be three weeks. Or a month.
My feeling increasingly is that Truss is going to fuck this up massively, primarily over the issue of energy bills (which would please Putin, Lavrov et al no end). The idea of JRM coming on the airwaves to explain why the Government won't help out is guaranteed to cause apoplexy.
I also think anger over energy issues will feed into other areas which is why we are starting to get tirades about the ambulance service.
2023 could get very ugly in the U.K. politically.
@GreenPartyMolly
Train to Birmingham is absolutely rammed
I'm lucky to have a small space to sit on the floor
I really don't feel my £90 ticket to Aberystwyth was good value
#PublicOwnershipNow
https://twitter.com/GreenPartyMolly/status/1563138231629418496
1) Increase retirement age much quicker. A bit unfair on those under 67, but makes things more sustainable.
2) Increase the charges for health and social care, even if cashflow is deferred and paid from assets when they pass away. Thereby stopping the increasing tax burden from falling on the economically productive part of the population.
3) Wealth taxes to achieve a similar goal to point 2 but shared across more people (but still biased to older generations). Abolishing NI and making part of income tax has a similar effect.
4) Continue to put all the tax burden on an ever shrinking working population as the economy gradually gets less productive and slowly decline into a shadow of our former self.
I predict that number 4 will be chosen.
new
Children, white collar workers and social media influencers are joining the record number of people making the perilous voyage, Tom Kington writes" (£)
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/tunisia-migrants-tiktok-stars-and-a-crumbling-economy-fuel-exodus-across-the-mediterranean-6kfppzb82
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-62674301
We Are All Snowflakes Now. This is how it will pan out: Truss will hold out for a week offering tax cuts and austerity and then cave and say all Must Have Heating, after its too late to salvage much political capital by doing so. and unless she emulates the underrated Lord North and takes the CotE job in-house everyone will say what a lovely man Kwasi is, and she'll be looking at the Next Leader betting and glancing over her shoulder at him.
'Astonishing; that you have the brass neck to accuse other people of "not cottoning onto reality" - yet you don't mention the 500 ton elephant in the room. The vast quantities of gas, right under our feet in the Bowland Basin!
A survey was done in 2013 by the British Geological Survey. If their most conservative estimate of the gas reserves is correct, there's enough gas to supply the whole of the UK at 2018 rates of consumption, for 275 years!'
@Richard_Tyndall ; @rcs1000 - this is very much at odds with prevailing opinion. Has the commentor got this totally wrong, and if so, how has he got it so wrong? Or is the gas he is referring to just really hard to winkle out?
Edit: of course anybody else with relevant info or thoughts is welcome to offer an opinion.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/lifeexpectancies/articles/howhaslifeexpectancychangedovertime/2015-09-09
In 1947 the average 65 year old male would have lived for another 11ish years
By the 1980s it was only up to 13 years.
Now it is more than 18 years.
Disappointing to see what their position is now.
Although to be fair, no way any high speed service is getting to Aberystwyth in our lifetimes.
https://www.lse.ac.uk/granthaminstitute/explainers/what-potential-reserves-of-shale-gas-are-there-in-the-uk/#:~:text=Four areas in the UK,Wessex area in Southern England.
The idea that we could become an instant net exporter of energy if only we fracked is not supported by much evidence unfortunately.
The U.S. State Department and Yale identify 21 detention/deportation sites in Russian-controlled territory.
*Satellite images show signs of mass graves.
https://twitter.com/nycjim/status/1563120506156462080