Tax cuts disproportionately benefit tax payers. What a shock.
Why not just increase taxes to 100% if that's your point of view, as anything less than that "disproportionately benefits" the rich.
Trickle down economics doesn’t work. Tax cuts for the rich aren’t going to massively increase growth, so they will increase the deficit, which will weaken the pound and lead to further inflation, making everyone poorer. Unless, of course, you slash public services. You think it takes a long time to get a GP appointment now? Wait until we’re further into Truss’s premiership.
Counter-cyclical taxation policies work if you invest in the country. The Government isn’t doing anything to improve productivity. It’s just inflating house prices with a stamp duty cut and encouraging unsafe financial systems through deregulation.
Truss isn't doing "tax cuts for the rich" or "trickle down economics" though, she's doing tax cuts for tax payers. Trickle down is when you only cut the rates of tax for the highest tax payers, rather than cutting everybody's tax which is what reversing the NI hike does.
Cutting everyone's tax does work, tax rises don't work, they strangle the economy and don't raise the revenues expected.
One can, of course, cut or raise taxes in a broad variety of ways. There are taxes that nearly everybody pays, like VAT, and there are taxes that are paid by a smaller proportion of the population, like inheritance tax or tobacco duty. Is there a particular group that benefit the most from Truss’s plans? Yes. Those on the highest incomes.
What of her other plans? How is a stamp duty cut benefitting everybody, when so many can’t even get on the property ladder? How is increasing bankers’ bonuses benefitting everybody?
Some will get the benefits, but we all pay the price of a massively increased deficit.
There are taxes that are paid by those who work for a living, like National Insurance.
There are taxes that are paid by those who are trying to get on the housing ladder, or engaged in labour mobility, like SDLT.
If you want to tax wealth, then taxing those who are working for a living is the worst place to start. Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes are not the ones benefiting from these tax changes.
Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes benefit from a stamp duty cut, as they’re more likely to be buying/selling property than the average person.
Were Truss planning to cut NI while also increasing wealth taxes so as to balance the budget, that would be one thing… but she’s not. She’s cutting taxes and raising borrowing. You keep sidestepping this point. Your answers never talk about the deficit or inflation.
The deficit is all Gordon Brown's fault, silly.
That was 14 years and at least 1 recession ago....
On the point above, a Stamp Duty cut does not benefit everybody - it benefits home owners, who by definition are the wealthier members of society.
On the last point, a fair amount of things *are* Gordon Brown's fault.
His habit was to borrow from future generations up to and including his grand children's generation (see PFI contracts) to spend it now, so we can't really divorce him from his shadow. In the case of PFI, his off-balance sheet shadow.
Currently, for example, my local NHS Trust is spending more than 5% of its total budget servicing its PFI scheme.
In general terms, how many more NHS staff and services can you get for £22 million a year?
Your PFI point is well made, but it is worth pointing out that prior to the GFC Labour had cut the debt to GDP ratio below the level it had inherited from the Tories in 97.
Tax cuts disproportionately benefit tax payers. What a shock.
Why not just increase taxes to 100% if that's your point of view, as anything less than that "disproportionately benefits" the rich.
Trickle down economics doesn’t work. Tax cuts for the rich aren’t going to massively increase growth, so they will increase the deficit, which will weaken the pound and lead to further inflation, making everyone poorer. Unless, of course, you slash public services. You think it takes a long time to get a GP appointment now? Wait until we’re further into Truss’s premiership.
Counter-cyclical taxation policies work if you invest in the country. The Government isn’t doing anything to improve productivity. It’s just inflating house prices with a stamp duty cut and encouraging unsafe financial systems through deregulation.
Truss isn't doing "tax cuts for the rich" or "trickle down economics" though, she's doing tax cuts for tax payers. Trickle down is when you only cut the rates of tax for the highest tax payers, rather than cutting everybody's tax which is what reversing the NI hike does.
Cutting everyone's tax does work, tax rises don't work, they strangle the economy and don't raise the revenues expected.
One can, of course, cut or raise taxes in a broad variety of ways. There are taxes that nearly everybody pays, like VAT, and there are taxes that are paid by a smaller proportion of the population, like inheritance tax or tobacco duty. Is there a particular group that benefit the most from Truss’s plans? Yes. Those on the highest incomes.
What of her other plans? How is a stamp duty cut benefitting everybody, when so many can’t even get on the property ladder? How is increasing bankers’ bonuses benefitting everybody?
Some will get the benefits, but we all pay the price of a massively increased deficit.
There are taxes that are paid by those who work for a living, like National Insurance.
There are taxes that are paid by those who are trying to get on the housing ladder, or engaged in labour mobility, like SDLT.
If you want to tax wealth, then taxing those who are working for a living is the worst place to start. Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes are not the ones benefiting from these tax changes.
Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes benefit from a stamp duty cut, as they’re more likely to be buying/selling property than the average person.
Were Truss planning to cut NI while also increasing wealth taxes so as to balance the budget, that would be one thing… but she’s not. She’s cutting taxes and raising borrowing. You keep sidestepping this point. Your answers never talk about the deficit or inflation.
The deficit is all Gordon Brown's fault, silly.
That was 14 years and at least 1 recession ago....
On the point above, a Stamp Duty cut does not benefit everybody - it benefits home owners, who by definition are the wealthier members of society.
On the last point, a fair amount of things *are* Gordon Brown's fault.
His habit was to borrow from future generations up to and including his grand children's generation (see PFI contracts) to spend it now, so we can't really divorce him from his shadow. In the case of PFI, his off-balance sheet shadow.
Currently, for example, my local NHS Trust is spending more than 5% of its total budget servicing its PFI scheme.
In general terms, how many more NHS staff and services can you get for £22 million a year?
PFI was a huge mistake and we should blame Brown (and others) for it… But perhaps it is more useful right now to focus on the people who are still in power and who can do something…? Is the Truss government doing anything about past or future PFI contracts?
With the exception of a freakish period between 1984-85 (when people thought the miners might win?) the pound is the weakest it has ever been against the dollar.
As is the euro - this is dollar strength
The pound is near the lowest value it has ever been against the Euro.
Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand
I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses
You need to tell the labour party to roll out my recommended strategy of choosing about 10 safe conservative seats on the periphery of London, areas with lots of undeveloped land and of limited landscape value, and pledge to pass an Act of Parliament in the first 100 days of being elected that grants outline planning permission for 2 million new houses in these areas.
No one on PB has ever been able to identify a downside to this when I suggest it. It should be labour party policy.
Labour MPs being unwilling to vote to take the hit on their own nice houses in London?
Because they know that once such blatantly partisan moves were made, it would become the norm.
Labour safe seats - well that’s the location of nuclear power stations, nuclear waste storage, giant reservoirs and Thermal Depolymerisation Plants sorted…
BREAKING. Defence Secretary Ben Wallace’s response to the address by Putin:
“Putin’s breaking of his own promises not to mobilise parts of his population and the illegal annexation of parts of Ukraine, are an admission that his invasion is failing. Ukraine is winning this war.”
Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand
I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses
How exactly is Truss to do this? There are thousands of plots that developers hold with planning permission, but why exactly would they go hell for leather and build them all, reducing the properties' value and the developers' profits (which is the effect that you want to see), as opposed to downing tools, selling the houses off plan, keeping values high and taking very little risk?
It's the same situation with supply of energy - we would all love suppliers to flood the market with cheap energy, but who's going to pay them to do so? Someone will have to.
Well, here's some ideas:
1. As suggested here by someone else previously: make the developers pay Council Tax on those plots. 2. Change planning to revoke permission if unused after a year. 3. All the government to compulsory purchase any land with building permission at the current value less 10% for every year it has sat idle.
I am sure there are plenty of others that could be considered.
2 would be counterproductive as it would make it more complex to get planning permission if you had to start from scratch every twelve months. Particularly for any private building plots where raising finance might be an issue.
3 would only work if the government/council were willing to build houses directly. Given the costs involved that seems unlikely.
1 is an excellent idea on a huge number of levels.
Agreed, council tax on undeveloped plots after the first twelve months would be an excellent incentive, raise a fair amount of revenue, and have fairly limited negative effects.
It would be, but the Conservative Party is in the hands of developers, so even that won't happen.
Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand
I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses
How exactly is Truss to do this? There are thousands of plots that developers hold with planning permission, but why exactly would they go hell for leather and build them all, reducing the properties' value and the developers' profits (which is the effect that you want to see), as opposed to downing tools, selling the houses off plan, keeping values high and taking very little risk?
It's the same situation with supply of energy - we would all love suppliers to flood the market with cheap energy, but who's going to pay them to do so? Someone will have to.
Abolish planning permission so that having land with permission is no longer valuable.
The only reason holding land with permission has a value is because permission is rationed and thus valuable. Abolish rationing, then holding permission loses all value.
The equivalent of legalising robbery so that the crime figures go down.
Tax cuts disproportionately benefit tax payers. What a shock.
Why not just increase taxes to 100% if that's your point of view, as anything less than that "disproportionately benefits" the rich.
Trickle down economics doesn’t work. Tax cuts for the rich aren’t going to massively increase growth, so they will increase the deficit, which will weaken the pound and lead to further inflation, making everyone poorer. Unless, of course, you slash public services. You think it takes a long time to get a GP appointment now? Wait until we’re further into Truss’s premiership.
Counter-cyclical taxation policies work if you invest in the country. The Government isn’t doing anything to improve productivity. It’s just inflating house prices with a stamp duty cut and encouraging unsafe financial systems through deregulation.
Truss isn't doing "tax cuts for the rich" or "trickle down economics" though, she's doing tax cuts for tax payers. Trickle down is when you only cut the rates of tax for the highest tax payers, rather than cutting everybody's tax which is what reversing the NI hike does.
Cutting everyone's tax does work, tax rises don't work, they strangle the economy and don't raise the revenues expected.
One can, of course, cut or raise taxes in a broad variety of ways. There are taxes that nearly everybody pays, like VAT, and there are taxes that are paid by a smaller proportion of the population, like inheritance tax or tobacco duty. Is there a particular group that benefit the most from Truss’s plans? Yes. Those on the highest incomes.
What of her other plans? How is a stamp duty cut benefitting everybody, when so many can’t even get on the property ladder? How is increasing bankers’ bonuses benefitting everybody?
Some will get the benefits, but we all pay the price of a massively increased deficit.
There are taxes that are paid by those who work for a living, like National Insurance.
There are taxes that are paid by those who are trying to get on the housing ladder, or engaged in labour mobility, like SDLT.
If you want to tax wealth, then taxing those who are working for a living is the worst place to start. Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes are not the ones benefiting from these tax changes.
Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes benefit from a stamp duty cut, as they’re more likely to be buying/selling property than the average person.
Were Truss planning to cut NI while also increasing wealth taxes so as to balance the budget, that would be one thing… but she’s not. She’s cutting taxes and raising borrowing. You keep sidestepping this point. Your answers never talk about the deficit or inflation.
The deficit is all Gordon Brown's fault, silly.
That was 14 years and at least 1 recession ago....
On the point above, a Stamp Duty cut does not benefit everybody - it benefits home owners, who by definition are the wealthier members of society.
On the last point, a fair amount of things *are* Gordon Brown's fault.
His habit was to borrow from future generations up to and including his grand children's generation (see PFI contracts) to spend it now, so we can't really divorce him from his shadow. In the case of PFI, his off-balance sheet shadow.
Currently, for example, my local NHS Trust is spending more than 5% of its total budget servicing its PFI scheme.
In general terms, how many more NHS staff and services can you get for £22 million a year?
Quite a lot, but only if they're available. We need to be training more people to be in public service.
What we are encouraging is people going into finance and other parasitical jobs rather than into doing something useful for other people.
And good morning one and all; looks more like autumn this morning.
It seems the Russian military collapse is not slowing down. Reports this morning of Russia abandoning Lyman.
Russia keep losing in hours territory it took them weeks to grind out via artillery shelling.
This war is going just one direction now and the "de-escalation" or don't antagonise Putin apologists across the West can't do anything to stop that now.
Lyman was being surrounded. The only question was whether they left it in an organised manner, or left all their kit again and ran.
Significant strategic loss for them. Another defensive line has failed.
The sheer amount of military hardware that Russia is supplying to Ukraine as they retreat is utterly astounding.
It's remarkable that no Russian generals had the strategic nous or ability to destroy the hardware and artillery shells etc as they were abandoning them instead of just leaving them uncontrolled for Ukraine to collect.
The Hundred Days, the Ukrainian remix.
For those who don’t know - after the German Michael offensive failed in 1918, the Allies pushed forward, the German lines collapsed, and they began to push forward at increasing speed.
Only the end of the war prevented them from entering Germany.
Indeed. The battle of Amiens should be up there with Crecy, Agincourt, Waterloo etc as great British victories. The black day of the German army.
British?
Well Waterloo was very much an allied army: UK/Hanover: 31,000 (25,000 British and 6,000 King's German Legion) Hanover: 11,000 Netherlands: 17,000 Brunswick: 6,000 Nassau: 3,000[5] Plus Blücher's army of 50,000 Prussians
Let us hope that Putin faces his own Waterloo pretty soon.
Tax cuts disproportionately benefit tax payers. What a shock.
Why not just increase taxes to 100% if that's your point of view, as anything less than that "disproportionately benefits" the rich.
Trickle down economics doesn’t work. Tax cuts for the rich aren’t going to massively increase growth, so they will increase the deficit, which will weaken the pound and lead to further inflation, making everyone poorer. Unless, of course, you slash public services. You think it takes a long time to get a GP appointment now? Wait until we’re further into Truss’s premiership.
Counter-cyclical taxation policies work if you invest in the country. The Government isn’t doing anything to improve productivity. It’s just inflating house prices with a stamp duty cut and encouraging unsafe financial systems through deregulation.
Truss isn't doing "tax cuts for the rich" or "trickle down economics" though, she's doing tax cuts for tax payers. Trickle down is when you only cut the rates of tax for the highest tax payers, rather than cutting everybody's tax which is what reversing the NI hike does.
Cutting everyone's tax does work, tax rises don't work, they strangle the economy and don't raise the revenues expected.
One can, of course, cut or raise taxes in a broad variety of ways. There are taxes that nearly everybody pays, like VAT, and there are taxes that are paid by a smaller proportion of the population, like inheritance tax or tobacco duty. Is there a particular group that benefit the most from Truss’s plans? Yes. Those on the highest incomes.
What of her other plans? How is a stamp duty cut benefitting everybody, when so many can’t even get on the property ladder? How is increasing bankers’ bonuses benefitting everybody?
Some will get the benefits, but we all pay the price of a massively increased deficit.
There are taxes that are paid by those who work for a living, like National Insurance.
There are taxes that are paid by those who are trying to get on the housing ladder, or engaged in labour mobility, like SDLT.
If you want to tax wealth, then taxing those who are working for a living is the worst place to start. Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes are not the ones benefiting from these tax changes.
Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes benefit from a stamp duty cut, as they’re more likely to be buying/selling property than the average person.
Were Truss planning to cut NI while also increasing wealth taxes so as to balance the budget, that would be one thing… but she’s not. She’s cutting taxes and raising borrowing. You keep sidestepping this point. Your answers never talk about the deficit or inflation.
The deficit is all Gordon Brown's fault, silly.
That was 14 years and at least 1 recession ago....
On the point above, a Stamp Duty cut does not benefit everybody - it benefits home owners, who by definition are the wealthier members of society.
On the last point, a fair amount of things *are* Gordon Brown's fault.
His habit was to borrow from future generations up to and including his grand children's generation (see PFI contracts) to spend it now, so we can't really divorce him from his shadow. In the case of PFI, his off-balance sheet shadow.
Currently, for example, my local NHS Trust is spending more than 5% of its total budget servicing its PFI scheme.
In general terms, how many more NHS staff and services can you get for £22 million a year?
Your PFI point is well made, but it is worth pointing out that prior to the GFC Labour had cut the debt to GDP ratio below the level it had inherited from the Tories in 97.
That is true, but it was above the level it had reached in 2000. And it had got it down to that level by following Clarke's (deliberately over tight) spending plans.
My train to Leeds for tonight's Enough is Enough rally has been stopped just outside London for the last 3 hours. I'm sorry not to be there, Leeds! 😭
Just another reminder that we need to bring rail into public ownership and make it fit for the future! 🚄
LNER Replying to @zarahsultana and @eiecampaign I am sorry for the delay, Zarah. This was due to damage to the overhead electric wires meaning services could not move around Stevenage, but services are now on the move. On your other point, LNER is owned by the DfT after the franchise was handed back in 2018. ^Cameron
Personally, I salute Labour for not discriminating on the basis of race, sex, or intelligence.
I wouldn't put money on Labour holding Coventry South at the next election.
I have banged on and on about thick as mince Corbynites such as Sultana. "why are you singling out this woman of colour" sometimes is the attack on Twitter.
It's not because she's a woman. Its not because she is British Asian. Its because she is a fucking moron. An ideologue zealot one at that.
Sounds like Mrs Sussex.
Really? Haven't seen any evidence of her moronity. They don't like her because she is a black American woman with opinions and a mouth. British princesses are supposed to come straight out of Harry Enfield's WOMEN KNOW YOUR LIMITS sketch, and she doesn't.
Actually it’s because she is a lying manipulative narcissist who’s just out for what she can take
I see we are at the anger phase of the grief response.
A cocktail of geo-strategising and whining about Meghan is pretty much the essence of PB nowadays. Just needs an incarnation of PB’s walking, talking multiple personality disorder prolapsing over nuclear armageddon to turn up to add the maraschino cherry to the mix.
What has happened with Meghan and Harry today? I thought they were good and quite dignified throughout the funeral.
Presumably they breathed funny or something.
I think Meghan being too good at acting sad ('She's an actress you know!!!') was literally one of the whines.
And there was that "look at me" hat.
I am not a fan of Meghan and think both she and Harry have been foolish over the last few years. But as someone pointed out to me yesterday, she has just done one of the toughest things she will ever have to do.
I am sure she was saddened by the Queen's death, if only for Harry (and I think more than that). She has had every camera in the place trained on here by people just waiting for her to give the slightest indication of a smile or the slightest deviation from 'proper' mourning.
In anyone else - any of the rest of the Royal family - it would have been excused as natural. Even in the darkest times we can find things that might bring a smile to our lips even if it is just a fond memory. But if a single shot had been taken of Meghan with the faintest of a smile she would have been crucified.
That is one tough gig for days on end and I don't think either she or Harry put a foot wrong.
Yes. I was joshing there. She and Harry don't merit the attention they get, either of the fawning or derogatory variety.
It seems the Russian military collapse is not slowing down. Reports this morning of Russia abandoning Lyman.
Russia keep losing in hours territory it took them weeks to grind out via artillery shelling.
This war is going just one direction now and the "de-escalation" or don't antagonise Putin apologists across the West can't do anything to stop that now.
Lyman was being surrounded. The only question was whether they left it in an organised manner, or left all their kit again and ran.
Significant strategic loss for them. Another defensive line has failed.
The sheer amount of military hardware that Russia is supplying to Ukraine as they retreat is utterly astounding.
It's remarkable that no Russian generals had the strategic nous or ability to destroy the hardware and artillery shells etc as they were abandoning them instead of just leaving them uncontrolled for Ukraine to collect.
The Hundred Days, the Ukrainian remix.
For those who don’t know - after the German Michael offensive failed in 1918, the Allies pushed forward, the German lines collapsed, and they began to push forward at increasing speed.
Only the end of the war prevented them from entering Germany.
Indeed. The battle of Amiens should be up there with Crecy, Agincourt, Waterloo etc as great British victories. The black day of the German army.
British?
Well Waterloo was very much an allied army: UK/Hanover: 31,000 (25,000 British and 6,000 King's German Legion) Hanover: 11,000 Netherlands: 17,000 Brunswick: 6,000 Nassau: 3,000[5] Plus Blücher's army of 50,000 Prussians
Let us hope that Putin faces his own Waterloo pretty soon.
Incidentally, the irony of saying that people in Ukraine do not wish to live under Neo-Nazis and he would support them in their wish was just extraordinary.
Maybe he reads history - the Nazis pitch in Ukraine was that they were liberators.
As with the Japanese in Asia, the obsessive compulsive genocide, theft, mass rape kinda put a dampener on that.
Well, yes, but actually that came slightly later. The actual first thing that turned the Ukrainians against the Nazis was the German decision to seize the collective farms and their produce for themselves rather than sharing out the land to the peasants as they had said they would.
Even so, some Ukrainians still fought for the Nazis, including Petro Poroshenko's hero Stepan Bandera. There were also significant numbers of Ukrainians active in the Holocaust, mainly as camp guards.
Not forgetting of course that the Soviets did just the same when they counter-invaded!
That was the theft part. Starting off by stealing all the food.
The plan of the Nazis was to steal the food of Ukraine/Occupied Russia/Eastern Europe. The resulting starvation and deaths was seen by those planning it as a welcome benefit.
It seems the Russian military collapse is not slowing down. Reports this morning of Russia abandoning Lyman.
Russia keep losing in hours territory it took them weeks to grind out via artillery shelling.
This war is going just one direction now and the "de-escalation" or don't antagonise Putin apologists across the West can't do anything to stop that now.
Lyman was being surrounded. The only question was whether they left it in an organised manner, or left all their kit again and ran.
Significant strategic loss for them. Another defensive line has failed.
The sheer amount of military hardware that Russia is supplying to Ukraine as they retreat is utterly astounding.
It's remarkable that no Russian generals had the strategic nous or ability to destroy the hardware and artillery shells etc as they were abandoning them instead of just leaving them uncontrolled for Ukraine to collect.
The Hundred Days, the Ukrainian remix.
For those who don’t know - after the German Michael offensive failed in 1918, the Allies pushed forward, the German lines collapsed, and they began to push forward at increasing speed.
Only the end of the war prevented them from entering Germany.
Indeed. The battle of Amiens should be up there with Crecy, Agincourt, Waterloo etc as great British victories. The black day of the German army.
British?
Well Waterloo was very much an allied army: UK/Hanover: 31,000 (25,000 British and 6,000 King's German Legion) Hanover: 11,000 Netherlands: 17,000 Brunswick: 6,000 Nassau: 3,000[5] Plus Blücher's army of 50,000 Prussians
Let us hope that Putin faces his own Waterloo pretty soon.
Indeed. So two English and one allied victory being crammed into the ‘British’ folder.
I'm willing to claim Bannockburn as a great British victory on the same basis. Your victories are our victories. Anything that makes Scotland strong, makes Britain strong.
Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand
I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses
You need to tell the labour party to roll out my recommended strategy of choosing about 10 safe conservative seats on the periphery of London, areas with lots of undeveloped land and of limited landscape value, and pledge to pass an Act of Parliament in the first 100 days of being elected that grants outline planning permission for 2 million new houses in these areas.
No one on PB has ever been able to identify a downside to this when I suggest it. It should be labour party policy.
Labour MPs being unwilling to vote to take the hit on their own nice houses in London?
Because they know that once such blatantly partisan moves were made, it would become the norm.
Labour safe seats - well that’s the location of nuclear power stations, nuclear waste storage, giant reservoirs and Thermal Depolymerisation Plants sorted…
The trouble is these days "Labour safe seats" is becoming something of an oxymoron.
Incidentally, the irony of saying that people in Ukraine do not wish to live under Neo-Nazis and he would support them in their wish was just extraordinary.
Maybe he reads history - the Nazis pitch in Ukraine was that they were liberators.
As with the Japanese in Asia, the obsessive compulsive genocide, theft, mass rape kinda put a dampener on that.
Well, yes, but actually that came slightly later. The actual first thing that turned the Ukrainians against the Nazis was the German decision to seize the collective farms and their produce for themselves rather than sharing out the land to the peasants as they had said they would.
Even so, some Ukrainians still fought for the Nazis, including Petro Poroshenko's hero Stepan Bandera. There were also significant numbers of Ukrainians active in the Holocaust, mainly as camp guards.
Not forgetting of course that the Soviets did just the same when they counter-invaded!
That was the theft part. Starting off by stealing all the food.
The plan of the Nazis was to steal the food of Ukraine/Occupied Russia/Eastern Europe. The resulting starvation and deaths was seen by those planning it as a welcome benefit.
Yes, they literally wrote that down.
Yes.
But they told the Ukrainians something slightly different...
Apols in advance for the parochialism but this is pretty funny. Apart from anything else the SCons thinking that someone working for Jim 'Astonished By How Easy It's Been To Outwit The SNP' Murphy was a plus is a cracker.
Going from the grand if sometimes overwhelming spectacle of mighty global politics to the tiny, tedious trivia of provincial Scotland - as here - is like being on safari in the Serengeti to watch the lions attack the herds of wildebeest, then you come back to camp & you hear the faint, predictable whine of a mosquito
With the exception of a freakish period between 1984-85 (when people thought the miners might win?) the pound is the weakest it has ever been against the dollar.
As is the euro - this is dollar strength
The pound is near the lowest value it has ever been against the Euro.
Tax cuts disproportionately benefit tax payers. What a shock.
Why not just increase taxes to 100% if that's your point of view, as anything less than that "disproportionately benefits" the rich.
Trickle down economics doesn’t work. Tax cuts for the rich aren’t going to massively increase growth, so they will increase the deficit, which will weaken the pound and lead to further inflation, making everyone poorer. Unless, of course, you slash public services. You think it takes a long time to get a GP appointment now? Wait until we’re further into Truss’s premiership.
Counter-cyclical taxation policies work if you invest in the country. The Government isn’t doing anything to improve productivity. It’s just inflating house prices with a stamp duty cut and encouraging unsafe financial systems through deregulation.
Truss isn't doing "tax cuts for the rich" or "trickle down economics" though, she's doing tax cuts for tax payers. Trickle down is when you only cut the rates of tax for the highest tax payers, rather than cutting everybody's tax which is what reversing the NI hike does.
Cutting everyone's tax does work, tax rises don't work, they strangle the economy and don't raise the revenues expected.
One can, of course, cut or raise taxes in a broad variety of ways. There are taxes that nearly everybody pays, like VAT, and there are taxes that are paid by a smaller proportion of the population, like inheritance tax or tobacco duty. Is there a particular group that benefit the most from Truss’s plans? Yes. Those on the highest incomes.
What of her other plans? How is a stamp duty cut benefitting everybody, when so many can’t even get on the property ladder? How is increasing bankers’ bonuses benefitting everybody?
Some will get the benefits, but we all pay the price of a massively increased deficit.
There are taxes that are paid by those who work for a living, like National Insurance.
There are taxes that are paid by those who are trying to get on the housing ladder, or engaged in labour mobility, like SDLT.
If you want to tax wealth, then taxing those who are working for a living is the worst place to start. Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes are not the ones benefiting from these tax changes.
Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes benefit from a stamp duty cut, as they’re more likely to be buying/selling property than the average person.
Were Truss planning to cut NI while also increasing wealth taxes so as to balance the budget, that would be one thing… but she’s not. She’s cutting taxes and raising borrowing. You keep sidestepping this point. Your answers never talk about the deficit or inflation.
The deficit is all Gordon Brown's fault, silly.
That was 14 years and at least 1 recession ago....
On the point above, a Stamp Duty cut does not benefit everybody - it benefits home owners, who by definition are the wealthier members of society.
On the last point, a fair amount of things *are* Gordon Brown's fault.
His habit was to borrow from future generations up to and including his grand children's generation (see PFI contracts) to spend it now, so we can't really divorce him from his shadow. In the case of PFI, his off-balance sheet shadow.
Currently, for example, my local NHS Trust is spending more than 5% of its total budget servicing its PFI scheme.
In general terms, how many more NHS staff and services can you get for £22 million a year?
Your PFI point is well made, but it is worth pointing out that prior to the GFC Labour had cut the debt to GDP ratio below the level it had inherited from the Tories in 97.
Because it followed Ken Clarke's plans until 2002 resulting in a budget surplus. Brown did nothing wrong before 2002.
The catastrophe was the hubris in thinking boom and bust was abolished and overspending dramatically post 2002.
Debt to GDP rose annually every single year from 2002 to 2008, it should have been falling then. Had debt to GDP been falling instead of rising then as it should have been cyclically then we'd have been well placed for the next recession when it inevitably came.
Why are russian propagandists and the Kremlin so afraid of ATACMS missiles... is it a fear of striking deep into russia? is it a fear of striking symbolic targets?
The UK shows that trickle down does not work. The wealthiest in this country are as wealthy as any of their European counterparts, but those on medium and low incomes lag their equivalents in a large number of European countries.
With the exception of a freakish period between 1984-85 (when people thought the miners might win?) the pound is the weakest it has ever been against the dollar.
Further to fall, I reckon. The Truss/KK plan is to try and buy the election having neutered "Treasury orthodoxy", aka its irritating preference for a semblance of fiscal sanity.
Never seen the Chancellor abbreviated to KK before.
Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand
I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses
How exactly is Truss to do this? There are thousands of plots that developers hold with planning permission, but why exactly would they go hell for leather and build them all, reducing the properties' value and the developers' profits (which is the effect that you want to see), as opposed to downing tools, selling the houses off plan, keeping values high and taking very little risk?
It's the same situation with supply of energy - we would all love suppliers to flood the market with cheap energy, but who's going to pay them to do so? Someone will have to.
Planning permission tax - levied at 10% of the improved land value for the first year, 20% for the second year, and 30% per year after that, until units are handed over and council tax starts being paid on the properties, and all paid to the local authority to encourage them to grant permission quickly once submitted.
Tax cuts disproportionately benefit tax payers. What a shock.
Why not just increase taxes to 100% if that's your point of view, as anything less than that "disproportionately benefits" the rich.
Trickle down economics doesn’t work. Tax cuts for the rich aren’t going to massively increase growth, so they will increase the deficit, which will weaken the pound and lead to further inflation, making everyone poorer. Unless, of course, you slash public services. You think it takes a long time to get a GP appointment now? Wait until we’re further into Truss’s premiership.
Counter-cyclical taxation policies work if you invest in the country. The Government isn’t doing anything to improve productivity. It’s just inflating house prices with a stamp duty cut and encouraging unsafe financial systems through deregulation.
Truss isn't doing "tax cuts for the rich" or "trickle down economics" though, she's doing tax cuts for tax payers. Trickle down is when you only cut the rates of tax for the highest tax payers, rather than cutting everybody's tax which is what reversing the NI hike does.
Cutting everyone's tax does work, tax rises don't work, they strangle the economy and don't raise the revenues expected.
One can, of course, cut or raise taxes in a broad variety of ways. There are taxes that nearly everybody pays, like VAT, and there are taxes that are paid by a smaller proportion of the population, like inheritance tax or tobacco duty. Is there a particular group that benefit the most from Truss’s plans? Yes. Those on the highest incomes.
What of her other plans? How is a stamp duty cut benefitting everybody, when so many can’t even get on the property ladder? How is increasing bankers’ bonuses benefitting everybody?
Some will get the benefits, but we all pay the price of a massively increased deficit.
There are taxes that are paid by those who work for a living, like National Insurance.
There are taxes that are paid by those who are trying to get on the housing ladder, or engaged in labour mobility, like SDLT.
If you want to tax wealth, then taxing those who are working for a living is the worst place to start. Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes are not the ones benefiting from these tax changes.
Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes benefit from a stamp duty cut, as they’re more likely to be buying/selling property than the average person.
Were Truss planning to cut NI while also increasing wealth taxes so as to balance the budget, that would be one thing… but she’s not. She’s cutting taxes and raising borrowing. You keep sidestepping this point. Your answers never talk about the deficit or inflation.
The deficit is all Gordon Brown's fault, silly.
That was 14 years and at least 1 recession ago....
On the point above, a Stamp Duty cut does not benefit everybody - it benefits home owners, who by definition are the wealthier members of society.
On the last point, a fair amount of things *are* Gordon Brown's fault.
His habit was to borrow from future generations up to and including his grand children's generation (see PFI contracts) to spend it now, so we can't really divorce him from his shadow. In the case of PFI, his off-balance sheet shadow.
Currently, for example, my local NHS Trust is spending more than 5% of its total budget servicing its PFI scheme.
In general terms, how many more NHS staff and services can you get for £22 million a year?
Quite a lot, but only if they're available. We need to be training more people to be in public service.
What we are encouraging is people going into finance and other parasitical jobs rather than into doing something useful for other people.
And good morning one and all; looks more like autumn this morning.
In 2016 the people you refer to in finance and similar accounted for nearly a third of UK tax or as much as 37 largest city combined
In anyone else - any of the rest of the Royal family - it would have been excused as natural. Even in the darkest times we can find things that might bring a smile to our lips even if it is just a fond memory. But if a single shot had been taken of Meghan with the faintest of a smile she would have been crucified.
That is one tough gig for days on end and I don't think either she or Harry put a foot wrong.
Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand
I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses
How exactly is Truss to do this? There are thousands of plots that developers hold with planning permission, but why exactly would they go hell for leather and build them all, reducing the properties' value and the developers' profits (which is the effect that you want to see), as opposed to downing tools, selling the houses off plan, keeping values high and taking very little risk?
It's the same situation with supply of energy - we would all love suppliers to flood the market with cheap energy, but who's going to pay them to do so? Someone will have to.
Abolish planning permission so that having land with permission is no longer valuable.
The only reason holding land with permission has a value is because permission is rationed and thus valuable. Abolish rationing, then holding permission loses all value.
The equivalent of legalising robbery so that the crime figures go down.
Legalise robbery and robberies will increase.
The question by Luckyguy was how to build more houses, the answer is legalise house building so that houses are built.
If you ration the ability to build houses, then whoever owns the rations controls the rate houses are built. Abolish rationing, and they can be built at the level demanded, they won't be built more than demanded because people won't waste money building homes with nobody to sell them to.
In Japan and other countries with building standards and zoning but without UK's Byzantine planning permission system houses are built individually at levels demanded, rather than in major estates by "developers".
As I say here, Truss thinks Thatcher's imperious pig-headedness, at her height, is the only quality worth cosplaying. But a) Thatcher had earned it politically by winning elections and b) it was her undoing.
Yes, people remember the caricature and think that's all there was.
The trouble with the Truss generation is that they're too young to actually remember Thatcher. They've only got the campfire stories that IEA members tell each other- presumably around a bonfire of red tape. So they forget that balanced budgets come before tax cuts and you only pick fights once you're ready to win them.
The bonfire of red tape is a good starting point, so long as it’s an actual bonfire, and not merely the talking about it we’ve seen from governments and bureaucrats past.
Trouble is most red tape is there for a reason, usually to protect either consumers, employees or members of the public (or animals). There is unnecessary bureaucracy out there too of course, but the trouble with a bonfire is it's not very discriminating. In any real bonfire they'd end up burning some things we really ought to have kept.
The trouble then comes months or years later when someone dies because of a corner being cut on transport safety, or a kid is kidnapped because of some relaxation of safeguarding rules, another building burns down because of lax fireproofing regulations, we get a food health scare because cows are being fed sheep brains, or indeed the financial markets crash because the government lifted regulations on mortgage-backed securities. and so on. It's really hard to cut red tape without collateral damage. Needs to be more precision cauterisation than a bonfire.
Mr. Observer, I wonder to what extent that's related to the unusually high degree of centralisation (in population terms as much as anything) of London and south-east?
Other economies of comparable size, most notably Germany and Italy, formed from numerous smaller states coalescing into a nation and thus has* various local capitals.
By contrast, London is bigger than probably the next half-dozen cities combined.
Interesting to consider the population balance had the Harrying of the North not occurred.
There is a factor often missed about housebuilding. I have a couple of friends who hold fairly senior positions at a large housebuilder. It is not possible for large housebuilders to accelerate housebuilding because they simply do not have the tradesmen (and in some cases there are problems with the supply of building materials).
Tax cuts disproportionately benefit tax payers. What a shock.
Why not just increase taxes to 100% if that's your point of view, as anything less than that "disproportionately benefits" the rich.
Trickle down economics doesn’t work. Tax cuts for the rich aren’t going to massively increase growth, so they will increase the deficit, which will weaken the pound and lead to further inflation, making everyone poorer. Unless, of course, you slash public services. You think it takes a long time to get a GP appointment now? Wait until we’re further into Truss’s premiership.
Counter-cyclical taxation policies work if you invest in the country. The Government isn’t doing anything to improve productivity. It’s just inflating house prices with a stamp duty cut and encouraging unsafe financial systems through deregulation.
Truss isn't doing "tax cuts for the rich" or "trickle down economics" though, she's doing tax cuts for tax payers. Trickle down is when you only cut the rates of tax for the highest tax payers, rather than cutting everybody's tax which is what reversing the NI hike does.
Cutting everyone's tax does work, tax rises don't work, they strangle the economy and don't raise the revenues expected.
One can, of course, cut or raise taxes in a broad variety of ways. There are taxes that nearly everybody pays, like VAT, and there are taxes that are paid by a smaller proportion of the population, like inheritance tax or tobacco duty. Is there a particular group that benefit the most from Truss’s plans? Yes. Those on the highest incomes.
What of her other plans? How is a stamp duty cut benefitting everybody, when so many can’t even get on the property ladder? How is increasing bankers’ bonuses benefitting everybody?
Some will get the benefits, but we all pay the price of a massively increased deficit.
There are taxes that are paid by those who work for a living, like National Insurance.
There are taxes that are paid by those who are trying to get on the housing ladder, or engaged in labour mobility, like SDLT.
If you want to tax wealth, then taxing those who are working for a living is the worst place to start. Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes are not the ones benefiting from these tax changes.
Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes benefit from a stamp duty cut, as they’re more likely to be buying/selling property than the average person.
Were Truss planning to cut NI while also increasing wealth taxes so as to balance the budget, that would be one thing… but she’s not. She’s cutting taxes and raising borrowing. You keep sidestepping this point. Your answers never talk about the deficit or inflation.
I don't talk much about inflation as I don't think its worth talking about. Inflation is being imported from an external price shock, there's quite frankly nothing to be done about it. As the war unwinds, the commodity prices should stabilise if not fall, and then we can deal with the legacy of inflation if need be. I have said before, I expect inflation to fall, naturally, possibly significantly to the point of having some technical deflation.
As for the deficit I have said a lot about that: its cyclical. Unlike 2007 when the spending taps were turned on full blast pre-recession meaning that the deficit became out of control and surged to absurd amounts even years after the crash, this time the UK entered this downturn in a much healthier position. The structural deficit had been eliminated, and the deficit rather than going from surplus to 3% had instead gone from 10% to just 1.5% pre-crash.
We need to get through the recession and grow the economy. Once we are at the other side of the supply shock, if there's still a significant deficit, then cyclically we need to address that. But right now we are in the thick of the supply shock. There was no problem in my eyes with Gordon Brown borrowing in 2008, what he did wrong was borrowing before 2008. Today is the 2008 scenario. If the war ends next year then within a couple of years after that the deficit needs to be coming back down again just as the deficit had to be coming down a couple of years after 2008.
Inflation is affected by many things. Yes, it is being affected by the things you describe, but it is also being affected by high borrowing. We can’t control inflation completely, but we can influence it. Is now the best time to be adding to inflation? Brown could borrow cheap in 2008; that’s not so much the case now.
Growing the economy is a good thing. How could we do that? We could invest in infrastructure, like more green energy. A Green New Deal? Oh, but Truss wants to limit on shore green energy…
We could invest in transport infrastructure, but the Conservatives have scaled back plans there.
We could increase trade; we could embrace free trade. But Truss wants to pick fights with the EU and has given up on a trade deal with the US.
We could invest in education… but I don’t see any plans there.
What does Truss propose? Cutting stamp duty, further inflating property prices.
Show me some pro-growth policies and I’m happy to see borrowing to fund them.
Tax cuts disproportionately benefit tax payers. What a shock.
Why not just increase taxes to 100% if that's your point of view, as anything less than that "disproportionately benefits" the rich.
Trickle down economics doesn’t work. Tax cuts for the rich aren’t going to massively increase growth, so they will increase the deficit, which will weaken the pound and lead to further inflation, making everyone poorer. Unless, of course, you slash public services. You think it takes a long time to get a GP appointment now? Wait until we’re further into Truss’s premiership.
Counter-cyclical taxation policies work if you invest in the country. The Government isn’t doing anything to improve productivity. It’s just inflating house prices with a stamp duty cut and encouraging unsafe financial systems through deregulation.
Truss isn't doing "tax cuts for the rich" or "trickle down economics" though, she's doing tax cuts for tax payers. Trickle down is when you only cut the rates of tax for the highest tax payers, rather than cutting everybody's tax which is what reversing the NI hike does.
Cutting everyone's tax does work, tax rises don't work, they strangle the economy and don't raise the revenues expected.
One can, of course, cut or raise taxes in a broad variety of ways. There are taxes that nearly everybody pays, like VAT, and there are taxes that are paid by a smaller proportion of the population, like inheritance tax or tobacco duty. Is there a particular group that benefit the most from Truss’s plans? Yes. Those on the highest incomes.
What of her other plans? How is a stamp duty cut benefitting everybody, when so many can’t even get on the property ladder? How is increasing bankers’ bonuses benefitting everybody?
Some will get the benefits, but we all pay the price of a massively increased deficit.
There are taxes that are paid by those who work for a living, like National Insurance.
There are taxes that are paid by those who are trying to get on the housing ladder, or engaged in labour mobility, like SDLT.
If you want to tax wealth, then taxing those who are working for a living is the worst place to start. Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes are not the ones benefiting from these tax changes.
Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes benefit from a stamp duty cut, as they’re more likely to be buying/selling property than the average person.
Were Truss planning to cut NI while also increasing wealth taxes so as to balance the budget, that would be one thing… but she’s not. She’s cutting taxes and raising borrowing. You keep sidestepping this point. Your answers never talk about the deficit or inflation.
The deficit is all Gordon Brown's fault, silly.
That was 14 years and at least 1 recession ago....
On the point above, a Stamp Duty cut does not benefit everybody - it benefits home owners, who by definition are the wealthier members of society.
On the last point, a fair amount of things *are* Gordon Brown's fault.
His habit was to borrow from future generations up to and including his grand children's generation (see PFI contracts) to spend it now, so we can't really divorce him from his shadow. In the case of PFI, his off-balance sheet shadow.
Currently, for example, my local NHS Trust is spending more than 5% of its total budget servicing its PFI scheme.
In general terms, how many more NHS staff and services can you get for £22 million a year?
Quite a lot, but only if they're available. We need to be training more people to be in public service.
What we are encouraging is people going into finance and other parasitical jobs rather than into doing something useful for other people.
And good morning one and all; looks more like autumn this morning.
In 2016 the people you refer to in finance and similar accounted for nearly a third of UK tax or as much as 37 largest city combined
My train to Leeds for tonight's Enough is Enough rally has been stopped just outside London for the last 3 hours. I'm sorry not to be there, Leeds! 😭
Just another reminder that we need to bring rail into public ownership and make it fit for the future! 🚄
LNER Replying to @zarahsultana and @eiecampaign I am sorry for the delay, Zarah. This was due to damage to the overhead electric wires meaning services could not move around Stevenage, but services are now on the move. On your other point, LNER is owned by the DfT after the franchise was handed back in 2018. ^Cameron
Personally, I salute Labour for not discriminating on the basis of race, sex, or intelligence.
I wouldn't put money on Labour holding Coventry South at the next election.
I have banged on and on about thick as mince Corbynites such as Sultana. "why are you singling out this woman of colour" sometimes is the attack on Twitter.
It's not because she's a woman. Its not because she is British Asian. Its because she is a fucking moron. An ideologue zealot one at that.
Sounds like Mrs Sussex.
Really? Haven't seen any evidence of her moronity. They don't like her because she is a black American woman with opinions and a mouth. British princesses are supposed to come straight out of Harry Enfield's WOMEN KNOW YOUR LIMITS sketch, and she doesn't.
Actually it’s because she is a lying manipulative narcissist who’s just out for what she can take
I see we are at the anger phase of the grief response.
A cocktail of geo-strategising and whining about Meghan is pretty much the essence of PB nowadays. Just needs an incarnation of PB’s walking, talking multiple personality disorder prolapsing over nuclear armageddon to turn up to add the maraschino cherry to the mix.
What has happened with Meghan and Harry today? I thought they were good and quite dignified throughout the funeral.
Impeccably behaved, which only seems to enrage the haters all the more...
It really is absolutely bizarre how ostensibly intelligent grown men can be so triggered by a very pretty American girl who is way out of Hazza’s league.
I think the modern times internet lingo is “living rent free in the PB Tories’ heads”, but let us not introduce another grim cliche to the PB mix…
So, what do we think Putin's speech delay was all about? Did the Chinese make him wait before they approved his address?
I suspect an internal row about mobilisation. Putin wanted the full fat, total war, complete mobilisation
His colleagues really really didn’t. So we have this hybrid. A compromise. “Partial mobilisation” which will probably become the full version over time
Tax cuts disproportionately benefit tax payers. What a shock.
Why not just increase taxes to 100% if that's your point of view, as anything less than that "disproportionately benefits" the rich.
Trickle down economics doesn’t work. Tax cuts for the rich aren’t going to massively increase growth, so they will increase the deficit, which will weaken the pound and lead to further inflation, making everyone poorer. Unless, of course, you slash public services. You think it takes a long time to get a GP appointment now? Wait until we’re further into Truss’s premiership.
Counter-cyclical taxation policies work if you invest in the country. The Government isn’t doing anything to improve productivity. It’s just inflating house prices with a stamp duty cut and encouraging unsafe financial systems through deregulation.
Truss isn't doing "tax cuts for the rich" or "trickle down economics" though, she's doing tax cuts for tax payers. Trickle down is when you only cut the rates of tax for the highest tax payers, rather than cutting everybody's tax which is what reversing the NI hike does.
Cutting everyone's tax does work, tax rises don't work, they strangle the economy and don't raise the revenues expected.
One can, of course, cut or raise taxes in a broad variety of ways. There are taxes that nearly everybody pays, like VAT, and there are taxes that are paid by a smaller proportion of the population, like inheritance tax or tobacco duty. Is there a particular group that benefit the most from Truss’s plans? Yes. Those on the highest incomes.
What of her other plans? How is a stamp duty cut benefitting everybody, when so many can’t even get on the property ladder? How is increasing bankers’ bonuses benefitting everybody?
Some will get the benefits, but we all pay the price of a massively increased deficit.
There are taxes that are paid by those who work for a living, like National Insurance.
There are taxes that are paid by those who are trying to get on the housing ladder, or engaged in labour mobility, like SDLT.
If you want to tax wealth, then taxing those who are working for a living is the worst place to start. Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes are not the ones benefiting from these tax changes.
Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes benefit from a stamp duty cut, as they’re more likely to be buying/selling property than the average person.
Were Truss planning to cut NI while also increasing wealth taxes so as to balance the budget, that would be one thing… but she’s not. She’s cutting taxes and raising borrowing. You keep sidestepping this point. Your answers never talk about the deficit or inflation.
The deficit is all Gordon Brown's fault, silly.
That was 14 years and at least 1 recession ago....
On the point above, a Stamp Duty cut does not benefit everybody - it benefits home owners, who by definition are the wealthier members of society.
On the last point, a fair amount of things *are* Gordon Brown's fault.
His habit was to borrow from future generations up to and including his grand children's generation (see PFI contracts) to spend it now, so we can't really divorce him from his shadow. In the case of PFI, his off-balance sheet shadow.
Currently, for example, my local NHS Trust is spending more than 5% of its total budget servicing its PFI scheme.
In general terms, how many more NHS staff and services can you get for £22 million a year?
Quite a lot, but only if they're available. We need to be training more people to be in public service.
What we are encouraging is people going into finance and other parasitical jobs rather than into doing something useful for other people.
And good morning one and all; looks more like autumn this morning.
In 2016 the people you refer to in finance and similar accounted for nearly a third of UK tax or as much as 37 largest city combined
With the exception of a freakish period between 1984-85 (when people thought the miners might win?) the pound is the weakest it has ever been against the dollar.
Further to fall, I reckon. The Truss/KK plan is to try and buy the election having neutered "Treasury orthodoxy", aka its irritating preference for a semblance of fiscal sanity.
Never seen the Chancellor abbreviated to KK before.
There is a factor often missed about housebuilding. I have a couple of friends who hold fairly senior positions at a large housebuilder. It is not possible for large housebuilders to accelerate housebuilding because they simply do not have the tradesmen (and in some cases there are problems with the supply of building materials).
Perhaps we could get tradesmen from nearby countries to come work in the UK? I understand the Poles have a good reputation…
The UK shows that trickle down does not work. The wealthiest in this country are as wealthy as any of their European counterparts, but those on medium and low incomes lag their equivalents in a large number of European countries.
The metaphor of 'trickle down' isn't very helpful in the UK context where a disproportionate number of high-earners make their money from the global rather than the domestic economy.
Tax cuts disproportionately benefit tax payers. What a shock.
Why not just increase taxes to 100% if that's your point of view, as anything less than that "disproportionately benefits" the rich.
Trickle down economics doesn’t work. Tax cuts for the rich aren’t going to massively increase growth, so they will increase the deficit, which will weaken the pound and lead to further inflation, making everyone poorer. Unless, of course, you slash public services. You think it takes a long time to get a GP appointment now? Wait until we’re further into Truss’s premiership.
Counter-cyclical taxation policies work if you invest in the country. The Government isn’t doing anything to improve productivity. It’s just inflating house prices with a stamp duty cut and encouraging unsafe financial systems through deregulation.
Truss isn't doing "tax cuts for the rich" or "trickle down economics" though, she's doing tax cuts for tax payers. Trickle down is when you only cut the rates of tax for the highest tax payers, rather than cutting everybody's tax which is what reversing the NI hike does.
Cutting everyone's tax does work, tax rises don't work, they strangle the economy and don't raise the revenues expected.
One can, of course, cut or raise taxes in a broad variety of ways. There are taxes that nearly everybody pays, like VAT, and there are taxes that are paid by a smaller proportion of the population, like inheritance tax or tobacco duty. Is there a particular group that benefit the most from Truss’s plans? Yes. Those on the highest incomes.
What of her other plans? How is a stamp duty cut benefitting everybody, when so many can’t even get on the property ladder? How is increasing bankers’ bonuses benefitting everybody?
Some will get the benefits, but we all pay the price of a massively increased deficit.
There are taxes that are paid by those who work for a living, like National Insurance.
There are taxes that are paid by those who are trying to get on the housing ladder, or engaged in labour mobility, like SDLT.
If you want to tax wealth, then taxing those who are working for a living is the worst place to start. Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes are not the ones benefiting from these tax changes.
Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes benefit from a stamp duty cut, as they’re more likely to be buying/selling property than the average person.
Were Truss planning to cut NI while also increasing wealth taxes so as to balance the budget, that would be one thing… but she’s not. She’s cutting taxes and raising borrowing. You keep sidestepping this point. Your answers never talk about the deficit or inflation.
I don't talk much about inflation as I don't think its worth talking about. Inflation is being imported from an external price shock, there's quite frankly nothing to be done about it. As the war unwinds, the commodity prices should stabilise if not fall, and then we can deal with the legacy of inflation if need be. I have said before, I expect inflation to fall, naturally, possibly significantly to the point of having some technical deflation.
As for the deficit I have said a lot about that: its cyclical. Unlike 2007 when the spending taps were turned on full blast pre-recession meaning that the deficit became out of control and surged to absurd amounts even years after the crash, this time the UK entered this downturn in a much healthier position. The structural deficit had been eliminated, and the deficit rather than going from surplus to 3% had instead gone from 10% to just 1.5% pre-crash.
We need to get through the recession and grow the economy. Once we are at the other side of the supply shock, if there's still a significant deficit, then cyclically we need to address that. But right now we are in the thick of the supply shock. There was no problem in my eyes with Gordon Brown borrowing in 2008, what he did wrong was borrowing before 2008. Today is the 2008 scenario. If the war ends next year then within a couple of years after that the deficit needs to be coming back down again just as the deficit had to be coming down a couple of years after 2008.
Inflation is affected by many things. Yes, it is being affected by the things you describe, but it is also being affected by high borrowing. We can’t control inflation completely, but we can influence it. Is now the best time to be adding to inflation? Brown could borrow cheap in 2008; that’s not so much the case now.
Growing the economy is a good thing. How could we do that? We could invest in infrastructure, like more green energy. A Green New Deal? Oh, but Truss wants to limit on shore green energy…
We could invest in transport infrastructure, but the Conservatives have scaled back plans there.
We could increase trade; we could embrace free trade. But Truss wants to pick fights with the EU and has given up on a trade deal with the US.
We could invest in education… but I don’t see any plans there.
What does Truss propose? Cutting stamp duty, further inflating property prices.
Show me some pro-growth policies and I’m happy to see borrowing to fund them.
Great so we're actually agreed that cyclically this is the appropriate time for borrowing, unlike when Brown splashed the cash and increased debt to GDP between 2002-2007 pre-crash. So the only question is what are pro-growth policies.
Pro-growth policies I would suggest:
1: Employers NI is quite literally a tax on jobs. I would abolish it if I could, at the very least it should be cut with a view to ultimately phasing it out.
2: Employee NI is a tax only paid by working people. I would abolish it if I could, merge it into Income Tax, at the very least the recent tax rise must be reversed.
3: Corporation Tax stifles investment into businesses. Rising it was a mistake, that should be reversed.
4: SDLT is a tax on mobility, not a tax on home ownership. It too should be abolished and replaced with a land tax in my view.
Taxation should ideally be put more heavily on externalities you wish to discourage, like pollution. People working for a living, or being mobile, is something we should be wanting to encourage not discourage.
Tax land hoarding (tax those who have multiple homes) and tax unearned incomes as high as earned ones, if not higher.
Mr. Observer, I wonder to what extent that's related to the unusually high degree of centralisation (in population terms as much as anything) of London and south-east?
Other economies of comparable size, most notably Germany and Italy, formed from numerous smaller states coalescing into a nation and thus has various local capitals.
By contrast, London is bigger than probably the next half-dozen cities combined.
Interesting to consider the population balance had the Harrying of the North not occurred.
So did Britain. First England uniting, so the capitals at Winchester, Dunwich, York and Gloucester were replaced with London. At the same time Scotland was uniting so the capitals of Hexham, Stirling and Berwick were replaced by Edinburgh. Wales, of course, only united intermittently so the capitals Dinefwr, Llanbadarn, Bala, Welshpool and Brecon generally retained their importance ahead of Rhuddlan, Abergwyngregyn and Harlech.
Then all these countries united over the centuries but still London tended to dominate. Partly I think that's because unlike most countries that assimilated gradually it was the political, commercial and legal capital all in one (not forgetting Scotland has its own law courts) so it naturally sucked all that activity to itself. In Italy Milan remains the commercial centre, in Germany it's Frankfurt, in Spain Barcelona is if not the commercial centre still very important. That provides a counterweight to the other capitals. (One reason Frankfurt wasn't made the capital of West Germany despite being the obvious choice was the fear of West German politicians it would eclipse Berlin and make reunification with Berlin as the capital harder to argue for).
Ireland, of course, is a rather different story of development with Dublin developing due to its status as a port with a large Protestant community that was under the lordship of the Crown of England. Ironically, you can see much the same phenomenon now in Ireland where Dublin far outstrips any other city in size and importance (where would be the second largest - I would guess Cork)?
Edit - on the island of Ireland as a whole, it would of course be Belfast, but I was thinking of the Republic.
There is a factor often missed about housebuilding. I have a couple of friends who hold fairly senior positions at a large housebuilder. It is not possible for large housebuilders to accelerate housebuilding because they simply do not have the tradesmen (and in some cases there are problems with the supply of building materials).
Good. They build shoddy, ugly houses crammed into as little space as possible.
Self-build is the way forward. It accounts for 60% of new houses in France and Germany, but only 10% in the UK. We need to build those skills up in this country.
Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand
I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses
How exactly is Truss to do this? There are thousands of plots that developers hold with planning permission, but why exactly would they go hell for leather and build them all, reducing the properties' value and the developers' profits (which is the effect that you want to see), as opposed to downing tools, selling the houses off plan, keeping values high and taking very little risk?
It's the same situation with supply of energy - we would all love suppliers to flood the market with cheap energy, but who's going to pay them to do so? Someone will have to.
I am familiar with this argument but there is an aspect of it that I don't get. I can see how it would benefit owners of plots of land with planning permission to act collectively and agree not to develop their plots, in order to restrict overall supply and so increase the value of all their collective assets. But does it advantage an individual landowner to do this? Shouldn't they just crack on and realise the value of their asset? Especially if they are concerned that the housing market may have peaked? Or does the argument go that most plots of land with planning permission are owned by a few large organisations who act as a kind of cartel? If this is the argument, is it true?
The land is owned by housing developers. Builders can be hired and laid off easily. It's far better for cash-flow to build gradually as properties are sold, than invest in the materials and builders to build it all, and potentially not sell, or have to reduce the price to sell. In that regard, it's not really a massive conspiracy to keep housing stock limited and the prices high, more prudent business practice. But it is a key bottleneck in increasing the number of houses.
Tax cuts disproportionately benefit tax payers. What a shock.
Why not just increase taxes to 100% if that's your point of view, as anything less than that "disproportionately benefits" the rich.
Trickle down economics doesn’t work. Tax cuts for the rich aren’t going to massively increase growth, so they will increase the deficit, which will weaken the pound and lead to further inflation, making everyone poorer. Unless, of course, you slash public services. You think it takes a long time to get a GP appointment now? Wait until we’re further into Truss’s premiership.
Counter-cyclical taxation policies work if you invest in the country. The Government isn’t doing anything to improve productivity. It’s just inflating house prices with a stamp duty cut and encouraging unsafe financial systems through deregulation.
Truss isn't doing "tax cuts for the rich" or "trickle down economics" though, she's doing tax cuts for tax payers. Trickle down is when you only cut the rates of tax for the highest tax payers, rather than cutting everybody's tax which is what reversing the NI hike does.
Cutting everyone's tax does work, tax rises don't work, they strangle the economy and don't raise the revenues expected.
One can, of course, cut or raise taxes in a broad variety of ways. There are taxes that nearly everybody pays, like VAT, and there are taxes that are paid by a smaller proportion of the population, like inheritance tax or tobacco duty. Is there a particular group that benefit the most from Truss’s plans? Yes. Those on the highest incomes.
What of her other plans? How is a stamp duty cut benefitting everybody, when so many can’t even get on the property ladder? How is increasing bankers’ bonuses benefitting everybody?
Some will get the benefits, but we all pay the price of a massively increased deficit.
There are taxes that are paid by those who work for a living, like National Insurance.
There are taxes that are paid by those who are trying to get on the housing ladder, or engaged in labour mobility, like SDLT.
If you want to tax wealth, then taxing those who are working for a living is the worst place to start. Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes are not the ones benefiting from these tax changes.
Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes benefit from a stamp duty cut, as they’re more likely to be buying/selling property than the average person.
Were Truss planning to cut NI while also increasing wealth taxes so as to balance the budget, that would be one thing… but she’s not. She’s cutting taxes and raising borrowing. You keep sidestepping this point. Your answers never talk about the deficit or inflation.
The deficit is all Gordon Brown's fault, silly.
That was 14 years and at least 1 recession ago....
On the point above, a Stamp Duty cut does not benefit everybody - it benefits home owners, who by definition are the wealthier members of society.
On the last point, a fair amount of things *are* Gordon Brown's fault.
His habit was to borrow from future generations up to and including his grand children's generation (see PFI contracts) to spend it now, so we can't really divorce him from his shadow. In the case of PFI, his off-balance sheet shadow.
Currently, for example, my local NHS Trust is spending more than 5% of its total budget servicing its PFI scheme.
In general terms, how many more NHS staff and services can you get for £22 million a year?
Quite a lot, but only if they're available. We need to be training more people to be in public service.
What we are encouraging is people going into finance and other parasitical jobs rather than into doing something useful for other people.
And good morning one and all; looks more like autumn this morning.
In 2016 the people you refer to in finance and similar accounted for nearly a third of UK tax or as much as 37 largest city combined
Doesn't alter the fact that they didn't contribute to the general welfare.
One third of all UK tax is an enormous contribution to the nations tax income and ability to fund public services
My point is that you could only run and economy on financial services for so long; you need to make something. Or take it out of the ground or something like that! That was the basic fault of Thatcherism. Things need to be initiated.
Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand
I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses
How exactly is Truss to do this? There are thousands of plots that developers hold with planning permission, but why exactly would they go hell for leather and build them all, reducing the properties' value and the developers' profits (which is the effect that you want to see), as opposed to downing tools, selling the houses off plan, keeping values high and taking very little risk?
It's the same situation with supply of energy - we would all love suppliers to flood the market with cheap energy, but who's going to pay them to do so? Someone will have to.
Well, here's some ideas:
1. As suggested here by someone else previously: make the developers pay Council Tax on those plots. 2. Change planning to revoke permission if unused after a year. 3. All the government to compulsory purchase any land with building permission at the current value less 10% for every year it has sat idle.
I am sure there are plenty of others that could be considered.
2 would be counterproductive as it would make it more complex to get planning permission if you had to start from scratch every twelve months. Particularly for any private building plots where raising finance might be an issue.
3 would only work if the government/council were willing to build houses directly. Given the costs involved that seems unlikely.
1 is an excellent idea on a huge number of levels.
Councils are willing to build houses directly, but current rules make it difficult for them to do so.
Tax cuts disproportionately benefit tax payers. What a shock.
Why not just increase taxes to 100% if that's your point of view, as anything less than that "disproportionately benefits" the rich.
Trickle down economics doesn’t work. Tax cuts for the rich aren’t going to massively increase growth, so they will increase the deficit, which will weaken the pound and lead to further inflation, making everyone poorer. Unless, of course, you slash public services. You think it takes a long time to get a GP appointment now? Wait until we’re further into Truss’s premiership.
Counter-cyclical taxation policies work if you invest in the country. The Government isn’t doing anything to improve productivity. It’s just inflating house prices with a stamp duty cut and encouraging unsafe financial systems through deregulation.
Truss isn't doing "tax cuts for the rich" or "trickle down economics" though, she's doing tax cuts for tax payers. Trickle down is when you only cut the rates of tax for the highest tax payers, rather than cutting everybody's tax which is what reversing the NI hike does.
Cutting everyone's tax does work, tax rises don't work, they strangle the economy and don't raise the revenues expected.
One can, of course, cut or raise taxes in a broad variety of ways. There are taxes that nearly everybody pays, like VAT, and there are taxes that are paid by a smaller proportion of the population, like inheritance tax or tobacco duty. Is there a particular group that benefit the most from Truss’s plans? Yes. Those on the highest incomes.
What of her other plans? How is a stamp duty cut benefitting everybody, when so many can’t even get on the property ladder? How is increasing bankers’ bonuses benefitting everybody?
Some will get the benefits, but we all pay the price of a massively increased deficit.
There are taxes that are paid by those who work for a living, like National Insurance.
There are taxes that are paid by those who are trying to get on the housing ladder, or engaged in labour mobility, like SDLT.
If you want to tax wealth, then taxing those who are working for a living is the worst place to start. Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes are not the ones benefiting from these tax changes.
Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes benefit from a stamp duty cut, as they’re more likely to be buying/selling property than the average person.
Were Truss planning to cut NI while also increasing wealth taxes so as to balance the budget, that would be one thing… but she’s not. She’s cutting taxes and raising borrowing. You keep sidestepping this point. Your answers never talk about the deficit or inflation.
The deficit is all Gordon Brown's fault, silly.
That was 14 years and at least 1 recession ago....
On the point above, a Stamp Duty cut does not benefit everybody - it benefits home owners, who by definition are the wealthier members of society.
On the last point, a fair amount of things *are* Gordon Brown's fault.
His habit was to borrow from future generations up to and including his grand children's generation (see PFI contracts) to spend it now, so we can't really divorce him from his shadow. In the case of PFI, his off-balance sheet shadow.
Currently, for example, my local NHS Trust is spending more than 5% of its total budget servicing its PFI scheme.
In general terms, how many more NHS staff and services can you get for £22 million a year?
PFI was a huge mistake and we should blame Brown (and others) for it… But perhaps it is more useful right now to focus on the people who are still in power and who can do something…? Is the Truss government doing anything about past or future PFI contracts?
PFI is fine in principle if rubbish in practice. Unless you are going to have a public sector construction unit or business, you end up with the private sector doing most jobs anyway so this just formalised it.
What makes them rubbish is the poor management of the contracts. The "£25 to change a lightbulb" examples are silly, but disguise the real troughing involved. We could have managed and enforced these contracts better to remove the grey areas but chose not to.
Also absurd is the partisanship - why "Brown" when Osborne was responsible for billions more of them having been elected saying they were "discredited". Both parties used them. A lot.
With the exception of a freakish period between 1984-85 (when people thought the miners might win?) the pound is the weakest it has ever been against the dollar.
Further to fall, I reckon. The Truss/KK plan is to try and buy the election having neutered "Treasury orthodoxy", aka its irritating preference for a semblance of fiscal sanity.
Never seen the Chancellor abbreviated to KK before.
Tax cuts disproportionately benefit tax payers. What a shock.
Why not just increase taxes to 100% if that's your point of view, as anything less than that "disproportionately benefits" the rich.
Trickle down economics doesn’t work. Tax cuts for the rich aren’t going to massively increase growth, so they will increase the deficit, which will weaken the pound and lead to further inflation, making everyone poorer. Unless, of course, you slash public services. You think it takes a long time to get a GP appointment now? Wait until we’re further into Truss’s premiership.
Counter-cyclical taxation policies work if you invest in the country. The Government isn’t doing anything to improve productivity. It’s just inflating house prices with a stamp duty cut and encouraging unsafe financial systems through deregulation.
Truss isn't doing "tax cuts for the rich" or "trickle down economics" though, she's doing tax cuts for tax payers. Trickle down is when you only cut the rates of tax for the highest tax payers, rather than cutting everybody's tax which is what reversing the NI hike does.
Cutting everyone's tax does work, tax rises don't work, they strangle the economy and don't raise the revenues expected.
One can, of course, cut or raise taxes in a broad variety of ways. There are taxes that nearly everybody pays, like VAT, and there are taxes that are paid by a smaller proportion of the population, like inheritance tax or tobacco duty. Is there a particular group that benefit the most from Truss’s plans? Yes. Those on the highest incomes.
What of her other plans? How is a stamp duty cut benefitting everybody, when so many can’t even get on the property ladder? How is increasing bankers’ bonuses benefitting everybody?
Some will get the benefits, but we all pay the price of a massively increased deficit.
There are taxes that are paid by those who work for a living, like National Insurance.
There are taxes that are paid by those who are trying to get on the housing ladder, or engaged in labour mobility, like SDLT.
If you want to tax wealth, then taxing those who are working for a living is the worst place to start. Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes are not the ones benefiting from these tax changes.
Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes benefit from a stamp duty cut, as they’re more likely to be buying/selling property than the average person.
Were Truss planning to cut NI while also increasing wealth taxes so as to balance the budget, that would be one thing… but she’s not. She’s cutting taxes and raising borrowing. You keep sidestepping this point. Your answers never talk about the deficit or inflation.
I don't talk much about inflation as I don't think its worth talking about. Inflation is being imported from an external price shock, there's quite frankly nothing to be done about it. As the war unwinds, the commodity prices should stabilise if not fall, and then we can deal with the legacy of inflation if need be. I have said before, I expect inflation to fall, naturally, possibly significantly to the point of having some technical deflation.
As for the deficit I have said a lot about that: its cyclical. Unlike 2007 when the spending taps were turned on full blast pre-recession meaning that the deficit became out of control and surged to absurd amounts even years after the crash, this time the UK entered this downturn in a much healthier position. The structural deficit had been eliminated, and the deficit rather than going from surplus to 3% had instead gone from 10% to just 1.5% pre-crash.
We need to get through the recession and grow the economy. Once we are at the other side of the supply shock, if there's still a significant deficit, then cyclically we need to address that. But right now we are in the thick of the supply shock. There was no problem in my eyes with Gordon Brown borrowing in 2008, what he did wrong was borrowing before 2008. Today is the 2008 scenario. If the war ends next year then within a couple of years after that the deficit needs to be coming back down again just as the deficit had to be coming down a couple of years after 2008.
Inflation is affected by many things. Yes, it is being affected by the things you describe, but it is also being affected by high borrowing. We can’t control inflation completely, but we can influence it. Is now the best time to be adding to inflation? Brown could borrow cheap in 2008; that’s not so much the case now.
Growing the economy is a good thing. How could we do that? We could invest in infrastructure, like more green energy. A Green New Deal? Oh, but Truss wants to limit on shore green energy…
We could invest in transport infrastructure, but the Conservatives have scaled back plans there.
We could increase trade; we could embrace free trade. But Truss wants to pick fights with the EU and has given up on a trade deal with the US.
We could invest in education… but I don’t see any plans there.
What does Truss propose? Cutting stamp duty, further inflating property prices.
Show me some pro-growth policies and I’m happy to see borrowing to fund them.
Great so we're actually agreed that cyclically this is the appropriate time for borrowing, unlike when Brown splashed the cash and increased debt to GDP between 2002-2007 pre-crash. So the only question is what are pro-growth policies.
Pro-growth policies I would suggest:
1: Employers NI is quite literally a tax on jobs. I would abolish it if I could, at the very least it should be cut with a view to ultimately phasing it out.
2: Employee NI is a tax only paid by working people. I would abolish it if I could, merge it into Income Tax, at the very least the recent tax rise must be reversed.
3: Corporation Tax stifles investment into businesses. Rising it was a mistake, that should be reversed.
4: SDLT is a tax on mobility, not a tax on home ownership. It too should be abolished and replaced with a land tax in my view.
Taxation should ideally be put more heavily on externalities you wish to discourage, like pollution. People working for a living, or being mobile, is something we should be wanting to encourage not discourage.
Tax land hoarding (tax those who have multiple homes) and tax unearned incomes as high as earned ones, if not higher.
Bart, if I could have you as PM instead of Truss, I would. But you’re not PM; Truss is. Forgive me if my wording misled you: my point is not to discuss hypotheticals that would be good, it’s to discuss what the Government is actually doing.
The Conservative government is not implementing your policy suggestions. They are not borrowing to increase growth. They are borrowing and simultaneously not doing enough to increase growth.
With the exception of a freakish period between 1984-85 (when people thought the miners might win?) the pound is the weakest it has ever been against the dollar.
Further to fall, I reckon. The Truss/KK plan is to try and buy the election having neutered "Treasury orthodoxy", aka its irritating preference for a semblance of fiscal sanity.
Never seen the Chancellor abbreviated to KK before.
With the exception of a freakish period between 1984-85 (when people thought the miners might win?) the pound is the weakest it has ever been against the dollar.
Further to fall, I reckon. The Truss/KK plan is to try and buy the election having neutered "Treasury orthodoxy", aka its irritating preference for a semblance of fiscal sanity.
Never seen the Chancellor abbreviated to KK before.
There is a factor often missed about housebuilding. I have a couple of friends who hold fairly senior positions at a large housebuilder. It is not possible for large housebuilders to accelerate housebuilding because they simply do not have the tradesmen (and in some cases there are problems with the supply of building materials).
Good. They build shoddy, ugly houses crammed into as little space as possible.
Self-build is the way forward. It accounts for 60% of new houses in France and Germany, but only 10% in the UK. We need to build those skills up in this country.
Abolish planning permission and self-build would happen. When people don't need to get permission for an entire estate and manage a Byzantine legal system to get consent, then they can build their own home. No more and no less than that.
Cookie cutter estates being built are because of our planning permission system. Change the system for requiring permission, and self-build becomes an option.
Apols in advance for the parochialism but this is pretty funny. Apart from anything else the SCons thinking that someone working for Jim 'Astonished By How Easy It's Been To Outwit The SNP' Murphy was a plus is a cracker.
Going from the grand if sometimes overwhelming spectacle of mighty global politics to the tiny, tedious trivia of provincial Scotland - as here - is like being on safari in the Serengeti to watch the lions attack the herds of wildebeest, then you come back to camp & you hear the faint, predictable whine of a mosquito
I specifically posted it for you as a distraction from your big nuclear war induced poopy pants. I hope you're grateful.
Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand
I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses
How exactly is Truss to do this? There are thousands of plots that developers hold with planning permission, but why exactly would they go hell for leather and build them all, reducing the properties' value and the developers' profits (which is the effect that you want to see), as opposed to downing tools, selling the houses off plan, keeping values high and taking very little risk?
It's the same situation with supply of energy - we would all love suppliers to flood the market with cheap energy, but who's going to pay them to do so? Someone will have to.
Well, here's some ideas:
1. As suggested here by someone else previously: make the developers pay Council Tax on those plots. 2. Change planning to revoke permission if unused after a year. 3. All the government to compulsory purchase any land with building permission at the current value less 10% for every year it has sat idle.
I am sure there are plenty of others that could be considered.
2 would be counterproductive as it would make it more complex to get planning permission if you had to start from scratch every twelve months. Particularly for any private building plots where raising finance might be an issue.
3 would only work if the government/council were willing to build houses directly. Given the costs involved that seems unlikely.
1 is an excellent idea on a huge number of levels.
Councils are willing to build houses directly, but current rules make it difficult for them to do so.
Councils cannot afford to build houses.
Then instead of borrowing money to give the most well off a tax cut, let’s borrow money to give to councils to build houses.
Tax cuts disproportionately benefit tax payers. What a shock.
Why not just increase taxes to 100% if that's your point of view, as anything less than that "disproportionately benefits" the rich.
Trickle down economics doesn’t work. Tax cuts for the rich aren’t going to massively increase growth, so they will increase the deficit, which will weaken the pound and lead to further inflation, making everyone poorer. Unless, of course, you slash public services. You think it takes a long time to get a GP appointment now? Wait until we’re further into Truss’s premiership.
Counter-cyclical taxation policies work if you invest in the country. The Government isn’t doing anything to improve productivity. It’s just inflating house prices with a stamp duty cut and encouraging unsafe financial systems through deregulation.
Truss isn't doing "tax cuts for the rich" or "trickle down economics" though, she's doing tax cuts for tax payers. Trickle down is when you only cut the rates of tax for the highest tax payers, rather than cutting everybody's tax which is what reversing the NI hike does.
Cutting everyone's tax does work, tax rises don't work, they strangle the economy and don't raise the revenues expected.
One can, of course, cut or raise taxes in a broad variety of ways. There are taxes that nearly everybody pays, like VAT, and there are taxes that are paid by a smaller proportion of the population, like inheritance tax or tobacco duty. Is there a particular group that benefit the most from Truss’s plans? Yes. Those on the highest incomes.
What of her other plans? How is a stamp duty cut benefitting everybody, when so many can’t even get on the property ladder? How is increasing bankers’ bonuses benefitting everybody?
Some will get the benefits, but we all pay the price of a massively increased deficit.
There are taxes that are paid by those who work for a living, like National Insurance.
There are taxes that are paid by those who are trying to get on the housing ladder, or engaged in labour mobility, like SDLT.
If you want to tax wealth, then taxing those who are working for a living is the worst place to start. Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes are not the ones benefiting from these tax changes.
Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes benefit from a stamp duty cut, as they’re more likely to be buying/selling property than the average person.
Were Truss planning to cut NI while also increasing wealth taxes so as to balance the budget, that would be one thing… but she’s not. She’s cutting taxes and raising borrowing. You keep sidestepping this point. Your answers never talk about the deficit or inflation.
I don't talk much about inflation as I don't think its worth talking about. Inflation is being imported from an external price shock, there's quite frankly nothing to be done about it. As the war unwinds, the commodity prices should stabilise if not fall, and then we can deal with the legacy of inflation if need be. I have said before, I expect inflation to fall, naturally, possibly significantly to the point of having some technical deflation.
As for the deficit I have said a lot about that: its cyclical. Unlike 2007 when the spending taps were turned on full blast pre-recession meaning that the deficit became out of control and surged to absurd amounts even years after the crash, this time the UK entered this downturn in a much healthier position. The structural deficit had been eliminated, and the deficit rather than going from surplus to 3% had instead gone from 10% to just 1.5% pre-crash.
We need to get through the recession and grow the economy. Once we are at the other side of the supply shock, if there's still a significant deficit, then cyclically we need to address that. But right now we are in the thick of the supply shock. There was no problem in my eyes with Gordon Brown borrowing in 2008, what he did wrong was borrowing before 2008. Today is the 2008 scenario. If the war ends next year then within a couple of years after that the deficit needs to be coming back down again just as the deficit had to be coming down a couple of years after 2008.
Inflation is affected by many things. Yes, it is being affected by the things you describe, but it is also being affected by high borrowing. We can’t control inflation completely, but we can influence it. Is now the best time to be adding to inflation? Brown could borrow cheap in 2008; that’s not so much the case now.
Growing the economy is a good thing. How could we do that? We could invest in infrastructure, like more green energy. A Green New Deal? Oh, but Truss wants to limit on shore green energy…
We could invest in transport infrastructure, but the Conservatives have scaled back plans there.
We could increase trade; we could embrace free trade. But Truss wants to pick fights with the EU and has given up on a trade deal with the US.
We could invest in education… but I don’t see any plans there.
What does Truss propose? Cutting stamp duty, further inflating property prices.
Show me some pro-growth policies and I’m happy to see borrowing to fund them.
Great so we're actually agreed that cyclically this is the appropriate time for borrowing, unlike when Brown splashed the cash and increased debt to GDP between 2002-2007 pre-crash. So the only question is what are pro-growth policies.
Pro-growth policies I would suggest:
1: Employers NI is quite literally a tax on jobs. I would abolish it if I could, at the very least it should be cut with a view to ultimately phasing it out.
2: Employee NI is a tax only paid by working people. I would abolish it if I could, merge it into Income Tax, at the very least the recent tax rise must be reversed.
3: Corporation Tax stifles investment into businesses. Rising it was a mistake, that should be reversed.
4: SDLT is a tax on mobility, not a tax on home ownership. It too should be abolished and replaced with a land tax in my view.
Taxation should ideally be put more heavily on externalities you wish to discourage, like pollution. People working for a living, or being mobile, is something we should be wanting to encourage not discourage.
Tax land hoarding (tax those who have multiple homes) and tax unearned incomes as high as earned ones, if not higher.
Bart, if I could have you as PM instead of Truss, I would. But you’re not PM; Truss is. Forgive me if my wording misled you: my point is not to discuss hypotheticals that would be good, it’s to discuss what the Government is actually doing.
The Conservative government is not implementing your policy suggestions. They are not borrowing to increase growth. They are borrowing and simultaneously not doing enough to increase growth.
Reducing taxes on jobs, employment, investment and mobility should encourage growth.
With the exception of a freakish period between 1984-85 (when people thought the miners might win?) the pound is the weakest it has ever been against the dollar.
Further to fall, I reckon. The Truss/KK plan is to try and buy the election having neutered "Treasury orthodoxy", aka its irritating preference for a semblance of fiscal sanity.
Never seen the Chancellor abbreviated to KK before.
Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand
I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses
How exactly is Truss to do this? There are thousands of plots that developers hold with planning permission, but why exactly would they go hell for leather and build them all, reducing the properties' value and the developers' profits (which is the effect that you want to see), as opposed to downing tools, selling the houses off plan, keeping values high and taking very little risk?
It's the same situation with supply of energy - we would all love suppliers to flood the market with cheap energy, but who's going to pay them to do so? Someone will have to.
Abolish planning permission so that having land with permission is no longer valuable.
The only reason holding land with permission has a value is because permission is rationed and thus valuable. Abolish rationing, then holding permission loses all value.
The equivalent of legalising robbery so that the crime figures go down.
Legalise robbery and robberies will increase.
The question by Luckyguy was how to build more houses, the answer is legalise house building so that houses are built.
If you ration the ability to build houses, then whoever owns the rations controls the rate houses are built. Abolish rationing, and they can be built at the level demanded, they won't be built more than demanded because people won't waste money building homes with nobody to sell them to.
In Japan and other countries with building standards and zoning but without UK's Byzantine planning permission system houses are built individually at levels demanded, rather than in major estates by "developers".
I genuinely think that you simply don't understand what 'planning permission' is or the function it serves.
To paraphrase the Great Inigo Montoya; "You keep using that phrase, I do not think it means what you think it means".
The default setting for all planning permissions is to grant permission. That has been the way since at least the introduction of the planning guidances (PPG) by Thatcher in the late 80s. The purpose of the planning permission is to ensure that the development is both as harmless as possible to the existing environment (archaeology, nature, water supply etc) and is also sustainable in terms of services and infrastructure. If it meets these criteria it will be granted. If it does not then the council will look for the developer to provide changes to their plans or mitigations to the damage they will cause. It is extremely rare for planning to be denied to developments and the changes the planners want to planning permission have nothing to do with releasing more land and everything to do with reducing the requirements upon them to make their developments as sustainable and harmless as possible.
Planning permission is not 'Byzantine' and is not the cause of a lack of housebuilding, no matter what you might think.
My train to Leeds for tonight's Enough is Enough rally has been stopped just outside London for the last 3 hours. I'm sorry not to be there, Leeds! 😭
Just another reminder that we need to bring rail into public ownership and make it fit for the future! 🚄
LNER Replying to @zarahsultana and @eiecampaign I am sorry for the delay, Zarah. This was due to damage to the overhead electric wires meaning services could not move around Stevenage, but services are now on the move. On your other point, LNER is owned by the DfT after the franchise was handed back in 2018. ^Cameron
Personally, I salute Labour for not discriminating on the basis of race, sex, or intelligence.
I wouldn't put money on Labour holding Coventry South at the next election.
I have banged on and on about thick as mince Corbynites such as Sultana. "why are you singling out this woman of colour" sometimes is the attack on Twitter.
It's not because she's a woman. Its not because she is British Asian. Its because she is a fucking moron. An ideologue zealot one at that.
Sounds like Mrs Sussex.
Really? Haven't seen any evidence of her moronity. They don't like her because she is a black American woman with opinions and a mouth. British princesses are supposed to come straight out of Harry Enfield's WOMEN KNOW YOUR LIMITS sketch, and she doesn't.
Actually it’s because she is a lying manipulative narcissist who’s just out for what she can take
I see we are at the anger phase of the grief response.
A cocktail of geo-strategising and whining about Meghan is pretty much the essence of PB nowadays. Just needs an incarnation of PB’s walking, talking multiple personality disorder prolapsing over nuclear armageddon to turn up to add the maraschino cherry to the mix.
What has happened with Meghan and Harry today? I thought they were good and quite dignified throughout the funeral.
Presumably they breathed funny or something.
I think Meghan being too good at acting sad ('She's an actress you know!!!') was literally one of the whines.
And there was that "look at me" hat.
I am not a fan of Meghan and think both she and Harry have been foolish over the last few years. But as someone pointed out to me yesterday, she has just done one of the toughest things she will ever have to do.
I am sure she was saddened by the Queen's death, if only for Harry (and I think more than that). She has had every camera in the place trained on here by people just waiting for her to give the slightest indication of a smile or the slightest deviation from 'proper' mourning.
In anyone else - any of the rest of the Royal family - it would have been excused as natural. Even in the darkest times we can find things that might bring a smile to our lips even if it is just a fond memory. But if a single shot had been taken of Meghan with the faintest of a smile she would have been crucified.
That is one tough gig for days on end and I don't think either she or Harry put a foot wrong.
I encountered an interesting reaction the other day. When the conversation turned to Meghan and Harry (a couple of my wife’s friends who live for the glossy magazines), I refused to comment.
When pressed I said that I didn’t have an opinion and that they’d asked for privacy, so it seemed a bit off banging on about it.
I was then accused of cancelling them. Am I missing something?
Tax cuts disproportionately benefit tax payers. What a shock.
Why not just increase taxes to 100% if that's your point of view, as anything less than that "disproportionately benefits" the rich.
Trickle down economics doesn’t work. Tax cuts for the rich aren’t going to massively increase growth, so they will increase the deficit, which will weaken the pound and lead to further inflation, making everyone poorer. Unless, of course, you slash public services. You think it takes a long time to get a GP appointment now? Wait until we’re further into Truss’s premiership.
Counter-cyclical taxation policies work if you invest in the country. The Government isn’t doing anything to improve productivity. It’s just inflating house prices with a stamp duty cut and encouraging unsafe financial systems through deregulation.
Truss isn't doing "tax cuts for the rich" or "trickle down economics" though, she's doing tax cuts for tax payers. Trickle down is when you only cut the rates of tax for the highest tax payers, rather than cutting everybody's tax which is what reversing the NI hike does.
Cutting everyone's tax does work, tax rises don't work, they strangle the economy and don't raise the revenues expected.
One can, of course, cut or raise taxes in a broad variety of ways. There are taxes that nearly everybody pays, like VAT, and there are taxes that are paid by a smaller proportion of the population, like inheritance tax or tobacco duty. Is there a particular group that benefit the most from Truss’s plans? Yes. Those on the highest incomes.
What of her other plans? How is a stamp duty cut benefitting everybody, when so many can’t even get on the property ladder? How is increasing bankers’ bonuses benefitting everybody?
Some will get the benefits, but we all pay the price of a massively increased deficit.
There are taxes that are paid by those who work for a living, like National Insurance.
There are taxes that are paid by those who are trying to get on the housing ladder, or engaged in labour mobility, like SDLT.
If you want to tax wealth, then taxing those who are working for a living is the worst place to start. Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes are not the ones benefiting from these tax changes.
Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes benefit from a stamp duty cut, as they’re more likely to be buying/selling property than the average person.
Were Truss planning to cut NI while also increasing wealth taxes so as to balance the budget, that would be one thing… but she’s not. She’s cutting taxes and raising borrowing. You keep sidestepping this point. Your answers never talk about the deficit or inflation.
The deficit is all Gordon Brown's fault, silly.
That was 14 years and at least 1 recession ago....
On the point above, a Stamp Duty cut does not benefit everybody - it benefits home owners, who by definition are the wealthier members of society.
On the last point, a fair amount of things *are* Gordon Brown's fault.
His habit was to borrow from future generations up to and including his grand children's generation (see PFI contracts) to spend it now, so we can't really divorce him from his shadow. In the case of PFI, his off-balance sheet shadow.
Currently, for example, my local NHS Trust is spending more than 5% of its total budget servicing its PFI scheme.
In general terms, how many more NHS staff and services can you get for £22 million a year?
PFI is the thing that everyone forgets but that we are still paying for today. A lot of people laud the new hospitals New Labour built, but mostly it was PFI. How many laud that but criticize Truss for deffering costs to the future for energy?
Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand
I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses
How exactly is Truss to do this? There are thousands of plots that developers hold with planning permission, but why exactly would they go hell for leather and build them all, reducing the properties' value and the developers' profits (which is the effect that you want to see), as opposed to downing tools, selling the houses off plan, keeping values high and taking very little risk?
It's the same situation with supply of energy - we would all love suppliers to flood the market with cheap energy, but who's going to pay them to do so? Someone will have to.
Well, here's some ideas:
1. As suggested here by someone else previously: make the developers pay Council Tax on those plots. 2. Change planning to revoke permission if unused after a year. 3. All the government to compulsory purchase any land with building permission at the current value less 10% for every year it has sat idle.
I am sure there are plenty of others that could be considered.
2 would be counterproductive as it would make it more complex to get planning permission if you had to start from scratch every twelve months. Particularly for any private building plots where raising finance might be an issue.
3 would only work if the government/council were willing to build houses directly. Given the costs involved that seems unlikely.
1 is an excellent idea on a huge number of levels.
Councils are willing to build houses directly, but current rules make it difficult for them to do so.
Councils cannot afford to build houses.
Then instead of borrowing money to give the most well off a tax cut, let’s borrow money to give to councils to build houses.
Do you think that Councils currently have the staff to plan/implement/manage mass house building?
Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand
I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses
How exactly is Truss to do this? There are thousands of plots that developers hold with planning permission, but why exactly would they go hell for leather and build them all, reducing the properties' value and the developers' profits (which is the effect that you want to see), as opposed to downing tools, selling the houses off plan, keeping values high and taking very little risk?
It's the same situation with supply of energy - we would all love suppliers to flood the market with cheap energy, but who's going to pay them to do so? Someone will have to.
Abolish planning permission so that having land with permission is no longer valuable.
The only reason holding land with permission has a value is because permission is rationed and thus valuable. Abolish rationing, then holding permission loses all value.
The equivalent of legalising robbery so that the crime figures go down.
If that’s the problem - planning permission that expires. With a covenant that anyone with an interest in the planning permission that expired can never have planning permission for that piece of land again.
Actually, let’s be kind. They are barred for 999 years.
Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand
I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses
How exactly is Truss to do this? There are thousands of plots that developers hold with planning permission, but why exactly would they go hell for leather and build them all, reducing the properties' value and the developers' profits (which is the effect that you want to see), as opposed to downing tools, selling the houses off plan, keeping values high and taking very little risk?
It's the same situation with supply of energy - we would all love suppliers to flood the market with cheap energy, but who's going to pay them to do so? Someone will have to.
Abolish planning permission so that having land with permission is no longer valuable.
The only reason holding land with permission has a value is because permission is rationed and thus valuable. Abolish rationing, then holding permission loses all value.
The equivalent of legalising robbery so that the crime figures go down.
Legalise robbery and robberies will increase.
The question by Luckyguy was how to build more houses, the answer is legalise house building so that houses are built.
If you ration the ability to build houses, then whoever owns the rations controls the rate houses are built. Abolish rationing, and they can be built at the level demanded, they won't be built more than demanded because people won't waste money building homes with nobody to sell them to.
In Japan and other countries with building standards and zoning but without UK's Byzantine planning permission system houses are built individually at levels demanded, rather than in major estates by "developers".
I genuinely think that you simply don't understand what 'planning permission' is or the function it serves.
To paraphrase the Great Inigo Montoya; "You keep using that phrase, I do not think it means what you think it means".
The default setting for all planning permissions is to grant permission. That has been the way since at least the introduction of the planning guidances (PPG) by Thatcher in the late 80s. The purpose of the planning permission is to ensure that the development is both as harmless as possible to the existing environment (archaeology, nature, water supply etc) and is also sustainable in terms of services and infrastructure. If it meets these criteria it will be granted. If it does not then the council will look for the developer to provide changes to their plans or mitigations to the damage they will cause. It is extremely rare for planning to be denied to developments and the changes the planners want to planning permission have nothing to do with releasing more land and everything to do with reducing the requirements upon them to make their developments as sustainable and harmless as possible.
Planning permission is not 'Byzantine' and is not the cause of a lack of housebuilding, no matter what you might think.
The purpose may be that, but the only people who can easily manage that are the developers, which is why it is Byzantine and why we have our system that we have.
"Developments" shouldn't be the only option, "developers" shouldn't be the only option, most countries people can self-build their own home because they don't have the requirement to get permission like we do in this country.
Anyone self-building their own home shouldn't need to apply for or get permission, it should be automatic so long as it is built to pre-determined standards in pre-determined zones. Do that and people can build their own home whenever or wherever they need it instead of "developers" controlling the system.
My train to Leeds for tonight's Enough is Enough rally has been stopped just outside London for the last 3 hours. I'm sorry not to be there, Leeds! 😭
Just another reminder that we need to bring rail into public ownership and make it fit for the future! 🚄
LNER Replying to @zarahsultana and @eiecampaign I am sorry for the delay, Zarah. This was due to damage to the overhead electric wires meaning services could not move around Stevenage, but services are now on the move. On your other point, LNER is owned by the DfT after the franchise was handed back in 2018. ^Cameron
Personally, I salute Labour for not discriminating on the basis of race, sex, or intelligence.
I wouldn't put money on Labour holding Coventry South at the next election.
I have banged on and on about thick as mince Corbynites such as Sultana. "why are you singling out this woman of colour" sometimes is the attack on Twitter.
It's not because she's a woman. Its not because she is British Asian. Its because she is a fucking moron. An ideologue zealot one at that.
Sounds like Mrs Sussex.
Really? Haven't seen any evidence of her moronity. They don't like her because she is a black American woman with opinions and a mouth. British princesses are supposed to come straight out of Harry Enfield's WOMEN KNOW YOUR LIMITS sketch, and she doesn't.
Actually it’s because she is a lying manipulative narcissist who’s just out for what she can take
I see we are at the anger phase of the grief response.
A cocktail of geo-strategising and whining about Meghan is pretty much the essence of PB nowadays. Just needs an incarnation of PB’s walking, talking multiple personality disorder prolapsing over nuclear armageddon to turn up to add the maraschino cherry to the mix.
What has happened with Meghan and Harry today? I thought they were good and quite dignified throughout the funeral.
Presumably they breathed funny or something.
I think Meghan being too good at acting sad ('She's an actress you know!!!') was literally one of the whines.
And there was that "look at me" hat.
I am not a fan of Meghan and think both she and Harry have been foolish over the last few years. But as someone pointed out to me yesterday, she has just done one of the toughest things she will ever have to do.
I am sure she was saddened by the Queen's death, if only for Harry (and I think more than that). She has had every camera in the place trained on here by people just waiting for her to give the slightest indication of a smile or the slightest deviation from 'proper' mourning.
In anyone else - any of the rest of the Royal family - it would have been excused as natural. Even in the darkest times we can find things that might bring a smile to our lips even if it is just a fond memory. But if a single shot had been taken of Meghan with the faintest of a smile she would have been crucified.
That is one tough gig for days on end and I don't think either she or Harry put a foot wrong.
I encountered an interesting reaction the other day. When the conversation turned to Meghan and Harry (a couple of my wife’s friends who live for the glossy magazines), I refused to comment.
When pressed I said that I didn’t have an opinion and that they’d asked for privacy, so it seemed a bit off banging on about it.
I was then accused of cancelling them. Am I missing something?
I don't think you can win in these arguments. If you don't pick a side then both sides attack you and there seems to be no middle ground. At least not amongst the 'activists'. Either she is a victim of a terrible crime or she is the devil incarnate. Of course, she is neither.
Mr. Observer, I wonder to what extent that's related to the unusually high degree of centralisation (in population terms as much as anything) of London and south-east?
Other economies of comparable size, most notably Germany and Italy, formed from numerous smaller states coalescing into a nation and thus has various local capitals.
By contrast, London is bigger than probably the next half-dozen cities combined.
Interesting to consider the population balance had the Harrying of the North not occurred.
So did Britain. First England uniting, so the capitals at Winchester, Dunwich, York and Gloucester were replaced with London. At the same time Scotland was uniting so the capitals of Hexham, Stirling and Berwick were replaced by Edinburgh. Wales, of course, only united intermittently so the capitals Dinefwr, Llanbadarn, Bala, Welshpool and Brecon generally retained their importance ahead of Rhuddlan, Abergwyngregyn and Harlech.
Then all these countries united over the centuries but still London tended to dominate. Partly I think that's because unlike most countries that assimilated gradually it was the political, commercial and legal capital all in one (not forgetting Scotland has its own law courts) so it naturally sucked all that activity to itself. In Italy Milan remains the commercial centre, in Germany it's Frankfurt, in Spain Barcelona is if not the commercial centre still very important. That provides a counterweight to the other capitals. (One reason Frankfurt wasn't made the capital of West Germany despite being the obvious choice was the fear of West German politicians it would eclipse Berlin and make reunification with Berlin as the capital harder to argue for).
Ireland, of course, is a rather different story of development with Dublin developing due to its status as a port with a large Protestant community that was under the lordship of the Crown of England. Ironically, you can see much the same phenomenon now in Ireland where Dublin far outstrips any other city in size and importance (where would be the second largest - I would guess Cork)?
Edit - on the island of Ireland as a whole, it would of course be Belfast, but I was thinking of the Republic.
Cork is the second-largest Irish city, population of ~250,000 so itself 5% of Ireland as a whole, equivalent to a UK city with a population of 3.4 million, which doesn't exist. But then it depends on where you draw the boundaries. The population of Greater Manchester is ~3 million.
There seems a good topological reason why Ireland and Britain would both have lopsided city distributions, because they're both on the very edge of Europe, and so trade is all in one direction, towards the continent. Whereas countries like France and Germany have influences pulling them in every direction.
Russian maths. https://mobile.twitter.com/ChristopherJM/status/1572476671277826051 Shoigu claims just 5,900+ Russian troops killed. Real number of KIA is certainly much, much higher. Meanwhile he claims 100,000 Ukrainian casualties, including 60,000 KIA — “half the Ukrainian army.”
It does make it hard to take their threats seriously when every word they say is an obvious lie.
Why the f*ck would they need to mobilise more people if they've only lost that many troops?
Doesn't even make sense to someone trying to shill for the regime.
Something like: the Russian military are doing so well that NATO wants to move from just propping up Ukraine to directly attacking Russia. So they need a partial mobilisation to deter/be ready for desperate NATO's next unprovoked escalation.
Tax cuts disproportionately benefit tax payers. What a shock.
Why not just increase taxes to 100% if that's your point of view, as anything less than that "disproportionately benefits" the rich.
Trickle down economics doesn’t work. Tax cuts for the rich aren’t going to massively increase growth, so they will increase the deficit, which will weaken the pound and lead to further inflation, making everyone poorer. Unless, of course, you slash public services. You think it takes a long time to get a GP appointment now? Wait until we’re further into Truss’s premiership.
Counter-cyclical taxation policies work if you invest in the country. The Government isn’t doing anything to improve productivity. It’s just inflating house prices with a stamp duty cut and encouraging unsafe financial systems through deregulation.
Truss isn't doing "tax cuts for the rich" or "trickle down economics" though, she's doing tax cuts for tax payers. Trickle down is when you only cut the rates of tax for the highest tax payers, rather than cutting everybody's tax which is what reversing the NI hike does.
Cutting everyone's tax does work, tax rises don't work, they strangle the economy and don't raise the revenues expected.
One can, of course, cut or raise taxes in a broad variety of ways. There are taxes that nearly everybody pays, like VAT, and there are taxes that are paid by a smaller proportion of the population, like inheritance tax or tobacco duty. Is there a particular group that benefit the most from Truss’s plans? Yes. Those on the highest incomes.
What of her other plans? How is a stamp duty cut benefitting everybody, when so many can’t even get on the property ladder? How is increasing bankers’ bonuses benefitting everybody?
Some will get the benefits, but we all pay the price of a massively increased deficit.
There are taxes that are paid by those who work for a living, like National Insurance.
There are taxes that are paid by those who are trying to get on the housing ladder, or engaged in labour mobility, like SDLT.
If you want to tax wealth, then taxing those who are working for a living is the worst place to start. Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes are not the ones benefiting from these tax changes.
Wealthy people who make their money from unearned incomes benefit from a stamp duty cut, as they’re more likely to be buying/selling property than the average person.
Were Truss planning to cut NI while also increasing wealth taxes so as to balance the budget, that would be one thing… but she’s not. She’s cutting taxes and raising borrowing. You keep sidestepping this point. Your answers never talk about the deficit or inflation.
I don't talk much about inflation as I don't think its worth talking about. Inflation is being imported from an external price shock, there's quite frankly nothing to be done about it. As the war unwinds, the commodity prices should stabilise if not fall, and then we can deal with the legacy of inflation if need be. I have said before, I expect inflation to fall, naturally, possibly significantly to the point of having some technical deflation.
As for the deficit I have said a lot about that: its cyclical. Unlike 2007 when the spending taps were turned on full blast pre-recession meaning that the deficit became out of control and surged to absurd amounts even years after the crash, this time the UK entered this downturn in a much healthier position. The structural deficit had been eliminated, and the deficit rather than going from surplus to 3% had instead gone from 10% to just 1.5% pre-crash.
We need to get through the recession and grow the economy. Once we are at the other side of the supply shock, if there's still a significant deficit, then cyclically we need to address that. But right now we are in the thick of the supply shock. There was no problem in my eyes with Gordon Brown borrowing in 2008, what he did wrong was borrowing before 2008. Today is the 2008 scenario. If the war ends next year then within a couple of years after that the deficit needs to be coming back down again just as the deficit had to be coming down a couple of years after 2008.
Inflation is affected by many things. Yes, it is being affected by the things you describe, but it is also being affected by high borrowing. We can’t control inflation completely, but we can influence it. Is now the best time to be adding to inflation? Brown could borrow cheap in 2008; that’s not so much the case now.
Growing the economy is a good thing. How could we do that? We could invest in infrastructure, like more green energy. A Green New Deal? Oh, but Truss wants to limit on shore green energy…
We could invest in transport infrastructure, but the Conservatives have scaled back plans there.
We could increase trade; we could embrace free trade. But Truss wants to pick fights with the EU and has given up on a trade deal with the US.
We could invest in education… but I don’t see any plans there.
What does Truss propose? Cutting stamp duty, further inflating property prices.
Show me some pro-growth policies and I’m happy to see borrowing to fund them.
Great so we're actually agreed that cyclically this is the appropriate time for borrowing, unlike when Brown splashed the cash and increased debt to GDP between 2002-2007 pre-crash. So the only question is what are pro-growth policies.
Pro-growth policies I would suggest:
1: Employers NI is quite literally a tax on jobs. I would abolish it if I could, at the very least it should be cut with a view to ultimately phasing it out.
2: Employee NI is a tax only paid by working people. I would abolish it if I could, merge it into Income Tax, at the very least the recent tax rise must be reversed.
3: Corporation Tax stifles investment into businesses. Rising it was a mistake, that should be reversed.
4: SDLT is a tax on mobility, not a tax on home ownership. It too should be abolished and replaced with a land tax in my view.
Taxation should ideally be put more heavily on externalities you wish to discourage, like pollution. People working for a living, or being mobile, is something we should be wanting to encourage not discourage.
Tax land hoarding (tax those who have multiple homes) and tax unearned incomes as high as earned ones, if not higher.
Bart, if I could have you as PM instead of Truss, I would. But you’re not PM; Truss is. Forgive me if my wording misled you: my point is not to discuss hypotheticals that would be good, it’s to discuss what the Government is actually doing.
The Conservative government is not implementing your policy suggestions. They are not borrowing to increase growth. They are borrowing and simultaneously not doing enough to increase growth.
Reducing taxes on jobs, employment, investment and mobility should encourage growth.
Reducing taxes on corporations has, in recent history, led to shareholders taking greater profits, not to more investment. The recent corporation tax rises encouraged investment as a way of mitigating any negative effects. Reversing them is not going to do much to encourage growth.
Stamp duty cuts generally lead to compensatory increases in property prices. Stamp duty cuts are a poor way of improving mobility: most of the benefit doesn’t go to those moving for work.
I’m all for folding NI into income tax, as you suggested previously, but that’s not being proposed. Reducing my taxes, as someone in the top decile by income, is not going to grow the economy as well as investing in infrastructure and education. Labour mobility and entrepreneurship comes by providing a good safety net, not by making my life a bit more comfortable.
With the exception of a freakish period between 1984-85 (when people thought the miners might win?) the pound is the weakest it has ever been against the dollar.
Further to fall, I reckon. The Truss/KK plan is to try and buy the election having neutered "Treasury orthodoxy", aka its irritating preference for a semblance of fiscal sanity.
Never seen the Chancellor abbreviated to KK before.
Shock as an economically illiterate government tries to solve a supply issue by incentivising demand
I am literally begging, just build more fucking houses
How exactly is Truss to do this? There are thousands of plots that developers hold with planning permission, but why exactly would they go hell for leather and build them all, reducing the properties' value and the developers' profits (which is the effect that you want to see), as opposed to downing tools, selling the houses off plan, keeping values high and taking very little risk?
It's the same situation with supply of energy - we would all love suppliers to flood the market with cheap energy, but who's going to pay them to do so? Someone will have to.
Abolish planning permission so that having land with permission is no longer valuable.
The only reason holding land with permission has a value is because permission is rationed and thus valuable. Abolish rationing, then holding permission loses all value.
The equivalent of legalising robbery so that the crime figures go down.
Legalise robbery and robberies will increase.
The question by Luckyguy was how to build more houses, the answer is legalise house building so that houses are built.
If you ration the ability to build houses, then whoever owns the rations controls the rate houses are built. Abolish rationing, and they can be built at the level demanded, they won't be built more than demanded because people won't waste money building homes with nobody to sell them to.
In Japan and other countries with building standards and zoning but without UK's Byzantine planning permission system houses are built individually at levels demanded, rather than in major estates by "developers".
I genuinely think that you simply don't understand what 'planning permission' is or the function it serves.
To paraphrase the Great Inigo Montoya; "You keep using that phrase, I do not think it means what you think it means".
The default setting for all planning permissions is to grant permission. That has been the way since at least the introduction of the planning guidances (PPG) by Thatcher in the late 80s. The purpose of the planning permission is to ensure that the development is both as harmless as possible to the existing environment (archaeology, nature, water supply etc) and is also sustainable in terms of services and infrastructure. If it meets these criteria it will be granted. If it does not then the council will look for the developer to provide changes to their plans or mitigations to the damage they will cause. It is extremely rare for planning to be denied to developments and the changes the planners want to planning permission have nothing to do with releasing more land and everything to do with reducing the requirements upon them to make their developments as sustainable and harmless as possible.
Planning permission is not 'Byzantine' and is not the cause of a lack of housebuilding, no matter what you might think.
The purpose may be that, but the only people who can easily manage that are the developers, which is why it is Byzantine and why we have our system that we have.
"Developments" shouldn't be the only option, "developers" shouldn't be the only option, most countries people can self-build their own home because they don't have the requirement to get permission like we do in this country.
Anyone self-building their own home shouldn't need to apply for or get permission, it should be automatic so long as it is built to pre-determined standards in pre-determined zones. Do that and people can build their own home whenever or wherever they need it instead of "developers" controlling the system.
Nope because the same localised conditions for archaeology, nature, transport and services exist.
Planning permission is not the onerous bit about self building. Building regs are far more problematic than planning permission these days. I agree there should be far more self building. It is about 80% of all building in Belgium for example. The Dutch have a far better system which I keep meaning to address in a thread header but never get round to. But planning permission is not the issue in the UK you pretend it is.
With the exception of a freakish period between 1984-85 (when people thought the miners might win?) the pound is the weakest it has ever been against the dollar.
Further to fall, I reckon. The Truss/KK plan is to try and buy the election having neutered "Treasury orthodoxy", aka its irritating preference for a semblance of fiscal sanity.
Never seen the Chancellor abbreviated to KK before.
BREAKING. Defence Secretary Ben Wallace’s response to the address by Putin:
“Putin’s breaking of his own promises not to mobilise parts of his population and the illegal annexation of parts of Ukraine, are an admission that his invasion is failing. Ukraine is winning this war.”
My train to Leeds for tonight's Enough is Enough rally has been stopped just outside London for the last 3 hours. I'm sorry not to be there, Leeds! 😭
Just another reminder that we need to bring rail into public ownership and make it fit for the future! 🚄
LNER Replying to @zarahsultana and @eiecampaign I am sorry for the delay, Zarah. This was due to damage to the overhead electric wires meaning services could not move around Stevenage, but services are now on the move. On your other point, LNER is owned by the DfT after the franchise was handed back in 2018. ^Cameron
Personally, I salute Labour for not discriminating on the basis of race, sex, or intelligence.
I wouldn't put money on Labour holding Coventry South at the next election.
I have banged on and on about thick as mince Corbynites such as Sultana. "why are you singling out this woman of colour" sometimes is the attack on Twitter.
It's not because she's a woman. Its not because she is British Asian. Its because she is a fucking moron. An ideologue zealot one at that.
Sounds like Mrs Sussex.
Really? Haven't seen any evidence of her moronity. They don't like her because she is a black American woman with opinions and a mouth. British princesses are supposed to come straight out of Harry Enfield's WOMEN KNOW YOUR LIMITS sketch, and she doesn't.
Actually it’s because she is a lying manipulative narcissist who’s just out for what she can take
I see we are at the anger phase of the grief response.
A cocktail of geo-strategising and whining about Meghan is pretty much the essence of PB nowadays. Just needs an incarnation of PB’s walking, talking multiple personality disorder prolapsing over nuclear armageddon to turn up to add the maraschino cherry to the mix.
What has happened with Meghan and Harry today? I thought they were good and quite dignified throughout the funeral.
Presumably they breathed funny or something.
I think Meghan being too good at acting sad ('She's an actress you know!!!') was literally one of the whines.
And there was that "look at me" hat.
I am not a fan of Meghan and think both she and Harry have been foolish over the last few years. But as someone pointed out to me yesterday, she has just done one of the toughest things she will ever have to do.
I am sure she was saddened by the Queen's death, if only for Harry (and I think more than that). She has had every camera in the place trained on here by people just waiting for her to give the slightest indication of a smile or the slightest deviation from 'proper' mourning.
In anyone else - any of the rest of the Royal family - it would have been excused as natural. Even in the darkest times we can find things that might bring a smile to our lips even if it is just a fond memory. But if a single shot had been taken of Meghan with the faintest of a smile she would have been crucified.
That is one tough gig for days on end and I don't think either she or Harry put a foot wrong.
I encountered an interesting reaction the other day. When the conversation turned to Meghan and Harry (a couple of my wife’s friends who live for the glossy magazines), I refused to comment.
When pressed I said that I didn’t have an opinion and that they’d asked for privacy, so it seemed a bit off banging on about it.
I was then accused of cancelling them. Am I missing something?
I don't think you can win in these arguments. If you don't pick a side then both sides attack you and there seems to be no middle ground. At least not amongst the 'activists'. Either she is a victim of a terrible crime or she is the devil incarnate. Of course, she is neither.
Apols in advance for the parochialism but this is pretty funny. Apart from anything else the SCons thinking that someone working for Jim 'Astonished By How Easy It's Been To Outwit The SNP' Murphy was a plus is a cracker.
Going from the grand if sometimes overwhelming spectacle of mighty global politics to the tiny, tedious trivia of provincial Scotland - as here - is like being on safari in the Serengeti to watch the lions attack the herds of wildebeest, then you come back to camp & you hear the faint, predictable whine of a mosquito
I specifically posted it for you as a distraction from your big nuclear war induced poopy pants. I hope you're grateful.
Comments
There are no easy answers and I am pleased I do not have the responsibility of these decisions
And then deleted another poster's name next to it.
And from thereon in, it went downhill...
Labour safe seats - well that’s the location of nuclear power stations, nuclear waste storage, giant reservoirs and Thermal Depolymerisation Plants sorted…
What we are encouraging is people going into finance and other parasitical jobs rather than into doing something useful for other people.
And good morning one and all; looks more like autumn this morning.
'Bjorn Again gave a private concert for Putin'
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/18056180/vladimir-putin-abba-tribute-act-bjorn-again/
The plan of the Nazis was to steal the food of Ukraine/Occupied Russia/Eastern Europe. The resulting starvation and deaths was seen by those planning it as a welcome benefit.
Yes, they literally wrote that down.
But they told the Ukrainians something slightly different...
They convince nobody and disrespect their own losses
They are war criminals and should be in the Hague
The catastrophe was the hubris in thinking boom and bust was abolished and overspending dramatically post 2002.
Debt to GDP rose annually every single year from 2002 to 2008, it should have been falling then. Had debt to GDP been falling instead of rising then as it should have been cyclically then we'd have been well placed for the next recession when it inevitably came.
No, it's all about logistics. A thread 🧵:
https://twitter.com/noclador/status/1572389840007892992
I hope his middle name isn't Keith.
PM Burnham please
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/jul/07/london-top-taxpaying-city-uk-report
answer.
The question by Luckyguy was how to build more houses, the answer is legalise house building so that houses are built.
If you ration the ability to build houses, then whoever owns the rations controls the rate houses are built. Abolish rationing, and they can be built at the level demanded, they won't be built more than demanded because people won't waste money building homes with nobody to sell them to.
In Japan and other countries with building standards and zoning but without UK's Byzantine planning permission system houses are built individually at levels demanded, rather than in major estates by "developers".
Other economies of comparable size, most notably Germany and Italy, formed from numerous smaller states coalescing into a nation and thus has* various local capitals.
By contrast, London is bigger than probably the next half-dozen cities combined.
Interesting to consider the population balance had the Harrying of the North not occurred.
Edited extra bit: ahem, typo.
Most horses I know learn from their mistakes.
Growing the economy is a good thing. How could we do that? We could invest in infrastructure, like more green energy. A Green New Deal? Oh, but Truss wants to limit on shore green energy…
We could invest in transport infrastructure, but the Conservatives have scaled back plans there.
We could increase trade; we could embrace free trade. But Truss wants to pick fights with the EU and has given up on a trade deal with the US.
We could invest in education… but I don’t see any plans there.
What does Truss propose? Cutting stamp duty, further inflating property prices.
Show me some pro-growth policies and I’m happy to see borrowing to fund them.
I think the modern times internet lingo is “living rent free in the PB Tories’ heads”, but let us not introduce another grim cliche to the PB mix…
I suspect an internal row about mobilisation. Putin wanted the full fat, total war, complete mobilisation
His colleagues really really didn’t. So we have this hybrid. A compromise. “Partial mobilisation” which will probably become the full version over time
Pro-growth policies I would suggest:
1: Employers NI is quite literally a tax on jobs. I would abolish it if I could, at the very least it should be cut with a view to ultimately phasing it out.
2: Employee NI is a tax only paid by working people. I would abolish it if I could, merge it into Income Tax, at the very least the recent tax rise must be reversed.
3: Corporation Tax stifles investment into businesses. Rising it was a mistake, that should be reversed.
4: SDLT is a tax on mobility, not a tax on home ownership. It too should be abolished and replaced with a land tax in my view.
Taxation should ideally be put more heavily on externalities you wish to discourage, like pollution. People working for a living, or being mobile, is something we should be wanting to encourage not discourage.
Tax land hoarding (tax those who have multiple homes) and tax unearned incomes as high as earned ones, if not higher.
Then all these countries united over the centuries but still London tended to dominate. Partly I think that's because unlike most countries that assimilated gradually it was the political, commercial and legal capital all in one (not forgetting Scotland has its own law courts) so it naturally sucked all that activity to itself. In Italy Milan remains the commercial centre, in Germany it's Frankfurt, in Spain Barcelona is if not the commercial centre still very important. That provides a counterweight to the other capitals. (One reason Frankfurt wasn't made the capital of West Germany despite being the obvious choice was the fear of West German politicians it would eclipse Berlin and make reunification with Berlin as the capital harder to argue for).
Ireland, of course, is a rather different story of development with Dublin developing due to its status as a port with a large Protestant community that was under the lordship of the Crown of England. Ironically, you can see much the same phenomenon now in Ireland where Dublin far outstrips any other city in size and importance (where would be the second largest - I would guess Cork)?
Edit - on the island of Ireland as a whole, it would of course be Belfast, but I was thinking of the Republic.
Self-build is the way forward. It accounts for 60% of new houses in France and Germany, but only 10% in the UK. We need to build those skills up in this country.
That was the basic fault of Thatcherism. Things need to be initiated.
Mr bondegazu (sp) makes the point upthread
What makes them rubbish is the poor management of the contracts. The "£25 to change a lightbulb" examples are silly, but disguise the real troughing involved. We could have managed and enforced these contracts better to remove the grey areas but chose not to.
Also absurd is the partisanship - why "Brown" when Osborne was responsible for billions more of them having been elected saying they were "discredited". Both parties used them. A lot.
The Conservative government is not implementing your policy suggestions. They are not borrowing to increase growth. They are borrowing and simultaneously not doing enough to increase growth.
And he's 47
Cookie cutter estates being built are because of our planning permission system. Change the system for requiring permission, and self-build becomes an option.
To paraphrase the Great Inigo Montoya; "You keep using that phrase, I do not think it means what you think it means".
The default setting for all planning permissions is to grant permission. That has been the way since at least the introduction of the planning guidances (PPG) by Thatcher in the late 80s. The purpose of the planning permission is to ensure that the development is both as harmless as possible to the existing environment (archaeology, nature, water supply etc) and is also sustainable in terms of services and infrastructure. If it meets these criteria it will be granted. If it does not then the council will look for the developer to provide changes to their plans or mitigations to the damage they will cause. It is extremely rare for planning to be denied to developments and the changes the planners want to planning permission have nothing to do with releasing more land and everything to do with reducing the requirements upon them to make their developments as sustainable and harmless as possible.
Planning permission is not 'Byzantine' and is not the cause of a lack of housebuilding, no matter what you might think.
When pressed I said that I didn’t have an opinion and that they’d asked for privacy, so it seemed a bit off banging on about it.
I was then accused of cancelling them. Am I missing something?
been found guilty of land banking
Actually, let’s be kind. They are barred for 999 years.
"Developments" shouldn't be the only option, "developers" shouldn't be the only option, most countries people can self-build their own home because they don't have the requirement to get permission like we do in this country.
Anyone self-building their own home shouldn't need to apply for or get permission, it should be automatic so long as it is built to pre-determined standards in pre-determined zones. Do that and people can build their own home whenever or wherever they need it instead of "developers" controlling the system.
There seems a good topological reason why Ireland and Britain would both have lopsided city distributions, because they're both on the very edge of Europe, and so trade is all in one direction, towards the continent. Whereas countries like France and Germany have influences pulling them in every direction.
Stamp duty cuts generally lead to compensatory increases in property prices. Stamp duty cuts are a poor way of improving mobility: most of the benefit doesn’t go to those moving for work.
I’m all for folding NI into income tax, as you suggested previously, but that’s not being proposed. Reducing my taxes, as someone in the top decile by income, is not going to grow the economy as well as investing in infrastructure and education. Labour mobility and entrepreneurship comes by providing a good safety net, not by making my life a bit more comfortable.
Planning permission is not the onerous bit about self building. Building regs are far more problematic than planning permission these days. I agree there should be far more self building. It is about 80% of all building in Belgium for example. The Dutch have a far better system which I keep meaning to address in a thread header but never get round to. But planning permission is not the issue in the UK you pretend it is.
https://twitter.com/Callsign_Santa/status/1572424074969886723
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10231239/Russian-cannibal-arrested-headless-corpse-rolls-car.html