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:
Oh dear: 1. The shitshow that is Britain's railways this summer is entirely the doing of the DfT 2. The emergency timetable on Avanti is the result of the DfT "break apart everything Virgin did" franchise agreement 3. The £90 fare is set by the DfT 4. Her onward connection to Aber is run by the Welsh government. 5. No passenger rail franchise has ever been privatised. A fixed term exclusive contract to operate services awarded to a private operator does not mean they own it. When the contract ends operating rights revert back to the owner - the DfT
There is no "nationalise it" magic wand to wave when the damage has been done by the wazzocks in government meddling in everything.
Kwasi wants to sack Bailey. That's risky but if the replacement is credible, say Raghuram Rajan, we could actually get inflation under control. Bailey is useless.
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.
Yes people's expectations of the length of retirement are unrealistic.
Better if we could encourage more part time working for older people to phase them out of the workforce.
Personally I'd much rather work 1-2 days a week and have more money to spend on the remaining days, than have all in the time in the world and be so limited in what I can afford to do.
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.
As the general public are feckless and too addicted to handouts and need to be kept warm, there is a simple solution.
Allow Tory donors to create a new company and then days later be awarded a £117m contract without tender to construct a big wooden wheel in every village hall across the country. Simply make the working class walk on the wheel all day to generate power for their homes and keep them warm into the bargain.
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.
2023 could get very ugly in the U.K. politically.
Can't see a market on BF for this. But you make good points.
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!
Only if you pay tax etc etc.
The Truss campaign are surely just holding out so that she can make a big whizzy statement involving billions of £ on day one of her premiership. Surely they don't actually believe this tax cut solves everything bollx?
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.
Yes people's expectations of the length of retirement are unrealistic.
Better if we could encourage more part time working for older people to phase them out of the workforce.
Personally I'd much rather work 1-2 days a week and have more money to spend on the remaining days, than have all in the time in the world and be so limited in what I can afford to do.
And yet those who can afford to are increasingly retiring earlier. How about making a working life a little more attractive to employees? The market says they can't wait to bugger off right now.
Kwasi wants to sack Bailey. That's risky but if the replacement is credible, say Raghuram Rajan, we could actually get inflation under control. Bailey is useless.
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.
Anyone who needs the state pension, for any reasonable meanig of "need," needs the triple lock. 10k a year is not a yuge amount.
There's a lot to be said for stiffing the richbois for whom it covers their drinks bill by means testing it. Despite cries of I paid in all my life, I'm entitled...
Kwasi wants to sack Bailey. That's risky but if the replacement is credible, say Raghuram Rajan, we could actually get inflation under control. Bailey is useless.
How about Jens Weidmann?
Lol, imagine handing the keys to the Bank to a hostile German.
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.
This is what I think. Expectations management. Don't see any point in doing it now, so Sunak can take potshots at it.
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.
And then we will eventually elect a Corbynite revolutionary with all the mess that will bring. So probably 2045 before the grown ups are back in charge.
Kwasi wants to sack Bailey. That's risky but if the replacement is credible, say Raghuram Rajan, we could actually get inflation under control. Bailey is useless.
He can't. The governor has an eight year term.
I suppose they could "persuade" him to take early retirement.
Kwasi wants to sack Bailey. That's risky but if the replacement is credible, say Raghuram Rajan, we could actually get inflation under control. Bailey is useless.
He can't. The governor has an eight year term.
I suppose they could "persuade" him to take early retirement.
If the Chancellor doesn't have confidence in the governor then the governor has to resign. No way he could stay under those circumstances. They could also reopen all of the investigations surrounding his time in charge of the FCA if he doesn't go quietly. One of the reasons sterling is weaker than it should be is because markets don't believe the bank has credibility, specifically Bailey. Solve that and we take 5-6% off imported inflation within a few months.
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.
Anyone who needs the state pension, for any reasonable meanig of "need," needs the triple lock. 10k a year is not a yuge amount.
There's a lot to be said for stiffing the richbois for whom it covers their drinks bill by means testing it. Despite cries of I paid in all my life, I'm entitled...
They do not need the triple lock. They need a decent level of state support, which can be provided by infinite alternative systems that do not involve a triple lock.
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
It was not going all in on gas that was the problem, but an unwillingness of British generators to get into fixed long-term supply contracts.
The Japanese and South Koreans entered into twenty year contracts with LNG exporters. We did not, relying almost entirely on spot cargoes.
@staylorish Noam Chomsky tells an Edinburgh Book Festival audience that Vladimir Putin should be given the benefit of the doubt on his motives for invading Ukraine, and that he (Chomsky) supports Scottish independence. The audience, which must be overwhelmingly idiots, whoops and cheers.
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.
Anyone who needs the state pension, for any reasonable meanig of "need," needs the triple lock. 10k a year is not a yuge amount.
There's a lot to be said for stiffing the richbois for whom it covers their drinks bill by means testing it. Despite cries of I paid in all my life, I'm entitled...
Alternatively, keep pushing up the retirement age.
@staylorish Noam Chomsky tells an Edinburgh Book Festival audience that Vladimir Putin should be given the benefit of the doubt on his motives for invading Ukraine, and that he (Chomsky) supports Scottish independence. The audience, which must be overwhelmingly idiots, whoops and cheers.
@staylorish Noam Chomsky tells an Edinburgh Book Festival audience that Vladimir Putin should be given the benefit of the doubt on his motives for invading Ukraine, and that he (Chomsky) supports Scottish independence. The audience, which must be overwhelmingly idiots, whoops and cheers.
Truss won’t call an early election. She’ll be under pressure after the first week when the bounce doesn’t appear, or when she fails to realise she has to govern for the country rather than the Tory membership.
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.
The idea that we could become an instant net exporter of energy if only we fracked is not supported by much evidence unfortunately.
Is that not a bit iffy? The British Geological Survey study (of 55 pages) says between 23.3 and 64.6 trillion cubic metres, and I don't see why they would be prone to sensationalism.
There follows a 10 page journal article in Nature, which is sniffy about this figure (standard practise in academia), but their downgraded figure is 4 trillion cubic metres. Not even a fifth of the BGS's lowest estimate? Why the vast chasm between the two figures? And why is it accepted universally that the more detailed piece of initial research is wrong, and the journal article is right?
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?
That's a great question: and the answer is that in Germany, lignite mines and power stations are at the same locations, and the German government has told the mines to go at full extraction capacity, but to store as much as possible.
(Basically: they want to make sure they don't run out of lignite to burn in the depths of winter.)
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.
Anyone who needs the state pension, for any reasonable meanig of "need," needs the triple lock. 10k a year is not a yuge amount.
There's a lot to be said for stiffing the richbois for whom it covers their drinks bill by means testing it. Despite cries of I paid in all my life, I'm entitled...
Alternatively, keep pushing up the 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.
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.
Anyone who needs the state pension, for any reasonable meanig of "need," needs the triple lock. 10k a year is not a yuge amount.
There's a lot to be said for stiffing the richbois for whom it covers their drinks bill by means testing it. Despite cries of I paid in all my life, I'm entitled...
Alternatively, keep pushing up the retirement age.
That, and tapering from £40k to £60k so no one who has private income of £60k+ gets it. If we can implement tapering for child benefit then we can do it for the state pension.
Truss won’t call an early election. She’ll be under pressure after the first week when the bounce doesn’t appear, or when she fails to realise she has to govern for the country rather than the Tory membership.
She has an odd sense of overconfidence.
I suppose that very sense of overconfidence could lead to her calling one but I don’t think she’s that deluded.
"“Affidavit heavily redacted!!! Nothing mentioned on ‘Nuclear,’ a total public relations subterfuge by the FBI & DOJ, or our close working relationship regarding document turnover – WE GAVE THEM MUCH,”
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.
Anyone who needs the state pension, for any reasonable meanig of "need," needs the triple lock. 10k a year is not a yuge amount.
There's a lot to be said for stiffing the richbois for whom it covers their drinks bill by means testing it. Despite cries of I paid in all my life, I'm entitled...
Alternatively, keep pushing up the retirement age.
That, and tapering from £40k to £60k so no one who has private income of £60k+ gets it. If we can implement tapering for child benefit then we can do it for the state pension.
And, euthanasia for the "useless eaters, " naturally.
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.
The idea that we could become an instant net exporter of energy if only we fracked is not supported by much evidence unfortunately.
Is that not a bit iffy? The British Geological Survey study (of 55 pages) says between 23.3 and 64.6 trillion cubic metres, and I don't see why they would be prone to sensationalism.
There follows a 10 page journal article in Nature, which is sniffy about this figure (standard practise in academia), but their downgraded figure is 4 trillion cubic metres. Not even a fifth of the BGS's lowest estimate? Why the vast chasm between the two figures? And why is it accepted universally that the more detailed piece of initial research is wrong, and the journal article is right?
Truss won’t call an early election. She’ll be under pressure after the first week when the bounce doesn’t appear, or when she fails to realise she has to govern for the country rather than the Tory membership.
She has an odd sense of overconfidence.
I suppose that very sense of overconfidence could lead to her calling one but I don’t think she’s that deluded.
As I have posted before, to me, she has the air of someone who the job will send bonkers quite quickly. All go to her head etc etc.
Being premier is like an x-ray of your soul said one of the pol commentators once ( i think Steve Richards?)
Although i have to say i liked her comments about diverting £ into social care - which, believe me, is a total clusterf*ck at the moment.
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.
Anyone who needs the state pension, for any reasonable meanig of "need," needs the triple lock. 10k a year is not a yuge amount.
There's a lot to be said for stiffing the richbois for whom it covers their drinks bill by means testing it. Despite cries of I paid in all my life, I'm entitled...
Alternatively, keep pushing up the retirement age.
For the 1962 and younger cohorts.
I would push that later by ooh...around five years sounds suitable.
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.
Yes people's expectations of the length of retirement are unrealistic.
Better if we could encourage more part time working for older people to phase them out of the workforce.
Personally I'd much rather work 1-2 days a week and have more money to spend on the remaining days, than have all in the time in the world and be so limited in what I can afford to do.
And yet those who can afford to are increasingly retiring earlier. How about making a working life a little more attractive to employees? The market says they can't wait to bugger off right now.
You do this... how, exactly?
Most jobs are not beloved vocations, and most workers would happily quit in a nanosecond if they won a socking great lottery prize.
Very few people want to work any longer than they have to. I suppose the most obvious way in which one could make work 'more attractive to employees' is by paying them more, but given that 'those who can afford to are increasingly retiring earlier,' this is unlikely to have the desired effect.
The only way you might be able to compel a large fraction of ageing workers to keep slogging away, when they would rather have playtime for a bit before they go gaga and then perish, is by dramatically increasing the state pension age, so that only people with very fat private pensions or other investments can bridge the gap to the point at which they become eligible for sundry pensioner benefits and tax exemptions.
Most people don't want to go to work. They're not going to be made to love it with cheap bribes. They have to be forced into it by circumstances.
@staylorish Noam Chomsky tells an Edinburgh Book Festival audience that Vladimir Putin should be given the benefit of the doubt on his motives for invading Ukraine, and that he (Chomsky) supports Scottish independence. The audience, which must be overwhelmingly idiots, whoops and cheers.
@staylorish Noam Chomsky tells an Edinburgh Book Festival audience that Vladimir Putin should be given the benefit of the doubt on his motives for invading Ukraine, and that he (Chomsky) supports Scottish independence. The audience, which must be overwhelmingly idiots, whoops and cheers.
@staylorish Noam Chomsky tells an Edinburgh Book Festival audience that Vladimir Putin should be given the benefit of the doubt on his motives for invading Ukraine, and that he (Chomsky) supports Scottish independence. The audience, which must be overwhelmingly idiots, whoops and cheers.
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.
Yes people's expectations of the length of retirement are unrealistic.
Better if we could encourage more part time working for older people to phase them out of the workforce.
Personally I'd much rather work 1-2 days a week and have more money to spend on the remaining days, than have all in the time in the world and be so limited in what I can afford to do.
And yet those who can afford to are increasingly retiring earlier. How about making a working life a little more attractive to employees? The market says they can't wait to bugger off right now.
You do this... how, exactly?
Most jobs are not beloved vocations, and most workers would happily quit in a nanosecond if they won a socking great lottery prize.
Very few people want to work any longer than they have to. I suppose the most obvious way in which one could make work 'more attractive to employees' is by paying them more, but given that 'those who can afford to are increasingly retiring earlier,' this is unlikely to have the desired effect.
The only way you might be able to compel a large fraction of ageing workers to keep slogging away, when they would rather have playtime for a bit before they go gaga and then perish, is by dramatically increasing the state pension age, so that only people with very fat private pensions or other investments can bridge the gap to the point at which they become eligible for sundry pensioner benefits and tax exemptions.
Most people don't want to go to work. They're not going to be made to love it with cheap bribes. They have to be forced into it by circumstances.
Well precisely. I was being a little facetious about making work more attractive. People want to retire. My cohort in their mid 50's are counting the days. People hate working as a general rule.
@staylorish Noam Chomsky tells an Edinburgh Book Festival audience that Vladimir Putin should be given the benefit of the doubt on his motives for invading Ukraine, and that he (Chomsky) supports Scottish independence. The audience, which must be overwhelmingly idiots, whoops and cheers.
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.
Yes people's expectations of the length of retirement are unrealistic.
Better if we could encourage more part time working for older people to phase them out of the workforce.
Personally I'd much rather work 1-2 days a week and have more money to spend on the remaining days, than have all in the time in the world and be so limited in what I can afford to do.
And yet those who can afford to are increasingly retiring earlier. How about making a working life a little more attractive to employees? The market says they can't wait to bugger off right now.
You do this... how, exactly?
Most jobs are not beloved vocations, and most workers would happily quit in a nanosecond if they won a socking great lottery prize.
Very few people want to work any longer than they have to. I suppose the most obvious way in which one could make work 'more attractive to employees' is by paying them more, but given that 'those who can afford to are increasingly retiring earlier,' this is unlikely to have the desired effect.
The only way you might be able to compel a large fraction of ageing workers to keep slogging away, when they would rather have playtime for a bit before they go gaga and then perish, is by dramatically increasing the state pension age, so that only people with very fat private pensions or other investments can bridge the gap to the point at which they become eligible for sundry pensioner benefits and tax exemptions.
Most people don't want to go to work. They're not going to be made to love it with cheap bribes. They have to be forced into it by circumstances.
Making part-time work available might do the trick; we can see from the medical profession it is a popular option.
Now, whether encouraging the elderly to stay on and block jobs for younger people is sensible is an awkward question because employers might not want it. We can see laws in place around the world to stop, or at least slow down, companies getting rid of older workers in favour of younger ones.
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:
I am so old I remember when the Green Party were totally for high speed trains and no other party was interested.
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.
So it's actually a very slow speed service?
The point being that when HS2 is built it will be far easier to run more trains on the WCML to New Street, and there will be more platform capacity for trains from inter alia the Cambrian system to park up there.
I won't re-quote the earlier comments about how rising fuel prices are going to impact chip shops - they won't be the only ones. Presumably, most eateries are going to suffer including my local cafe.
I was also thinking of that other haven of the lost, lonely, sad and desperate, no, not PB but the betting shop. They are big users of electricity - think of all those screens and FOBTs. Moving on from that you have the racecourses who race using floodlights in the winter which is now all the artificial surface venues except Lingfield.
It's not just the cost of staging the meetings - it's the fuel costs of getting the horses, jockeys, trainers etc to the courses. I've proposed canning the floodlit season from November 1st to the end of February - yes, it would reduce opportunities within the racing industry but we are already hearing lamentations from trainers complaining at transport costs.
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.
I love this little conversation.
@MrEd nails it with the first post - the pendulum has swung away from Reaganomics/Thatcherism.
@BartholomewRoberts makes a plea for more neoliberalism but it's almost as if he knows he's fighting a lost cause.
@rcs1000 highlights the structural issues we're facing - we are the victims of our own success in helping people live longer.
And finally, @Ratters provides three options for the the solution (his feared choice, 4., is no solution and cannot be the long-term choice).
I would just add that we should celebrate our success in living longer healthier lives - that is a massive prize, for which it is well worth forgoing perpetual 'standard of living' increases (which nowadays just means acquiring more 'stuff' we probably don't need).
I won't re-quote the earlier comments about how rising fuel prices are going to impact chip shops - they won't be the only ones. Presumably, most eateries are going to suffer including my local cafe.
I was also thinking of that other haven of the lost, lonely, sad and desperate, no, not PB but the betting shop. They are big users of electricity - think of all those screens and FOBTs. Moving on from that you have the racecourses who race using floodlights in the winter which is now all the artificial surface venues except Lingfield.
It's not just the cost of staging the meetings - it's the fuel costs of getting the horses, jockeys, trainers etc to the courses. I've proposed canning the floodlit season from November 1st to the end of February - yes, it would reduce opportunities within the racing industry but we are already hearing lamentations from trainers complaining at transport costs.
All further examples of why energy prices should have been frozen. Whatever the cost, a way should have been found.
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.
Yes people's expectations of the length of retirement are unrealistic.
Better if we could encourage more part time working for older people to phase them out of the workforce.
Personally I'd much rather work 1-2 days a week and have more money to spend on the remaining days, than have all in the time in the world and be so limited in what I can afford to do.
And yet those who can afford to are increasingly retiring earlier. How about making a working life a little more attractive to employees? The market says they can't wait to bugger off right now.
You do this... how, exactly?
Most jobs are not beloved vocations, and most workers would happily quit in a nanosecond if they won a socking great lottery prize.
Very few people want to work any longer than they have to. I suppose the most obvious way in which one could make work 'more attractive to employees' is by paying them more, but given that 'those who can afford to are increasingly retiring earlier,' this is unlikely to have the desired effect.
The only way you might be able to compel a large fraction of ageing workers to keep slogging away, when they would rather have playtime for a bit before they go gaga and then perish, is by dramatically increasing the state pension age, so that only people with very fat private pensions or other investments can bridge the gap to the point at which they become eligible for sundry pensioner benefits and tax exemptions.
Most people don't want to go to work. They're not going to be made to love it with cheap bribes. They have to be forced into it by circumstances.
Making part-time work available might do the trick; we can see from the medical profession it is a popular option.
Now, whether encouraging the elderly to stay on and block jobs for younger people is sensible is an awkward question because employers might not want it. We can see laws in place around the world to stop, or at least slow down, companies getting rid of older workers in favour of younger ones.
Part-time working of this kind is, of course, very popular because it is a means for people who can't quite afford to retire to work less. Until the moment they can afford to retire properly, when they immediately bugger off. Should Plan A (massive lottery prize; immediately bugger off) fail to bear fruit, then my own personal Plan B consists of going part-time just as soon as possible - so at least I'm only dragging myself out of bed at half-past agony three days a week, rather than five.
Most jobs are not beloved vocations, and most workers would happily quit in a nanosecond if they won a socking great lottery prize.
Very few people want to work any longer than they have to. I suppose the most obvious way in which one could make work 'more attractive to employees' is by paying them more, but given that 'those who can afford to are increasingly retiring earlier,' this is unlikely to have the desired effect.
The only way you might be able to compel a large fraction of ageing workers to keep slogging away, when they would rather have playtime for a bit before they go gaga and then perish, is by dramatically increasing the state pension age, so that only people with very fat private pensions or other investments can bridge the gap to the point at which they become eligible for sundry pensioner benefits and tax exemptions.
Most people don't want to go to work. They're not going to be made to love it with cheap bribes. They have to be forced into it by circumstances.
Well precisely. I was being a little facetious about making work more attractive. People want to retire. My cohort in their mid 50's are counting the days. People hate working as a general rule.
You'd better believe those of us in our early 60s already have an "exit plan" worked out. Of those with whom I work it's often those who have children very late (and are still putting them through University) or those whose finances have been ravaged by divorce or poor investment decisions who still seem to want to work.
I think we need a fundamental re-evaluation of the nature of work - the idea of 9 to 5, five days a week, just sounds absurd in the modern era. We remain wedded to the work culture of the factory and the compartmentalisation of our work and home lives. I've seen the expression "post-work world" banded around for those societies with an increasing percentage of economically active individuals.
That seems to be formulated and developed into a new economic and cultural model for the mid-21st century and beyond.
Kwasi wants to sack Bailey. That's risky but if the replacement is credible, say Raghuram Rajan, we could actually get inflation under control. Bailey is useless.
He can't. The governor has an eight year term.
I suppose they could "persuade" him to take early retirement.
If the Chancellor doesn't have confidence in the governor then the governor has to resign. No way he could stay under those circumstances. They could also reopen all of the investigations surrounding his time in charge of the FCA if he doesn't go quietly. One of the reasons sterling is weaker than it should be is because markets don't believe the bank has credibility, specifically Bailey. Solve that and we take 5-6% off imported inflation within a few months.
Careful what you wish for, Max.
Sacking a Bank governor (even if he is a duffer) costs a bit in credibility anyway.
And given that the Truss solution to everything is Grow Baby, Grow, I can see her (via KK) finding and appointing someone even softer on inflation.
An unsustainable boom in 2023 is their only hope of winning in 2024.
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.
Not sure people understand what is involved in getting gas out by fracking (which is what he is referring to). If I want to access to conventional gas reserves I drill a single hole or a series of holes from one location to drain the reservoir. Fracking involves drilling hundreds or thousands of holes a few hundred yards apart over a vast area. This is why it only really works in places with wide open spaces. Having a fracking site every few hundred yards across the Forest of Bowland is both impractical and probably not going to be too popular.
This really is the period of maximum danger for the Tories. It could all fall apart very quickly.
I meant internally. The problem with a double secret probation plan is that when the great reveal happens, some Tories say no. You never campaigned on that. Rumours that the Emergency Budget will just be the tax cuts and a statement of intentions. Thus avoiding scrutiny from the OBR. Who are saying they are perfectly able to produce an opinion. If that's the plan then God help us all.
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.
Yes people's expectations of the length of retirement are unrealistic.
Better if we could encourage more part time working for older people to phase them out of the workforce.
Personally I'd much rather work 1-2 days a week and have more money to spend on the remaining days, than have all in the time in the world and be so limited in what I can afford to do.
And yet those who can afford to are increasingly retiring earlier. How about making a working life a little more attractive to employees? The market says they can't wait to bugger off right now.
You do this... how, exactly?
Most jobs are not beloved vocations, and most workers would happily quit in a nanosecond if they won a socking great lottery prize.
Very few people want to work any longer than they have to. I suppose the most obvious way in which one could make work 'more attractive to employees' is by paying them more, but given that 'those who can afford to are increasingly retiring earlier,' this is unlikely to have the desired effect.
The only way you might be able to compel a large fraction of ageing workers to keep slogging away, when they would rather have playtime for a bit before they go gaga and then perish, is by dramatically increasing the state pension age, so that only people with very fat private pensions or other investments can bridge the gap to the point at which they become eligible for sundry pensioner benefits and tax exemptions.
Most people don't want to go to work. They're not going to be made to love it with cheap bribes. They have to be forced into it by circumstances.
Making part-time work available might do the trick; we can see from the medical profession it is a popular option.
Now, whether encouraging the elderly to stay on and block jobs for younger people is sensible is an awkward question because employers might not want it. We can see laws in place around the world to stop, or at least slow down, companies getting rid of older workers in favour of younger ones.
The trick is going to be to create a lot of "wise old owl" roles in the economy. Think Ken Clarke in Cameron's cabinets.
Not in charge, or the generation below will go mad waiting for their turn. Not doing madly physical stuff. But available, in tap, to dispense experience and wisdom.
This really is the period of maximum danger for the Tories. It could all fall apart very quickly.
The new Prime Minister has a formidable challenge - far greater than the ones facing Johnson and May.
Her (presumably) authority over the Party will seem complete initially but clearly there are plenty beyond the membership who have "doubts" and won't give her a lot of space or time.
We've also got the expectations management thing - something "big and bold" would seem the most attractive option but it must grate with traditionally small-state Conservatives to hear some of the more interventionist lines being put about.
We also know it's not just a winter of rising fuel poverty ahead - it seems possible higher energy costs will be with us for at least as long as there is continuing conflict in the Ukraine.
I'm cautiously optimistic.
One of the reasons I support the capitalist system is flexibility - adversity creates opportunity just as it did at the start of the pandemic. Those who moved quickly into home delivery for example did very well. Those who can champion energy efficiency will do well just as thermal insulation flourished in the 1970s after the 73-74 oil price shock.
Higher energy prices will in time generate energy efficiency throughout the economy either via alternative sources or by technology making better use of what we use.
I’ve just come over to my mate’s where I planted all his vegetables. He’s not picked anything in the last two weeks so I had to do a little harvest. He has several marrows of various shape and colour, a few overgrown mini cucumbers and a big bowl of tomatoes.
My tomatoes are still going great. I passed twenty pounds total on my harvest this morning and should reach ten kilos tomorrow. I love having two unit scales and extra milestones.
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.
Fair points; it's not an easy one. Some of my problems remain however.
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.
Yes people's expectations of the length of retirement are unrealistic.
Better if we could encourage more part time working for older people to phase them out of the workforce.
Personally I'd much rather work 1-2 days a week and have more money to spend on the remaining days, than have all in the time in the world and be so limited in what I can afford to do.
And yet those who can afford to are increasingly retiring earlier. How about making a working life a little more attractive to employees? The market says they can't wait to bugger off right now.
You do this... how, exactly?
Most jobs are not beloved vocations, and most workers would happily quit in a nanosecond if they won a socking great lottery prize.
Very few people want to work any longer than they have to. I suppose the most obvious way in which one could make work 'more attractive to employees' is by paying them more, but given that 'those who can afford to are increasingly retiring earlier,' this is unlikely to have the desired effect.
The only way you might be able to compel a large fraction of ageing workers to keep slogging away, when they would rather have playtime for a bit before they go gaga and then perish, is by dramatically increasing the state pension age, so that only people with very fat private pensions or other investments can bridge the gap to the point at which they become eligible for sundry pensioner benefits and tax exemptions.
Most people don't want to go to work. They're not going to be made to love it with cheap bribes. They have to be forced into it by circumstances.
Well precisely. I was being a little facetious about making work more attractive. People want to retire. My cohort in their mid 50's are counting the days. People hate working as a general rule.
You need to try and find work that you like doing. So many people get stuck in jobs that they don't like. I've always viewed my career as an odyssey just trying out new things and experiences and find that, generally, after 4 years doing whatever I am doing it is time to move on.
I’ve just come over to my mate’s where I planted all his vegetables. He’s not picked anything in the last two weeks so I had to do a little harvest. He has several marrows of various shape and colour, a few overgrown mini cucumbers and a big bowl of tomatoes.
My tomatoes are still going great. I passed twenty pounds total on my harvest this morning and should reach ten kilos tomorrow. I love having two unit scales and extra milestones.
Gorgeous! I'm not (quite) a vegetarian, but I am a vegetable-arian big time. Lucky mate.
Here are the "tapering" rules for social security in the US: "If a worker delays receiving Social Security retirement benefits until after they reach full retirement age,[48] the benefit will increase by two-thirds of one percent of the PIA per month.[49] After age 70 there are no more increases as a result of delaying benefits. Social Security uses an "average" survival rate at your full retirement age to prorate the increase in the amount of benefit increase so that the total benefits are roughly the same whenever you retire. Women may benefit more than men from this delayed benefit increase since the "average" survival rates are based on both men and women and women live approximately three years longer than men. The other consideration is that workers have only a limited number of years of "good" health left after they reach full retirement age and unless they enjoy their job they may be passing up an opportunity to do something else they may enjoy doing while they are still relatively healthy." source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_(United_States)#Delayed_benefits
As far as I know, they are uncontroversial, now.
(George W. Bush proposed a reform which would have invested part of social security taxes in securities, with subisidies for low-income workers. It didn't get majority support, in spite of that redistributive sweetner.)
The problem insufficiently addressed so far is that with the gigantic numbers of people affected by the energy hike - SFAICS the entire working and just managing class + of course loads of OAPs etc, the people in need of a further handout and the class of taxpayers who are the only group large enough to pay for the handouts are largely the same people.
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.
Yes people's expectations of the length of retirement are unrealistic.
Better if we could encourage more part time working for older people to phase them out of the workforce.
Personally I'd much rather work 1-2 days a week and have more money to spend on the remaining days, than have all in the time in the world and be so limited in what I can afford to do.
And yet those who can afford to are increasingly retiring earlier. How about making a working life a little more attractive to employees? The market says they can't wait to bugger off right now.
You do this... how, exactly?
Most jobs are not beloved vocations, and most workers would happily quit in a nanosecond if they won a socking great lottery prize.
Very few people want to work any longer than they have to. I suppose the most obvious way in which one could make work 'more attractive to employees' is by paying them more, but given that 'those who can afford to are increasingly retiring earlier,' this is unlikely to have the desired effect.
The only way you might be able to compel a large fraction of ageing workers to keep slogging away, when they would rather have playtime for a bit before they go gaga and then perish, is by dramatically increasing the state pension age, so that only people with very fat private pensions or other investments can bridge the gap to the point at which they become eligible for sundry pensioner benefits and tax exemptions.
Most people don't want to go to work. They're not going to be made to love it with cheap bribes. They have to be forced into it by circumstances.
Making part-time work available might do the trick; we can see from the medical profession it is a popular option.
Now, whether encouraging the elderly to stay on and block jobs for younger people is sensible is an awkward question because employers might not want it. We can see laws in place around the world to stop, or at least slow down, companies getting rid of older workers in favour of younger ones.
The trick is going to be to create a lot of "wise old owl" roles in the economy. Think Ken Clarke in Cameron's cabinets.
Not in charge, or the generation below will go mad waiting for their turn. Not doing madly physical stuff. But available, in tap, to dispense experience and wisdom.
Tricky.
The key is to get the oldies occupied for most of the day on other stuff. Perhaps get them addicted to posting their random thoughts on an internet blog for example.
The problem insufficiently addressed so far is that with the gigantic numbers of people affected by the energy hike - SFAICS the entire working and just managing class + of course loads of OAPs etc, the people in need of a further handout and the class of taxpayers who are the only group large enough to pay for the handouts are largely the same people.
Not in proportion to costs and certainly not in proportion to year 1 cash flow required.
Osama bin Laden (or some one working for him) wrote an op-ed which was published in the Guardian.
What struck me about it at the time was that . . . it read as if it was written by Noam Chomsky. So much so that I considered sending him a note, asking whether he would confess to being the ghost writer.
I fear I am doxxing Leon here by mentioning Karl Andersson.
Masturbation journal paper exposes deeper problems in research
Karl Andersson’s ‘appallingly bad’ paper has exposed the insanity of ethnography’s turn towards introspection and other postmodern research methods that place little value on objectivity, says William Matthews
A peer-reviewed article based on masturbation to paedophilic comics as an autoethnographic method has rightly sparked condemnation within and beyond academia.
The article by Karl Andersson, a University of Manchester PhD student, has now been removed from Qualitative Research’s website. Its ethical failings have already been scrutinised by journalists and academics. But a key question remains outstanding: how has qualitative research, ostensibly under the banner of anthropology, got to the point where something like this could even be considered scholarship in the first place?
O/T We have had a hummingbird hawk-moth visiting our geraniums this evening - first time we have ever seen one in this country, though they are not that uncommon apparently. Beautiful though.
BlancheLivermore - Your "victory garden" reminds me of the time, years ago, when I had a full-scale garden. One of the biggest surprises were the cantaloupes. The small ones I raised had a better taste than the commercial ones, but the taste varied widely, even on melons picked on successive days from the same vine.
(Don't know if they can be raised in your part of Britain, but they are, in my experience, worth the trouble, if that is possible.)
O/T We have had a hummingbird hawk-moth visiting our geraniums this evening - first time we have ever seen one in this country, though it's not that uncommon apparently. Beautiful though.
(Not a photo of the one we saw, obvs)
I also saw one enjoying a drink from some lavender flowers on the way home the other evening. I assume that they're colonising the country from further South due to climate change.
The problem insufficiently addressed so far is that with the gigantic numbers of people affected by the energy hike - SFAICS the entire working and just managing class + of course loads of OAPs etc, the people in need of a further handout and the class of taxpayers who are the only group large enough to pay for the handouts are largely the same people.
I've spoken to a few friends and colleagues and a view I've heard goes something like this:
"Someone somewhere is profiting from all this. They don't deserve to and the Government should be going after these undeserved profits and taxing them and giving the proceeds to the public to help us pay our bills"
Executive pay is also getting noticed an becoming an issue and particularly the remuneration packages handed out to the senior managers of water companies for example. There's also the issue of foreign ownership - this is why nationalisation is popular. It's back to those notions of accountability and control that resonated so much in the EU debate.
I do point out one of the organisations doing well is the Government via VAT - that elicits a fairly predictable response in terms of cutting VAT. I then point out the amount we are now paying in debt interest and servicing future debt and if you want to cut health, defence or education, be my guest but don't expect it to be popular.
Kwasi wants to sack Bailey. That's risky but if the replacement is credible, say Raghuram Rajan, we could actually get inflation under control. Bailey is useless.
He can't. The governor has an eight year term.
I suppose they could "persuade" him to take early retirement.
If the Chancellor doesn't have confidence in the governor then the governor has to resign. No way he could stay under those circumstances. They could also reopen all of the investigations surrounding his time in charge of the FCA if he doesn't go quietly. One of the reasons sterling is weaker than it should be is because markets don't believe the bank has credibility, specifically Bailey. Solve that and we take 5-6% off imported inflation within a few months.
He should be forced to invest his compensation with St. James’s Place.
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.
There have been plenty of well drilled prior to the 2019 ban on fracking in the UK, by both Cuadrilla and by iGas. Neither of them were able to find commercially viable deposits. iGas shares had lost more than 99% of their value by the end of 2018.
It is worth remembering that the US has twenty or so shale basins. Of these, only two or three are commercially viable. The rest, yes, there's gas there, but it's either too deep, or the rock above it is two expensive to drill through, or the flow rates you get after fracturing the rock just aren't good enough.
There's a lazy assumption that "shale gas deposits" mean it must be like the Marcellus, and not like the Floyd or the Antrim shales.
O/T We have had a hummingbird hawk-moth visiting our geraniums this evening - first time we have ever seen one in this country, though it's not that uncommon apparently. Beautiful though.
(Not a photo of the one we saw, obvs)
I also saw one enjoying a drink from some lavender flowers on the way home the other evening. I assume that they're colonising the country from further South due to climate change.
Seems to have quite a northerly extent, going up to northern Norway and Iceland.
I fear I am doxxing Leon here by mentioning Karl Andersson.
Masturbation journal paper exposes deeper problems in research
Karl Andersson’s ‘appallingly bad’ paper has exposed the insanity of ethnography’s turn towards introspection and other postmodern research methods that place little value on objectivity, says William Matthews
A peer-reviewed article based on masturbation to paedophilic comics as an autoethnographic method has rightly sparked condemnation within and beyond academia.
The article by Karl Andersson, a University of Manchester PhD student, has now been removed from Qualitative Research’s website. Its ethical failings have already been scrutinised by journalists and academics. But a key question remains outstanding: how has qualitative research, ostensibly under the banner of anthropology, got to the point where something like this could even be considered scholarship in the first place?
@staylorish Noam Chomsky tells an Edinburgh Book Festival audience that Vladimir Putin should be given the benefit of the doubt on his motives for invading Ukraine, and that he (Chomsky) supports Scottish independence. The audience, which must be overwhelmingly idiots, whoops and cheers.
The problem insufficiently addressed so far is that with the gigantic numbers of people affected by the energy hike - SFAICS the entire working and just managing class + of course loads of OAPs etc, the people in need of a further handout and the class of taxpayers who are the only group large enough to pay for the handouts are largely the same people.
I've spoken to a few friends and colleagues and a view I've heard goes something like this:
"Someone somewhere is profiting from all this. They don't deserve to and the Government should be going after these undeserved profits and taxing them and giving the proceeds to the public to help us pay our bills"
Executive pay is also getting noticed an becoming an issue and particularly the remuneration packages handed out to the senior managers of water companies for example. There's also the issue of foreign ownership - this is why nationalisation is popular. It's back to those notions of accountability and control that resonated so much in the EU debate.
I do point out one of the organisations doing well is the Government via VAT - that elicits a fairly predictable response in terms of cutting VAT. I then point out the amount we are now paying in debt interest and servicing future debt and if you want to cut health, defence or education, be my guest but don't expect it to be popular.
Figures mentioned have been up to £100bn. To get it in perspective, if it were per annum that's about 18-20p on the basic rate of income tax.
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.
The idea that we could become an instant net exporter of energy if only we fracked is not supported by much evidence unfortunately.
Is that not a bit iffy? The British Geological Survey study (of 55 pages) says between 23.3 and 64.6 trillion cubic metres, and I don't see why they would be prone to sensationalism.
There follows a 10 page journal article in Nature, which is sniffy about this figure (standard practise in academia), but their downgraded figure is 4 trillion cubic metres. Not even a fifth of the BGS's lowest estimate? Why the vast chasm between the two figures? And why is it accepted universally that the more detailed piece of initial research is wrong, and the journal article is right?
There are also two entirely different numbers that one can be talking about (actually, there's more than two, but I'm just going for two...):
(1) There is the amount of oil and gas in place (2) There is the amount of commercially extractable oil and gas
You might very well have an absolutely enormous (1), but a tiny (2).
@staylorish Noam Chomsky tells an Edinburgh Book Festival audience that Vladimir Putin should be given the benefit of the doubt on his motives for invading Ukraine, and that he (Chomsky) supports Scottish independence. The audience, which must be overwhelmingly idiots, whoops and cheers.
@staylorish Noam Chomsky tells an Edinburgh Book Festival audience that Vladimir Putin should be given the benefit of the doubt on his motives for invading Ukraine, and that he (Chomsky) supports Scottish independence. The audience, which must be overwhelmingly idiots, whoops and cheers.
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.
Not sure people understand what is involved in getting gas out by fracking (which is what he is referring to). If I want to access to conventional gas reserves I drill a single hole or a series of holes from one location to drain the reservoir. Fracking involves drilling hundreds or thousands of holes a few hundred yards apart over a vast area. This is why it only really works in places with wide open spaces. Having a fracking site every few hundred yards across the Forest of Bowland is both impractical and probably not going to be too popular.
That's one of the nicest pics on PB today - very nearly as nice as the moth and tomatoes.
And, of course, the BGS were probably asked to say how much reserve there was. Not whether it was commercially extractable. Yes Minister basic grade stuff.
The problem insufficiently addressed so far is that with the gigantic numbers of people affected by the energy hike - SFAICS the entire working and just managing class + of course loads of OAPs etc, the people in need of a further handout and the class of taxpayers who are the only group large enough to pay for the handouts are largely the same people.
I've spoken to a few friends and colleagues and a view I've heard goes something like this:
"Someone somewhere is profiting from all this. They don't deserve to and the Government should be going after these undeserved profits and taxing them and giving the proceeds to the public to help us pay our bills"
Executive pay is also getting noticed an becoming an issue and particularly the remuneration packages handed out to the senior managers of water companies for example. There's also the issue of foreign ownership - this is why nationalisation is popular. It's back to those notions of accountability and control that resonated so much in the EU debate.
I do point out one of the organisations doing well is the Government via VAT - that elicits a fairly predictable response in terms of cutting VAT. I then point out the amount we are now paying in debt interest and servicing future debt and if you want to cut health, defence or education, be my guest but don't expect it to be popular.
Fundamentally, because we are a net importer of energy, the profits from the high prices are being made where we can't tax them. As a country, the UK is poorer as a result.
@staylorish Noam Chomsky tells an Edinburgh Book Festival audience that Vladimir Putin should be given the benefit of the doubt on his motives for invading Ukraine, and that he (Chomsky) supports Scottish independence. The audience, which must be overwhelmingly idiots, whoops and cheers.
The problem insufficiently addressed so far is that with the gigantic numbers of people affected by the energy hike - SFAICS the entire working and just managing class + of course loads of OAPs etc, the people in need of a further handout and the class of taxpayers who are the only group large enough to pay for the handouts are largely the same people.
I've spoken to a few friends and colleagues and a view I've heard goes something like this:
"Someone somewhere is profiting from all this. They don't deserve to and the Government should be going after these undeserved profits and taxing them and giving the proceeds to the public to help us pay our bills"
Executive pay is also getting noticed an becoming an issue and particularly the remuneration packages handed out to the senior managers of water companies for example. There's also the issue of foreign ownership - this is why nationalisation is popular. It's back to those notions of accountability and control that resonated so much in the EU debate.
I do point out one of the organisations doing well is the Government via VAT - that elicits a fairly predictable response in terms of cutting VAT. I then point out the amount we are now paying in debt interest and servicing future debt and if you want to cut health, defence or education, be my guest but don't expect it to be popular.
Figures mentioned have been up to £100bn. To get it in perspective, if it were per annum that's about 18-20p on the basic rate of income tax.
I've seen £95 billion so all in the same neck of the woods. That's not an inconsequential sum and should interest rates rise again that amount would also go up. Yes, perhaps inflation will help over time but we need to get the deficit under control and that will help with the debt.
I've heard nothing from Liz Truss to make me think she has a grasp of this - it's all still interventionist magic money tree thinking that wouldn't have surprised had it come from John McDonnell.
There seems this almost infantile belief tax cuts are a one way ticket to happiness - presumably she's kept the spending cut aspect quiet during the campaign.
The problem insufficiently addressed so far is that with the gigantic numbers of people affected by the energy hike - SFAICS the entire working and just managing class + of course loads of OAPs etc, the people in need of a further handout and the class of taxpayers who are the only group large enough to pay for the handouts are largely the same people.
I've spoken to a few friends and colleagues and a view I've heard goes something like this:
"Someone somewhere is profiting from all this. They don't deserve to and the Government should be going after these undeserved profits and taxing them and giving the proceeds to the public to help us pay our bills"
Executive pay is also getting noticed an becoming an issue and particularly the remuneration packages handed out to the senior managers of water companies for example. There's also the issue of foreign ownership - this is why nationalisation is popular. It's back to those notions of accountability and control that resonated so much in the EU debate.
I do point out one of the organisations doing well is the Government via VAT - that elicits a fairly predictable response in terms of cutting VAT. I then point out the amount we are now paying in debt interest and servicing future debt and if you want to cut health, defence or education, be my guest but don't expect it to be popular.
Figures mentioned have been up to £100bn. To get it in perspective, if it were per annum that's about 18-20p on the basic rate of income tax.
Realistically I think £100bn covers about a year, and we are likely to need more than a year (could be less than a year if the war ends soon). But the way to look at it is maybe £150-200bn spread over 20 years. Energy is not going to cost this much in the future, and even if it somehow did we can transition to using less energy and an economy that matches the higher cost over a few years. We can't do that in six months.
So it is more like 1-2p on income tax over 20 years rather than 20p on income tax in one year - and the taxes should of course come from wealth taxes rather than income tax anyway.
Chomsky is a genius in the field of linguistics. Rather like Dawkins, I fail to see why this qualifies him to pontificate outside his field of expertise. Or rather, why anyone listens to him more than any other random.
Reading through an old thread, I came across this from 2018:
Russia's strangehold on energy supplies to Eastern Europe will continue to wane. Norway's gas production is rising, Israel is coming on stream next year, and everyone is building LNG import terminals to benefit from new supplies from the US and Africa. (And the rise of Australian LNG means that gas from the Gulf will be increasingly directed towards Europe.)
The moves to renewables in Europe - while they have sucked for many consumers - have had a similar effect.
The Russian noose around Eastern Europe is slowly loosening.
Ah well, we all make mistakes. But I tactfully won't identify the author!
@staylorish Noam Chomsky tells an Edinburgh Book Festival audience that Vladimir Putin should be given the benefit of the doubt on his motives for invading Ukraine, and that he (Chomsky) supports Scottish independence. The audience, which must be overwhelmingly idiots, whoops and cheers.
@staylorish Noam Chomsky tells an Edinburgh Book Festival audience that Vladimir Putin should be given the benefit of the doubt on his motives for invading Ukraine, and that he (Chomsky) supports Scottish independence. The audience, which must be overwhelmingly idiots, whoops and cheers.
@staylorish Noam Chomsky tells an Edinburgh Book Festival audience that Vladimir Putin should be given the benefit of the doubt on his motives for invading Ukraine, and that he (Chomsky) supports Scottish independence. The audience, which must be overwhelmingly idiots, whoops and cheers.
@staylorish Noam Chomsky tells an Edinburgh Book Festival audience that Vladimir Putin should be given the benefit of the doubt on his motives for invading Ukraine, and that he (Chomsky) supports Scottish independence. The audience, which must be overwhelmingly idiots, whoops and cheers.
@staylorish Noam Chomsky tells an Edinburgh Book Festival audience that Vladimir Putin should be given the benefit of the doubt on his motives for invading Ukraine, and that he (Chomsky) supports Scottish independence. The audience, which must be overwhelmingly idiots, whoops and cheers.
English urban middle classes lefties, mostly Corbyites.
If polling is to be believed, urban, middle class lefty English people are actually more unionist than right-leaning working class, leavers.
Pre Brexit maybe not post Brexit. While in Scotland Remainers are more likely to back independence than Leavers, yet in 2014 it was working class Scots who voted Yes to independence and middle class Scots who voted No.
Comments
1. The shitshow that is Britain's railways this summer is entirely the doing of the DfT
2. The emergency timetable on Avanti is the result of the DfT "break apart everything Virgin did" franchise agreement
3. The £90 fare is set by the DfT
4. Her onward connection to Aber is run by the Welsh government.
5. No passenger rail franchise has ever been privatised. A fixed term exclusive contract to operate services awarded to a private operator does not mean they own it. When the contract ends operating rights revert back to the owner - the DfT
There is no "nationalise it" magic wand to wave when the damage has been done by the wazzocks in government meddling in everything.
Better if we could encourage more part time working for older people to phase them out of the workforce.
Personally I'd much rather work 1-2 days a week and have more money to spend on the remaining days, than have all in the time in the world and be so limited in what I can afford to do.
Allow Tory donors to create a new company and then days later be awarded a £117m contract without tender to construct a big wooden wheel in every village hall across the country. Simply make the working class walk on the wheel all day to generate power for their homes and keep them warm into the bargain.
The Truss campaign are surely just holding out so that she can make a big whizzy statement involving billions of £ on day one of her premiership. Surely they don't actually believe this tax cut solves everything bollx?
How about making a working life a little more attractive to employees? The market says they can't wait to bugger off right now.
There's a lot to be said for stiffing the richbois for whom it covers their drinks bill by means testing it. Despite cries of I paid in all my life, I'm entitled...
I suppose they could "persuade" him to take early retirement.
The Japanese and South Koreans entered into twenty year contracts with LNG exporters. We did not, relying almost entirely on spot cargoes.
Which was great... until it wasn't.
Noam Chomsky tells an Edinburgh Book Festival audience that Vladimir Putin should be given the benefit of the doubt on his motives for invading Ukraine, and that he (Chomsky) supports Scottish independence. The audience, which must be overwhelmingly idiots, whoops and cheers.
https://twitter.com/staylorish/status/1563219243025326080
She has an odd sense of overconfidence.
There follows a 10 page journal article in Nature, which is sniffy about this figure (standard practise in academia), but their downgraded figure is 4 trillion cubic metres. Not even a fifth of the BGS's lowest estimate? Why the vast chasm between the two figures? And why is it accepted universally that the more detailed piece of initial research is wrong, and the journal article is right?
(Basically: they want to make sure they don't run out of lignite to burn in the depths of winter.)
Trump
Not really.my field of expertise.
Being premier is like an x-ray of your soul said one of the pol commentators once ( i think Steve Richards?)
Although i have to say i liked her comments about diverting £ into social care - which, believe me, is a total clusterf*ck at the moment.
https://www.insidermedia.com/news/midlands/rolls-royce-smr-partners-with-dutch-development-company
Making money building nuclear plants is really hard, but could Rolls Royce pull it off?
Most jobs are not beloved vocations, and most workers would happily quit in a nanosecond if they won a socking great lottery prize.
Very few people want to work any longer than they have to. I suppose the most obvious way in which one could make work 'more attractive to employees' is by paying them more, but given that 'those who can afford to are increasingly retiring earlier,' this is unlikely to have the desired effect.
The only way you might be able to compel a large fraction of ageing workers to keep slogging away, when they would rather have playtime for a bit before they go gaga and then perish, is by dramatically increasing the state pension age, so that only people with very fat private pensions or other investments can bridge the gap to the point at which they become eligible for sundry pensioner benefits and tax exemptions.
Most people don't want to go to work. They're not going to be made to love it with cheap bribes. They have to be forced into it by circumstances.
I was being a little facetious about making work more attractive. People want to retire. My cohort in their mid 50's are counting the days.
People hate working as a general rule.
Now, whether encouraging the elderly to stay on and block jobs for younger people is sensible is an awkward question because employers might not want it. We can see laws in place around the world to stop, or at least slow down, companies getting rid of older workers in favour of younger ones.
The point being that when HS2 is built it will be far easier to run more trains on the WCML to New Street, and there will be more platform capacity for trains from inter alia the Cambrian system to park up there.
I won't re-quote the earlier comments about how rising fuel prices are going to impact chip shops - they won't be the only ones. Presumably, most eateries are going to suffer including my local cafe.
I was also thinking of that other haven of the lost, lonely, sad and desperate, no, not PB but the betting shop. They are big users of electricity - think of all those screens and FOBTs. Moving on from that you have the racecourses who race using floodlights in the winter which is now all the artificial surface venues except Lingfield.
It's not just the cost of staging the meetings - it's the fuel costs of getting the horses, jockeys, trainers etc to the courses. I've proposed canning the floodlit season from November 1st to the end of February - yes, it would reduce opportunities within the racing industry but we are already hearing lamentations from trainers complaining at transport costs.
@MrEd nails it with the first post - the pendulum has swung away from Reaganomics/Thatcherism.
@BartholomewRoberts makes a plea for more neoliberalism but it's almost as if he knows he's fighting a lost cause.
@rcs1000 highlights the structural issues we're facing - we are the victims of our own success in helping people live longer.
And finally, @Ratters provides three options for the the solution (his feared choice, 4., is no solution and cannot be the long-term choice).
I would just add that we should celebrate our success in living longer healthier lives - that is a massive prize, for which it is well worth forgoing perpetual 'standard of living' increases (which nowadays just means acquiring more 'stuff' we probably don't need).
It could all fall apart very quickly.
No smiley face because although I'm not sorry to see the Tories IDS*, it's horrible for the rest of us.
*in deep shit. Who, er, What did you think I meant?
I think we need a fundamental re-evaluation of the nature of work - the idea of 9 to 5, five days a week, just sounds absurd in the modern era. We remain wedded to the work culture of the factory and the compartmentalisation of our work and home lives. I've seen the expression "post-work world" banded around for those societies with an increasing percentage of economically active individuals.
That seems to be formulated and developed into a new economic and cultural model for the mid-21st century and beyond.
Sacking a Bank governor (even if he is a duffer) costs a bit in credibility anyway.
And given that the Truss solution to everything is Grow Baby, Grow, I can see her (via KK) finding and appointing someone even softer on inflation.
An unsustainable boom in 2023 is their only hope of winning in 2024.
The problem with a double secret probation plan is that when the great reveal happens, some Tories say no. You never campaigned on that.
Rumours that the Emergency Budget will just be the tax cuts and a statement of intentions.
Thus avoiding scrutiny from the OBR. Who are saying they are perfectly able to produce an opinion.
If that's the plan then God help us all.
Not in charge, or the generation below will go mad waiting for their turn. Not doing madly physical stuff. But available, in tap, to dispense experience and wisdom.
Tricky.
Her (presumably) authority over the Party will seem complete initially but clearly there are plenty beyond the membership who have "doubts" and won't give her a lot of space or time.
We've also got the expectations management thing - something "big and bold" would seem the most attractive option but it must grate with traditionally small-state Conservatives to hear some of the more interventionist lines being put about.
We also know it's not just a winter of rising fuel poverty ahead - it seems possible higher energy costs will be with us for at least as long as there is continuing conflict in the Ukraine.
I'm cautiously optimistic.
One of the reasons I support the capitalist system is flexibility - adversity creates opportunity just as it did at the start of the pandemic. Those who moved quickly into home delivery for example did very well. Those who can champion energy efficiency will do well just as thermal insulation flourished in the 1970s after the 73-74 oil price shock.
Higher energy prices will in time generate energy efficiency throughout the economy either via alternative sources or by technology making better use of what we use.
My tomatoes are still going great. I passed twenty pounds total on my harvest this morning and should reach ten kilos tomorrow. I love having two unit scales and extra milestones.
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_(United_States)#Delayed_benefits
As far as I know, they are uncontroversial, now.
(George W. Bush proposed a reform which would have invested part of social security taxes in securities, with subisidies for low-income workers. It didn't get majority support, in spite of that redistributive sweetner.)
What struck me about it at the time was that . . . it read as if it was written by Noam Chomsky. So much so that I considered sending him a note, asking whether he would confess to being the ghost writer.
Masturbation journal paper exposes deeper problems in research
Karl Andersson’s ‘appallingly bad’ paper has exposed the insanity of ethnography’s turn towards introspection and other postmodern research methods that place little value on objectivity, says William Matthews
A peer-reviewed article based on masturbation to paedophilic comics as an autoethnographic method has rightly sparked condemnation within and beyond academia.
The article by Karl Andersson, a University of Manchester PhD student, has now been removed from Qualitative Research’s website. Its ethical failings have already been scrutinised by journalists and academics. But a key question remains outstanding: how has qualitative research, ostensibly under the banner of anthropology, got to the point where something like this could even be considered scholarship in the first place?
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/masturbation-journal-paper-exposes-deeper-problems-research
(Not a photo of the one we saw, obvs)
(Don't know if they can be raised in your part of Britain, but they are, in my experience, worth the trouble, if that is possible.)
"Someone somewhere is profiting from all this. They don't deserve to and the Government should be going after these undeserved profits and taxing them and giving the proceeds to the public to help us pay our bills"
Executive pay is also getting noticed an becoming an issue and particularly the remuneration packages handed out to the senior managers of water companies for example. There's also the issue of foreign ownership - this is why nationalisation is popular. It's back to those notions of accountability and control that resonated so much in the EU debate.
I do point out one of the organisations doing well is the Government via VAT - that elicits a fairly predictable response in terms of cutting VAT. I then point out the amount we are now paying in debt interest and servicing future debt and if you want to cut health, defence or education, be my guest but don't expect it to be popular.
It is worth remembering that the US has twenty or so shale basins. Of these, only two or three are commercially viable. The rest, yes, there's gas there, but it's either too deep, or the rock above it is two expensive to drill through, or the flow rates you get after fracturing the rock just aren't good enough.
There's a lazy assumption that "shale gas deposits" mean it must be like the Marcellus, and not like the Floyd or the Antrim shales.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Distribution_map_Macroglossum_stellatarum.svg
(1) There is the amount of oil and gas in place
(2) There is the amount of commercially extractable oil and gas
You might very well have an absolutely enormous (1), but a tiny (2).
And, of course, the BGS were probably asked to say how much reserve there was. Not whether it was commercially extractable. Yes Minister basic grade stuff.
I've heard nothing from Liz Truss to make me think she has a grasp of this - it's all still interventionist magic money tree thinking that wouldn't have surprised had it come from John McDonnell.
There seems this almost infantile belief tax cuts are a one way ticket to happiness - presumably she's kept the spending cut aspect quiet during the campaign.
So it is more like 1-2p on income tax over 20 years rather than 20p on income tax in one year - and the taxes should of course come from wealth taxes rather than income tax anyway.
Or rather, why anyone listens to him more than any other random.
Bin the Tesla. Get on your bike. Get that thermostat down and have shorter showers. Don't overfill the kettle.
Find a partner to keep your bed warm at night. *Boris states down camera* "Let's shag our way to victory".
Russia's strangehold on energy supplies to Eastern Europe will continue to wane. Norway's gas production is rising, Israel is coming on stream next year, and everyone is building LNG import terminals to benefit from new supplies from the US and Africa. (And the rise of Australian LNG means that gas from the Gulf will be increasingly directed towards Europe.)
The moves to renewables in Europe - while they have sucked for many consumers - have had a similar effect.
The Russian noose around Eastern Europe is slowly loosening.
Ah well, we all make mistakes. But I tactfully won't identify the author!
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/sep/15/life-expectancy-in-england-falls-to-lowest-level-since-2011
In 1973 the bath was full of coal!
Who came up with that silly term? Miliband?
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/joke
A laughably worthless thing or person; a sham.
...
The president was a joke.
This government is a joke.
The Conservative Party is a joke.
None of which is funny.
Chomsky though is basically a Corbynite