If party members had the final say Badenoch would now be Tory leader not Truss. It was Tory MPs who put Truss in the final 2.
Would Badenoch be doing anything different from Truss though?
Yes Badenoch is more socially conservative than Truss maybe but I doubt she would have cut the 45p top rate and scrapped the bankers' bonus cap even if she reversed the NI and corporation tax rises
The Conservatives are rightly suffering because the Prime Minister (chosen by the members) and the Chancellor (chosen by the PM) re both incredibly bad at politics.
I mean, just jaw-droppingly "WTF??????" bad. They appear to be operating in an ability-free bubble.
The Treasury is proudly bragging that a "typical" first-time buyer, earning £30,000, can save £11,250 in stamp duty on a "representative" terraced house.
2nd like the LDs (Hoping for lots of MPs in the Tory wipeout)
Realistically, Bev, how many seats do you think the LDs can get?
Personally I'd love to see them become the official opposition and the few remaining Conservative MPs sent to one of Vlad's Gulags but I just can't see Team Davey getting above 50.
Whilst I don't expect them to pick up every seat in succession, in a "fuck the Tories" election you get all kinds of interesting results. And well into triple digits are seats held by the LibDems as recently as 2010...
That is an interesting list. Cheadle and Hazel Grove are two that were only a few miles from where I used to live and could see them being achievable. However, given that the expectation is of a massive Tory collapse, even a 10% swing only gets them up about 30 MPs and I doubt the Labour marginals will be winnable for them.
Thanks for sharing that.
In the current situation I suspect the Lib Dems are resource-constrained.
My constituency (Witney) is #39 on the LD target list, with a 12.4% swing required, and nowhere on the Labour list. With the polls as they are it's absolutely ripe for the plucking by the Lib Dems, especially given that the local MP is an ineffectual Tory boy who has pissed everyone off with his indifference to the sewage being dumped into the local rivers.
But for the Lib Dems to take it, there needs to be a Focus-bombing campaign of "Labour can't win here" to persuade people that the anti-Tory vote should rest with them, rather than with that nice Mr Starmer you keep seeing on the TV. And right now I don't see any sign that LDHQ has the budget or the personnel to throw at #39 in the target list, especially when next-door Wantage is in theory an easier catch.
Very quiet on here about this, and buried on the bbc. Agenda? It’s not great, but it could be worse.
Feels about right. 'It could be worse' and it will be worse, sadly.'
So much worse. After the GFC bail outs the idea has taken hold that the government can magic away any problems if they want to. It then becomes a moral failure not to. If you can bail out the banks why not me?
So you pay my wages when I can’t work, you pay my heating bill when it goes up, you are responsible for my mortgage.
It’s going to take a lot of time and pain to realise that the magic money tree has been cut down and burnt to keep us warm. The markets have said enough.
We are heading back to reality, when people have to accept they are responsible for themselves. It’s going to be a hell of a detox.
Well said, we are indeed. Truss and Kwasi have the right prescription for getting us back to reality, but the country doesn't want to hear it, and it might be frankly too little, too late now.
If the country wants to live in delusion that the government can magic away all our problems, then lets give Starmer a go and see if he can do it. When he can't, maybe people will realise Truss was ahead of her time and finally pay attention to what she rightly wanted to do.
And that reality is what? A bunch of tax cuts paid for by borrowing money? How is that facing up to "reality" it's more fantasy economics. Where are the spending cuts, when is the sainted NHS going to actually be forced to modernise? Where are the state pension reforms and taper for high earning retirees? Where was the NI on pension income announcement?
There was absolutely no "reality" in the Friday statement, you are seeing what you want to see, not what they actually announced which was a series of unfunded tax cuts and new spending commitments. The Truss "prescription" is no different to Corbyn, just from the other side of the political divide, Corbyn wanted to borrow hundreds of billions for nationalisation and spending, Truss is borrowing hundreds of billions for tax cuts.
I do not think Bart or myself are saying that. I certainly am not. Last Friday was deeply delusional and idiotic, done by people without even the most rudimentary understanding of economics or politics or even morality. Just beyond stupid and needing reversed. But that will not solve the problems we face.
Actually I am saying that. Cut taxes, grow the economy, and take a smaller slice of a bigger pie. Borrow for the transition, because taxes are already choking the economy and higher than they've ever been.
What spending cuts should have been announced? Other than the traditional third rail of slashing welfare for pensioners, which I agree should be done but nobody will go near, there is not much left to cut. Taxes have risen as high as they'll go, spending has been cut as far as it will go, and we're still out of money.
The only way forward is to stop strangling the economy with taxes, let it grow, and take a smaller slice.
What they did was combine tax cuts with a massive uncosted and uncostable increase in public spending subsidising fuel costs. That is nuts. In the medium term I agree that taxes on incomes have risen too high but the market made it very clear that you cannot cut taxes and increase spending at the same time.
So what can you do?
Increase taxes yet again, strangle growth even more yet again?
If fixing the fundamentals of too high taxes can't be done, what can be done, other than manage decline by taxing working people more and more and having a state that's nothing but an NHS and pension provider?
Make the tough choices. That's what being in government is about. Cut public sector and state pension entitlements. That's the big saving right now but the government are too scared to do it because it hits their voters.
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship."
Looking for the positives, perhaps terror about the state of the economy could be just what's needed to get Tory MPs to swallow supply-side reforms on housing.
Very quiet on here about this, and buried on the bbc. Agenda? It’s not great, but it could be worse.
Feels about right. 'It could be worse' and it will be worse, sadly.'
So much worse. After the GFC bail outs the idea has taken hold that the government can magic away any problems if they want to. It then becomes a moral failure not to. If you can bail out the banks why not me?
So you pay my wages when I can’t work, you pay my heating bill when it goes up, you are responsible for my mortgage.
It’s going to take a lot of time and pain to realise that the magic money tree has been cut down and burnt to keep us warm. The markets have said enough.
We are heading back to reality, when people have to accept they are responsible for themselves. It’s going to be a hell of a detox.
Well said, we are indeed. Truss and Kwasi have the right prescription for getting us back to reality, but the country doesn't want to hear it, and it might be frankly too little, too late now.
If the country wants to live in delusion that the government can magic away all our problems, then lets give Starmer a go and see if he can do it. When he can't, maybe people will realise Truss was ahead of her time and finally pay attention to what she rightly wanted to do.
Can the Government magic away all our problems? No, but several of our current problems were created by the Government a week ago. This “right prescription” is going to cost us all (except the super-rich) more via inflation and higher borrowing costs than any savings to our tax bills. Everyone being poorer is going to hit growth.
No, the problems were already there, the Government just pulled out the rug and revealed the extend they'd been brushed under it until now.
The politics was absolutely mishandled though. The £2bn in the 45p tax change is neither here nor there, and if it attracts people to pay their tax here instead of abroad then it absolutely would be self-funding and then some, but while making economic sense it destroyed any "all in it together" narrative and allowed the media and opposition to pretend that all this was about that rounding error of a change.
You seem to be blaming the media and opposition when it was the markets that gave their verdict . It seems strange that people who seem to like free markets only seem to like them when they agree with their opinion .
I like the free markets whether they agree with me or not. I believe in creative destruction and evolution, I do not believe that instantaneous snap judgements of markets is correct any more than people buying into Bitcoin because its going up in value in the past was a wise investment. But I believe in the market economy, because in the long term it identifies mistakes and corrects course.
People made a big deal about pound falling to £1.08 after Kwasi spoke, since then its fallen further to . . . £1.12
The pound is now roughly back to exactly where it was before Kwasi spoke last Friday. So lets not overreact to every move in every market.
Nationwide announce house prices were unchanged in September but 9.5% higher than last September
These rises were unsustainable and this crisis has ended that and likely plunged many into negative equity for years to come
We have been here before
The prices people have been paying for properties round here has astounded me, people just seem to lose the plot when buying houses and have the daft idea that house prices will always rise when all evidence shows that they don't. Houses need to be seen as a place to live not an asset to make money on.
The reason is that they're comparing it to renting. As long as you can pay the mortgage repayments, at the end of your mortgage term you own the house in full and no longer need to pay rent or mortgage. Thirty years of renting and you have nothing.
The difference in housing security that gives people is immense, and that's why people will pay any price they can to buy a house (and they'll pay as much as they can afford to buy the best house in the best area that they can afford)
I've been thinking about this quite a bit, and I think this is the reason why house prices will always rise in the UK to the limit of affordability, and it's why increasing supply won't easily bring down prices.
Whereas removing the govt props that drive up affordability will.....
Very quiet on here about this, and buried on the bbc. Agenda? It’s not great, but it could be worse.
Feels about right. 'It could be worse' and it will be worse, sadly.'
So much worse. After the GFC bail outs the idea has taken hold that the government can magic away any problems if they want to. It then becomes a moral failure not to. If you can bail out the banks why not me?
So you pay my wages when I can’t work, you pay my heating bill when it goes up, you are responsible for my mortgage.
It’s going to take a lot of time and pain to realise that the magic money tree has been cut down and burnt to keep us warm. The markets have said enough.
We are heading back to reality, when people have to accept they are responsible for themselves. It’s going to be a hell of a detox.
Well said, we are indeed. Truss and Kwasi have the right prescription for getting us back to reality, but the country doesn't want to hear it, and it might be frankly too little, too late now.
If the country wants to live in delusion that the government can magic away all our problems, then lets give Starmer a go and see if he can do it. When he can't, maybe people will realise Truss was ahead of her time and finally pay attention to what she rightly wanted to do.
And that reality is what? A bunch of tax cuts paid for by borrowing money? How is that facing up to "reality" it's more fantasy economics. Where are the spending cuts, when is the sainted NHS going to actually be forced to modernise? Where are the state pension reforms and taper for high earning retirees? Where was the NI on pension income announcement?
There was absolutely no "reality" in the Friday statement, you are seeing what you want to see, not what they actually announced which was a series of unfunded tax cuts and new spending commitments. The Truss "prescription" is no different to Corbyn, just from the other side of the political divide, Corbyn wanted to borrow hundreds of billions for nationalisation and spending, Truss is borrowing hundreds of billions for tax cuts.
Fantasy economics is that we can tax and spend our way to growth.
The country has ratchetted up taxes to the highest level in 74 years and the notion that reversing some tax rises to the point they're still far higher than they were when Labour were last in office is "irresponsible" tax cutting is just a bad joke.
Cut taxes, grow the economy, and take a smaller slice of a bigger pie. That's how you solve it.
Maybe, but it's also fantasy economics to make a bunch of unfunded tax cuts and push up borrowing heading into a recession. Again, I have no issue with tax cuts, I just want them to be properly funded from cuts or be able to see the maths that shows the measures will push up trend growth to enough of a degree to be worthwhile. The Friday statement had neither of these aspects and now the PM is going begging to the OBR this morning to produce the latter, which they probably can't do because none of these tax cuts will make a dent in economic growth.
The other policy we've got is a real terms cut in working age benefits while maintaining the triple lock. It's a reasonable saving but it really is going to put people in a position of choosing between eating and heating this winter.
I simply don't see how you can support any of these policies, if they were coming from a Labour government you'd be screaming bloody murder at borrowing an extra £45bn per year.
Its a Catch-22 though Max.
If like me you believe we've gone well past the peak of the Laffer Curve then how do you properly fund tax cuts, when the spending on everything other than pensions has been cut as far as it can be cut, and high taxes are the root cause of your dilemma. Our welfare budget now is going on pensioners and nobody will touch that, all the easy cuts have been made, and we're still in trouble. Any tax rises to cut taxes is just shuffling the problem around. If you need cuts to grow the economy, then how do you self-fund those cuts, other than borrowing?
On your second point, I categorically do not support maintaining the triple lock. Not a bit.
Actually the laffer/tax curve shows that taxes on wealth tend to create more growth as the wealth is put to work to earn income, secondly you're just letting Truss off the hook for not cutting pensions. If she wants these big tax cuts then the state needs to make at least half of that in a saving and the only realistic saving is pensions. She shouldn't be afraid of that hurting her core voters, that's the cost of doing business and pushing big tax cuts.
All you're doing is saying "well it's too hard to cut spending, so fuck it lets just run a huge deficit and hope the markets don't realise" well they fucking realised.
Very quiet on here about this, and buried on the bbc. Agenda? It’s not great, but it could be worse.
Feels about right. 'It could be worse' and it will be worse, sadly.'
So much worse. After the GFC bail outs the idea has taken hold that the government can magic away any problems if they want to. It then becomes a moral failure not to. If you can bail out the banks why not me?
So you pay my wages when I can’t work, you pay my heating bill when it goes up, you are responsible for my mortgage.
It’s going to take a lot of time and pain to realise that the magic money tree has been cut down and burnt to keep us warm. The markets have said enough.
We are heading back to reality, when people have to accept they are responsible for themselves. It’s going to be a hell of a detox.
Well said, we are indeed. Truss and Kwasi have the right prescription for getting us back to reality, but the country doesn't want to hear it, and it might be frankly too little, too late now.
If the country wants to live in delusion that the government can magic away all our problems, then lets give Starmer a go and see if he can do it. When he can't, maybe people will realise Truss was ahead of her time and finally pay attention to what she rightly wanted to do.
And that reality is what? A bunch of tax cuts paid for by borrowing money? How is that facing up to "reality" it's more fantasy economics. Where are the spending cuts, when is the sainted NHS going to actually be forced to modernise? Where are the state pension reforms and taper for high earning retirees? Where was the NI on pension income announcement?
There was absolutely no "reality" in the Friday statement, you are seeing what you want to see, not what they actually announced which was a series of unfunded tax cuts and new spending commitments. The Truss "prescription" is no different to Corbyn, just from the other side of the political divide, Corbyn wanted to borrow hundreds of billions for nationalisation and spending, Truss is borrowing hundreds of billions for tax cuts.
I do not think Bart or myself are saying that. I certainly am not. Last Friday was deeply delusional and idiotic, done by people without even the most rudimentary understanding of economics or politics or even morality. Just beyond stupid and needing reversed. But that will not solve the problems we face.
Actually I am saying that. Cut taxes, grow the economy, and take a smaller slice of a bigger pie. Borrow for the transition, because taxes are already choking the economy and higher than they've ever been.
What spending cuts should have been announced? Other than the traditional third rail of slashing welfare for pensioners, which I agree should be done but nobody will go near, there is not much left to cut. Taxes have risen as high as they'll go, spending has been cut as far as it will go, and we're still out of money.
The only way forward is to stop strangling the economy with taxes, let it grow, and take a smaller slice.
What they did was combine tax cuts with a massive uncosted and uncostable increase in public spending subsidising fuel costs. That is nuts. In the medium term I agree that taxes on incomes have risen too high but the market made it very clear that you cannot cut taxes and increase spending at the same time.
So what can you do?
Increase taxes yet again, strangle growth even more yet again?
If fixing the fundamentals of too high taxes can't be done, what can be done, other than manage decline by taxing working people more and more and having a state that's nothing but an NHS and pension provider?
If party members had the final say Badenoch would now be Tory leader not Truss. It was Tory MPs who put Truss in the final 2.
Would Badenoch be doing anything different from Truss though?
Yes Badenoch is more socially conservative than Truss maybe but I doubt she would have cut the 45p top rate and scrapped the bankers' bonus cap even if she reversed the NI and corporation tax rises
The Conservatives are rightly suffering because the Prime Minister (chosen by the members) and the Chancellor (chosen by the PM) re both incredibly bad at politics.
I mean, just jaw-droppingly "WTF??????" bad. They appear to be operating in an ability-free bubble.
That said, at least @BartholomewRoberts is trying to plot a way out of the mess. He may be wrong but he’s trying. The rest of us continuously saying WTF They’re Mad doesn’t get us far
And I don’t see any of the PB Lefties offering any solution other than “tax the rich more” - well, great, that just means the rich will leave, and the economy stalls even more. That’s what happened to France with their wealth tax. And France has advantages we do not
It’s a rum do, alright. And almost every economy is in deep shit. How do we get out?
Very quiet on here about this, and buried on the bbc. Agenda? It’s not great, but it could be worse.
Feels about right. 'It could be worse' and it will be worse, sadly.'
So much worse. After the GFC bail outs the idea has taken hold that the government can magic away any problems if they want to. It then becomes a moral failure not to. If you can bail out the banks why not me?
So you pay my wages when I can’t work, you pay my heating bill when it goes up, you are responsible for my mortgage.
It’s going to take a lot of time and pain to realise that the magic money tree has been cut down and burnt to keep us warm. The markets have said enough.
We are heading back to reality, when people have to accept they are responsible for themselves. It’s going to be a hell of a detox.
Well said, we are indeed. Truss and Kwasi have the right prescription for getting us back to reality, but the country doesn't want to hear it, and it might be frankly too little, too late now.
If the country wants to live in delusion that the government can magic away all our problems, then lets give Starmer a go and see if he can do it. When he can't, maybe people will realise Truss was ahead of her time and finally pay attention to what she rightly wanted to do.
Can the Government magic away all our problems? No, but several of our current problems were created by the Government a week ago. This “right prescription” is going to cost us all (except the super-rich) more via inflation and higher borrowing costs than any savings to our tax bills. Everyone being poorer is going to hit growth.
No, the problems were already there, the Government just pulled out the rug and revealed the extend they'd been brushed under it until now.
The politics was absolutely mishandled though. The £2bn in the 45p tax change is neither here nor there, and if it attracts people to pay their tax here instead of abroad then it absolutely would be self-funding and then some, but while making economic sense it destroyed any "all in it together" narrative and allowed the media and opposition to pretend that all this was about that rounding error of a change.
You seem to be blaming the media and opposition when it was the markets that gave their verdict . It seems strange that people who seem to like free markets only seem to like them when they agree with their opinion .
I like the free markets whether they agree with me or not. I believe in creative destruction and evolution, I do not believe that instantaneous snap judgements of markets is correct any more than people buying into Bitcoin because its going up in value in the past was a wise investment. But I believe in the market economy, because in the long term it identifies mistakes and corrects course.
People made a big deal about pound falling to £1.08 after Kwasi spoke, since then its fallen further to . . . £1.12
The pound is now roughly back to exactly where it was before Kwasi spoke last Friday. So lets not overreact to every move in every market.
The pound recovered because the markets think Truss and Kwarteng are now cornered and will have to come up with a plan. They’ll then give their further verdict !
I don't think the benefits proposal is that bigger deal politically as there is some residual loathing for 'benefit scroungers' that they can usefully exploit. The ruin of the conservative party will simply be the tax cut for the very rich.
The easiest way to cut benefit costs would be to freeze housing benefit for x years or even cut it a few percentage.
That would also have a side effect of reducing the pressure on rental prices everywhere. I suspect however the Government won't do that as Landlords are elderly and vote Tory provided the sweeties keep on coming.
I don't think that strategy will work. The number of available rental properties will decline. There is a problem with the supply of private rental sector properties as it is.
Very quiet on here about this, and buried on the bbc. Agenda? It’s not great, but it could be worse.
Feels about right. 'It could be worse' and it will be worse, sadly.'
So much worse. After the GFC bail outs the idea has taken hold that the government can magic away any problems if they want to. It then becomes a moral failure not to. If you can bail out the banks why not me?
So you pay my wages when I can’t work, you pay my heating bill when it goes up, you are responsible for my mortgage.
It’s going to take a lot of time and pain to realise that the magic money tree has been cut down and burnt to keep us warm. The markets have said enough.
We are heading back to reality, when people have to accept they are responsible for themselves. It’s going to be a hell of a detox.
Well said, we are indeed. Truss and Kwasi have the right prescription for getting us back to reality, but the country doesn't want to hear it, and it might be frankly too little, too late now.
If the country wants to live in delusion that the government can magic away all our problems, then lets give Starmer a go and see if he can do it. When he can't, maybe people will realise Truss was ahead of her time and finally pay attention to what she rightly wanted to do.
And that reality is what? A bunch of tax cuts paid for by borrowing money? How is that facing up to "reality" it's more fantasy economics. Where are the spending cuts, when is the sainted NHS going to actually be forced to modernise? Where are the state pension reforms and taper for high earning retirees? Where was the NI on pension income announcement?
There was absolutely no "reality" in the Friday statement, you are seeing what you want to see, not what they actually announced which was a series of unfunded tax cuts and new spending commitments. The Truss "prescription" is no different to Corbyn, just from the other side of the political divide, Corbyn wanted to borrow hundreds of billions for nationalisation and spending, Truss is borrowing hundreds of billions for tax cuts.
Fantasy economics is that we can tax and spend our way to growth.
The country has ratchetted up taxes to the highest level in 74 years and the notion that reversing some tax rises to the point they're still far higher than they were when Labour were last in office is "irresponsible" tax cutting is just a bad joke.
Cut taxes, grow the economy, and take a smaller slice of a bigger pie. That's how you solve it.
Maybe, but it's also fantasy economics to make a bunch of unfunded tax cuts and push up borrowing heading into a recession. Again, I have no issue with tax cuts, I just want them to be properly funded from cuts or be able to see the maths that shows the measures will push up trend growth to enough of a degree to be worthwhile. The Friday statement had neither of these aspects and now the PM is going begging to the OBR this morning to produce the latter, which they probably can't do because none of these tax cuts will make a dent in economic growth.
The other policy we've got is a real terms cut in working age benefits while maintaining the triple lock. It's a reasonable saving but it really is going to put people in a position of choosing between eating and heating this winter.
I simply don't see how you can support any of these policies, if they were coming from a Labour government you'd be screaming bloody murder at borrowing an extra £45bn per year.
Its a Catch-22 though Max.
If like me you believe we've gone well past the peak of the Laffer Curve then how do you properly fund tax cuts, when the spending on everything other than pensions has been cut as far as it can be cut, and high taxes are the root cause of your dilemma. Our welfare budget now is going on pensioners and nobody will touch that, all the easy cuts have been made, and we're still in trouble. Any tax rises to cut taxes is just shuffling the problem around. If you need cuts to grow the economy, then how do you self-fund those cuts, other than borrowing?
On your second point, I categorically do not support maintaining the triple lock. Not a bit.
Actually the laffer/tax curve shows that taxes on wealth tend to create more growth as the wealth is put to work to earn income, secondly you're just letting Truss off the hook for not cutting pensions. If she wants these big tax cuts then the state needs to make at least half of that in a saving and the only realistic saving is pensions. She shouldn't be afraid of that hurting her core voters, that's the cost of doing business and pushing big tax cuts.
All you're doing is saying "well it's too hard to cut spending, so fuck it lets just run a huge deficit and hope the markets don't realise" well they fucking realised.
I'm not saying Truss is perfect by any means, I'm saying she's better than Sunak and Starmer and all the other alternatives in my eyes.
Absolutely cut pensions. You and I are 100% on the same page there.
The reason that Labour inherited a golden economic legacy in 1997 was that house prices were generally 3 times the average income at that time.. House prices are the cause of most economic problems in the UK and have been for decades
If my spending is going to be squeezed I'd rather it was via higher taxes than interest rates at 7pc v 5pc. At least the taxes might be spent on something useful or reduce government borrowing.
They’re probably right tho, because there is no competition for this role. Rock bands are dead. No one cares. It’s like saying he’s the most “important quill sharpener of the last century”
Replacing "Tax and Spend" with "Not Tax and Lots of Spend" doesn't work.
Spend? I have had it up to here with 12 years of cut after cut after cut to public services combined with cut after cut after cut to the safety net that our new PM revealingly considers to be "handouts". The pretence that they are anything but a pale shadow of what they were when your lot took over beggars belief.
Rest assured my preferred approach is "A Lot More Tax and A Lot More Spend Just Not On The Stupid Shit These Wankers Have Been Spending It On"
It does seem that no 10 want more work visas as this they think will help growth .
Politically problematic I would have thought .
They are going for Home Counties £150k+£100k bonuses employing a cheap foreign au pair on £50 a week pocket money vote. Mondeo man replaced by Rupert & Henrietta as the target vote.
I don't think the benefits proposal is that bigger deal politically as there is some residual loathing for 'benefit scroungers' that they can usefully exploit. The ruin of the conservative party will simply be the tax cut for the very rich.
The easiest way to cut benefit costs would be to freeze housing benefit for x years or even cut it a few percentage.
That would also have a side effect of reducing the pressure on rental prices everywhere. I suspect however the Government won't do that as Landlords are elderly and vote Tory provided the sweeties keep on coming.
I don't think that strategy will work. The number of available rental properties will decline. There is a problem with the supply of private rental sector properties as it is.
In which case there are zero cost savings within benefits....
Which leaves the NHS bearing the cuts - again not an option..
So we need £37bn of spending cuts and we can't see £37 of easily obtainable ones given that everything else has already had 12 years of cutting unnecessary spending...
Very quiet on here about this, and buried on the bbc. Agenda? It’s not great, but it could be worse.
Feels about right. 'It could be worse' and it will be worse, sadly.'
So much worse. After the GFC bail outs the idea has taken hold that the government can magic away any problems if they want to. It then becomes a moral failure not to. If you can bail out the banks why not me?
So you pay my wages when I can’t work, you pay my heating bill when it goes up, you are responsible for my mortgage.
It’s going to take a lot of time and pain to realise that the magic money tree has been cut down and burnt to keep us warm. The markets have said enough.
We are heading back to reality, when people have to accept they are responsible for themselves. It’s going to be a hell of a detox.
Well said, we are indeed. Truss and Kwasi have the right prescription for getting us back to reality, but the country doesn't want to hear it, and it might be frankly too little, too late now.
If the country wants to live in delusion that the government can magic away all our problems, then lets give Starmer a go and see if he can do it. When he can't, maybe people will realise Truss was ahead of her time and finally pay attention to what she rightly wanted to do.
And that reality is what? A bunch of tax cuts paid for by borrowing money? How is that facing up to "reality" it's more fantasy economics. Where are the spending cuts, when is the sainted NHS going to actually be forced to modernise? Where are the state pension reforms and taper for high earning retirees? Where was the NI on pension income announcement?
There was absolutely no "reality" in the Friday statement, you are seeing what you want to see, not what they actually announced which was a series of unfunded tax cuts and new spending commitments. The Truss "prescription" is no different to Corbyn, just from the other side of the political divide, Corbyn wanted to borrow hundreds of billions for nationalisation and spending, Truss is borrowing hundreds of billions for tax cuts.
I do not think Bart or myself are saying that. I certainly am not. Last Friday was deeply delusional and idiotic, done by people without even the most rudimentary understanding of economics or politics or even morality. Just beyond stupid and needing reversed. But that will not solve the problems we face.
Actually I am saying that. Cut taxes, grow the economy, and take a smaller slice of a bigger pie. Borrow for the transition, because taxes are already choking the economy and higher than they've ever been.
What spending cuts should have been announced? Other than the traditional third rail of slashing welfare for pensioners, which I agree should be done but nobody will go near, there is not much left to cut. Taxes have risen as high as they'll go, spending has been cut as far as it will go, and we're still out of money.
The only way forward is to stop strangling the economy with taxes, let it grow, and take a smaller slice.
What they did was combine tax cuts with a massive uncosted and uncostable increase in public spending subsidising fuel costs. That is nuts. In the medium term I agree that taxes on incomes have risen too high but the market made it very clear that you cannot cut taxes and increase spending at the same time.
So what can you do?
Increase taxes yet again, strangle growth even more yet again?
If fixing the fundamentals of too high taxes can't be done, what can be done, other than manage decline by taxing working people more and more and having a state that's nothing but an NHS and pension provider?
Switch taxes on earnings for taxes on assets.
The only asset it makes sense to tax is land, every other asset can be moved out of our tax jurisdiction.
If anyone proposes rebalancing taxes away from income and into land instead, then I would absolutely be prepared to vote for them. Even if its Keir Starmer. But I don't see anyone proposing that yet.
Very quiet on here about this, and buried on the bbc. Agenda? It’s not great, but it could be worse.
Feels about right. 'It could be worse' and it will be worse, sadly.'
So much worse. After the GFC bail outs the idea has taken hold that the government can magic away any problems if they want to. It then becomes a moral failure not to. If you can bail out the banks why not me?
So you pay my wages when I can’t work, you pay my heating bill when it goes up, you are responsible for my mortgage.
It’s going to take a lot of time and pain to realise that the magic money tree has been cut down and burnt to keep us warm. The markets have said enough.
We are heading back to reality, when people have to accept they are responsible for themselves. It’s going to be a hell of a detox.
Well said, we are indeed. Truss and Kwasi have the right prescription for getting us back to reality, but the country doesn't want to hear it, and it might be frankly too little, too late now.
If the country wants to live in delusion that the government can magic away all our problems, then lets give Starmer a go and see if he can do it. When he can't, maybe people will realise Truss was ahead of her time and finally pay attention to what she rightly wanted to do.
And that reality is what? A bunch of tax cuts paid for by borrowing money? How is that facing up to "reality" it's more fantasy economics. Where are the spending cuts, when is the sainted NHS going to actually be forced to modernise? Where are the state pension reforms and taper for high earning retirees? Where was the NI on pension income announcement?
There was absolutely no "reality" in the Friday statement, you are seeing what you want to see, not what they actually announced which was a series of unfunded tax cuts and new spending commitments. The Truss "prescription" is no different to Corbyn, just from the other side of the political divide, Corbyn wanted to borrow hundreds of billions for nationalisation and spending, Truss is borrowing hundreds of billions for tax cuts.
Fantasy economics is that we can tax and spend our way to growth.
The country has ratchetted up taxes to the highest level in 74 years and the notion that reversing some tax rises to the point they're still far higher than they were when Labour were last in office is "irresponsible" tax cutting is just a bad joke.
Cut taxes, grow the economy, and take a smaller slice of a bigger pie. That's how you solve it.
Maybe, but it's also fantasy economics to make a bunch of unfunded tax cuts and push up borrowing heading into a recession. Again, I have no issue with tax cuts, I just want them to be properly funded from cuts or be able to see the maths that shows the measures will push up trend growth to enough of a degree to be worthwhile. The Friday statement had neither of these aspects and now the PM is going begging to the OBR this morning to produce the latter, which they probably can't do because none of these tax cuts will make a dent in economic growth.
The other policy we've got is a real terms cut in working age benefits while maintaining the triple lock. It's a reasonable saving but it really is going to put people in a position of choosing between eating and heating this winter.
I simply don't see how you can support any of these policies, if they were coming from a Labour government you'd be screaming bloody murder at borrowing an extra £45bn per year.
Its a Catch-22 though Max.
If like me you believe we've gone well past the peak of the Laffer Curve then how do you properly fund tax cuts, when the spending on everything other than pensions has been cut as far as it can be cut, and high taxes are the root cause of your dilemma. Our welfare budget now is going on pensioners and nobody will touch that, all the easy cuts have been made, and we're still in trouble. Any tax rises to cut taxes is just shuffling the problem around. If you need cuts to grow the economy, then how do you self-fund those cuts, other than borrowing?
On your second point, I categorically do not support maintaining the triple lock. Not a bit.
Actually the laffer/tax curve shows that taxes on wealth tend to create more growth as the wealth is put to work to earn income, secondly you're just letting Truss off the hook for not cutting pensions. If she wants these big tax cuts then the state needs to make at least half of that in a saving and the only realistic saving is pensions. She shouldn't be afraid of that hurting her core voters, that's the cost of doing business and pushing big tax cuts.
All you're doing is saying "well it's too hard to cut spending, so fuck it lets just run a huge deficit and hope the markets don't realise" well they fucking realised.
I'm not saying Truss is perfect by any means, I'm saying she's better than Sunak and Starmer and all the other alternatives in my eyes.
Absolutely cut pensions. You and I are 100% on the same page there.
But taxes on earnings have to go down.
There's no such thing as partial credit though, all Liz Truss has done is taken the UK down a path of fiscal irresponsibility which is worse than doing nothing. Either you do both (tax cuts and spending cuts) or come up with a different plan.
Very quiet on here about this, and buried on the bbc. Agenda? It’s not great, but it could be worse.
Feels about right. 'It could be worse' and it will be worse, sadly.'
So much worse. After the GFC bail outs the idea has taken hold that the government can magic away any problems if they want to. It then becomes a moral failure not to. If you can bail out the banks why not me?
So you pay my wages when I can’t work, you pay my heating bill when it goes up, you are responsible for my mortgage.
It’s going to take a lot of time and pain to realise that the magic money tree has been cut down and burnt to keep us warm. The markets have said enough.
We are heading back to reality, when people have to accept they are responsible for themselves. It’s going to be a hell of a detox.
Well said, we are indeed. Truss and Kwasi have the right prescription for getting us back to reality, but the country doesn't want to hear it, and it might be frankly too little, too late now.
If the country wants to live in delusion that the government can magic away all our problems, then lets give Starmer a go and see if he can do it. When he can't, maybe people will realise Truss was ahead of her time and finally pay attention to what she rightly wanted to do.
And that reality is what? A bunch of tax cuts paid for by borrowing money? How is that facing up to "reality" it's more fantasy economics. Where are the spending cuts, when is the sainted NHS going to actually be forced to modernise? Where are the state pension reforms and taper for high earning retirees? Where was the NI on pension income announcement?
There was absolutely no "reality" in the Friday statement, you are seeing what you want to see, not what they actually announced which was a series of unfunded tax cuts and new spending commitments. The Truss "prescription" is no different to Corbyn, just from the other side of the political divide, Corbyn wanted to borrow hundreds of billions for nationalisation and spending, Truss is borrowing hundreds of billions for tax cuts.
I do not think Bart or myself are saying that. I certainly am not. Last Friday was deeply delusional and idiotic, done by people without even the most rudimentary understanding of economics or politics or even morality. Just beyond stupid and needing reversed. But that will not solve the problems we face.
Actually I am saying that. Cut taxes, grow the economy, and take a smaller slice of a bigger pie. Borrow for the transition, because taxes are already choking the economy and higher than they've ever been.
What spending cuts should have been announced? Other than the traditional third rail of slashing welfare for pensioners, which I agree should be done but nobody will go near, there is not much left to cut. Taxes have risen as high as they'll go, spending has been cut as far as it will go, and we're still out of money.
The only way forward is to stop strangling the economy with taxes, let it grow, and take a smaller slice.
What they did was combine tax cuts with a massive uncosted and uncostable increase in public spending subsidising fuel costs. That is nuts. In the medium term I agree that taxes on incomes have risen too high but the market made it very clear that you cannot cut taxes and increase spending at the same time.
So what can you do?
Increase taxes yet again, strangle growth even more yet again?
If fixing the fundamentals of too high taxes can't be done, what can be done, other than manage decline by taxing working people more and more and having a state that's nothing but an NHS and pension provider?
Make the tough choices. That's what being in government is about. Cut public sector and state pension entitlements. That's the big saving right now but the government are too scared to do it because it hits their voters.
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship."
A rational argument, but is it true? 'Always' is a big claim. It needs empirical analysis with reference to mature democracies. France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Iceland, Japan, Canada, USA, as well as UK. Or try Botswana, South Africa.
Nationwide announce house prices were unchanged in September but 9.5% higher than last September
These rises were unsustainable and this crisis has ended that and likely plunged many into negative equity for years to come
We have been here before
The prices people have been paying for properties round here has astounded me, people just seem to lose the plot when buying houses and have the daft idea that house prices will always rise when all evidence shows that they don't. Houses need to be seen as a place to live not an asset to make money on.
The reason is that they're comparing it to renting. As long as you can pay the mortgage repayments, at the end of your mortgage term you own the house in full and no longer need to pay rent or mortgage. Thirty years of renting and you have nothing.
The difference in housing security that gives people is immense, and that's why people will pay any price they can to buy a house (and they'll pay as much as they can afford to buy the best house in the best area that they can afford)
I've been thinking about this quite a bit, and I think this is the reason why house prices will always rise in the UK to the limit of affordability, and it's why increasing supply won't easily bring down prices.
Mortgage payments have also been cheaper than rent for the last 10 years. The identical house to mine, two doors down, costs £250 a month more in rent than I am paying on my mortgage.
That may well be about to change, of course, which will have a knock-on effect on demand.
The point about appreciation still holds, of course. If I had lived in that other house for 7 years, I would have paid around £12,000 more in rent, and not built up £125,000 in deposit.
Equally, I wouldn't have had to pay around £38,000 in repairs and improvements. So swings and roundabouts.
The thing about repairs and improvements is generally another plus for owning rather than renting because many landlords are pretty crap about it.
One of the rooms in my flat has a bay window where the wall is much thinner, and let's much more heat out, than the rest of the property. The landlord has no interest or motivation in improving this. If we owned the place then we'd have the option of spending the (considerable) sum of money to rectify the issue, and have a more comfortable and efficient to heat home as a result.
The most useful thing we could do is to make other forms of investment relatively more attractive to investors than residential property. There's broadly two different ways to do that, either clobber property investment with taxation on landlords, or make investment in other parts of the economy (productive businesses hopefully) more rewarding. Then at least people buying a home would only be competing with other aspirational homeowners, rather than with a tsunami of investment capital.
Next week pictures of delegates at the Tory conference applauding ministers as they proclaim huge tax cuts for the very richest and benefits cuts for the very poorest will be beamed into TV sets up and down the country.
What if there isn't applause?
They should boo every member of the cabinet that speaks.
Very quiet on here about this, and buried on the bbc. Agenda? It’s not great, but it could be worse.
Feels about right. 'It could be worse' and it will be worse, sadly.'
So much worse. After the GFC bail outs the idea has taken hold that the government can magic away any problems if they want to. It then becomes a moral failure not to. If you can bail out the banks why not me?
So you pay my wages when I can’t work, you pay my heating bill when it goes up, you are responsible for my mortgage.
It’s going to take a lot of time and pain to realise that the magic money tree has been cut down and burnt to keep us warm. The markets have said enough.
We are heading back to reality, when people have to accept they are responsible for themselves. It’s going to be a hell of a detox.
Well said, we are indeed. Truss and Kwasi have the right prescription for getting us back to reality, but the country doesn't want to hear it, and it might be frankly too little, too late now.
If the country wants to live in delusion that the government can magic away all our problems, then lets give Starmer a go and see if he can do it. When he can't, maybe people will realise Truss was ahead of her time and finally pay attention to what she rightly wanted to do.
And that reality is what? A bunch of tax cuts paid for by borrowing money? How is that facing up to "reality" it's more fantasy economics. Where are the spending cuts, when is the sainted NHS going to actually be forced to modernise? Where are the state pension reforms and taper for high earning retirees? Where was the NI on pension income announcement?
There was absolutely no "reality" in the Friday statement, you are seeing what you want to see, not what they actually announced which was a series of unfunded tax cuts and new spending commitments. The Truss "prescription" is no different to Corbyn, just from the other side of the political divide, Corbyn wanted to borrow hundreds of billions for nationalisation and spending, Truss is borrowing hundreds of billions for tax cuts.
I do not think Bart or myself are saying that. I certainly am not. Last Friday was deeply delusional and idiotic, done by people without even the most rudimentary understanding of economics or politics or even morality. Just beyond stupid and needing reversed. But that will not solve the problems we face.
Actually I am saying that. Cut taxes, grow the economy, and take a smaller slice of a bigger pie. Borrow for the transition, because taxes are already choking the economy and higher than they've ever been.
What spending cuts should have been announced? Other than the traditional third rail of slashing welfare for pensioners, which I agree should be done but nobody will go near, there is not much left to cut. Taxes have risen as high as they'll go, spending has been cut as far as it will go, and we're still out of money.
The only way forward is to stop strangling the economy with taxes, let it grow, and take a smaller slice.
What they did was combine tax cuts with a massive uncosted and uncostable increase in public spending subsidising fuel costs. That is nuts. In the medium term I agree that taxes on incomes have risen too high but the market made it very clear that you cannot cut taxes and increase spending at the same time.
So what can you do?
Increase taxes yet again, strangle growth even more yet again?
If fixing the fundamentals of too high taxes can't be done, what can be done, other than manage decline by taxing working people more and more and having a state that's nothing but an NHS and pension provider?
Switch taxes on earnings for taxes on assets.
The only asset it makes sense to tax is land, every other asset can be moved out of our tax jurisdiction.
If anyone proposes rebalancing taxes away from income and into land instead, then I would absolutely be prepared to vote for them. Even if its Keir Starmer. But I don't see anyone proposing that yet.
So foreigners stop buying land, it gets much cheaper, house prices crash, everyone hates you, and you lose the next election
Very quiet on here about this, and buried on the bbc. Agenda? It’s not great, but it could be worse.
Feels about right. 'It could be worse' and it will be worse, sadly.'
So much worse. After the GFC bail outs the idea has taken hold that the government can magic away any problems if they want to. It then becomes a moral failure not to. If you can bail out the banks why not me?
So you pay my wages when I can’t work, you pay my heating bill when it goes up, you are responsible for my mortgage.
It’s going to take a lot of time and pain to realise that the magic money tree has been cut down and burnt to keep us warm. The markets have said enough.
We are heading back to reality, when people have to accept they are responsible for themselves. It’s going to be a hell of a detox.
Well said, we are indeed. Truss and Kwasi have the right prescription for getting us back to reality, but the country doesn't want to hear it, and it might be frankly too little, too late now.
If the country wants to live in delusion that the government can magic away all our problems, then lets give Starmer a go and see if he can do it. When he can't, maybe people will realise Truss was ahead of her time and finally pay attention to what she rightly wanted to do.
And that reality is what? A bunch of tax cuts paid for by borrowing money? How is that facing up to "reality" it's more fantasy economics. Where are the spending cuts, when is the sainted NHS going to actually be forced to modernise? Where are the state pension reforms and taper for high earning retirees? Where was the NI on pension income announcement?
There was absolutely no "reality" in the Friday statement, you are seeing what you want to see, not what they actually announced which was a series of unfunded tax cuts and new spending commitments. The Truss "prescription" is no different to Corbyn, just from the other side of the political divide, Corbyn wanted to borrow hundreds of billions for nationalisation and spending, Truss is borrowing hundreds of billions for tax cuts.
Fantasy economics is that we can tax and spend our way to growth.
The country has ratchetted up taxes to the highest level in 74 years and the notion that reversing some tax rises to the point they're still far higher than they were when Labour were last in office is "irresponsible" tax cutting is just a bad joke.
Cut taxes, grow the economy, and take a smaller slice of a bigger pie. That's how you solve it.
Maybe, but it's also fantasy economics to make a bunch of unfunded tax cuts and push up borrowing heading into a recession. Again, I have no issue with tax cuts, I just want them to be properly funded from cuts or be able to see the maths that shows the measures will push up trend growth to enough of a degree to be worthwhile. The Friday statement had neither of these aspects and now the PM is going begging to the OBR this morning to produce the latter, which they probably can't do because none of these tax cuts will make a dent in economic growth.
The other policy we've got is a real terms cut in working age benefits while maintaining the triple lock. It's a reasonable saving but it really is going to put people in a position of choosing between eating and heating this winter.
I simply don't see how you can support any of these policies, if they were coming from a Labour government you'd be screaming bloody murder at borrowing an extra £45bn per year.
Its a Catch-22 though Max.
If like me you believe we've gone well past the peak of the Laffer Curve then how do you properly fund tax cuts, when the spending on everything other than pensions has been cut as far as it can be cut, and high taxes are the root cause of your dilemma. Our welfare budget now is going on pensioners and nobody will touch that, all the easy cuts have been made, and we're still in trouble. Any tax rises to cut taxes is just shuffling the problem around. If you need cuts to grow the economy, then how do you self-fund those cuts, other than borrowing?
On your second point, I categorically do not support maintaining the triple lock. Not a bit.
Actually the laffer/tax curve shows that taxes on wealth tend to create more growth as the wealth is put to work to earn income, secondly you're just letting Truss off the hook for not cutting pensions. If she wants these big tax cuts then the state needs to make at least half of that in a saving and the only realistic saving is pensions. She shouldn't be afraid of that hurting her core voters, that's the cost of doing business and pushing big tax cuts.
All you're doing is saying "well it's too hard to cut spending, so fuck it lets just run a huge deficit and hope the markets don't realise" well they fucking realised.
I'm not saying Truss is perfect by any means, I'm saying she's better than Sunak and Starmer and all the other alternatives in my eyes.
Absolutely cut pensions. You and I are 100% on the same page there.
But taxes on earnings have to go down.
There's no such thing as partial credit though, all Liz Truss has done is taken the UK down a path of fiscal irresponsibility which is worse than doing nothing. Either you do both (tax cuts and spending cuts) or come up with a different plan.
I'm sorry I just don't agree with you. If cutting taxes that are strangling growth leads to economy growth then that is self-funding.
The second anyone else proposes to tax land or cut pensioner welfare, then I would embrace them as better than Truss, but until then Truss is closest to what has to be done.
Replacing "Tax and Spend" with "Not Tax and Lots of Spend" doesn't work.
Spend? I have had it up to here with 12 years of cut after cut after cut to public services combined with cut after cut after cut to the safety net that our new PM revealingly considers to be "handouts". The pretence that they are anything but a pale shadow of what they were when your lot took over beggars belief.
All these cuts that you speak of...have there been any cuts to the bloated system of public sector pensions? How can it be right that a hospital doctor or senior civil servant can have around 20 years of pension drawings that significantly exceeds what many people draw as salary and all from the taxpayer? This is where a large part of our taxes go that could be used for "better public services". It is public sector greed, pure and simple. Not all public sector workers for sure, but it is a pretty big section of them by the time they get to their option to retire on final salary pension scheme at 55 or 60 depending on their chosen profession.
Those saying about how we were rooked before Truss and Kwarteng miss the main point.
A nation which had it's finances in as fragile a state as ours needed a chancellor whose first, last and only job was to retain the CONFIDENCE of our creditors. Sunak managed that, Kwarteng has utterly blown that and it will be a tough slog to get back. If there's an election in 23 or 24 and Truss/Kwarteng get back in we ARE headed to economic ruin if they don't reverse ferret.
Er, there’s no way they are “getting back in” bar nuclear meltdown = coalition govt or whatever
It’s over. Finito. Even if they pursue trussonomix the damage done to confidence/borrowing costs means Trussonomix won’t work, and even if the policy somehow works they haven’t got enough time to benefit
Plus: misery awaits
Starmer is a more nailed on prime minister than Jimmy Nail starring as “Nails Von Nail” in Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Nail
John Major waves rather forlornly from the back of the room. Or is it his ghost? Hard to tell.
From about 1993 onwards, his government didn't do a bad job as these things go. Not perfect, but not bad. Britain was Booming by 1997, albeit there was a backlog of repairs to be done. But none of it mattered- one considerable cockup on the currency front and that was it.
Even if things go well from here (and my uninfomed judgement is that Trussonomics is Cargo Cult Thatcherism, doing the external moves without understanding there was an internal mechanism, and only chumps and ninnies still think it will work), people won't remember that bit. They will remember the panic.
(There was discussion of this during Covidtide. Isn't the theory that the three bits of any story that people remember are the start, finish and most intense bit of the middle?)
Which is why Truss is Toast. Only question is how many Conservatives make it out of the building before the whole thing burns down.
I don't think the benefits proposal is that bigger deal politically as there is some residual loathing for 'benefit scroungers' that they can usefully exploit. The ruin of the conservative party will simply be the tax cut for the very rich.
The easiest way to cut benefit costs would be to freeze housing benefit for x years or even cut it a few percentage.
That would also have a side effect of reducing the pressure on rental prices everywhere. I suspect however the Government won't do that as Landlords are elderly and vote Tory provided the sweeties keep on coming.
I don't think that strategy will work. The number of available rental properties will decline. There is a problem with the supply of private rental sector properties as it is.
What will happen to those properties?
a. Magically disappear b. Left empty and landlord receives £0, and pays surcharge council tax for empty homes c. Landlord receives less rent d. Landlord sells to another landlord who receives less rent e. Landlord sells to buyer who would otherwise be unable to buy, and reduces the pool of renters accordingly
A clue - for the vast majority of homes it will not be a or b.
Very quiet on here about this, and buried on the bbc. Agenda? It’s not great, but it could be worse.
Feels about right. 'It could be worse' and it will be worse, sadly.'
So much worse. After the GFC bail outs the idea has taken hold that the government can magic away any problems if they want to. It then becomes a moral failure not to. If you can bail out the banks why not me?
So you pay my wages when I can’t work, you pay my heating bill when it goes up, you are responsible for my mortgage.
It’s going to take a lot of time and pain to realise that the magic money tree has been cut down and burnt to keep us warm. The markets have said enough.
We are heading back to reality, when people have to accept they are responsible for themselves. It’s going to be a hell of a detox.
Well said, we are indeed. Truss and Kwasi have the right prescription for getting us back to reality, but the country doesn't want to hear it, and it might be frankly too little, too late now.
If the country wants to live in delusion that the government can magic away all our problems, then lets give Starmer a go and see if he can do it. When he can't, maybe people will realise Truss was ahead of her time and finally pay attention to what she rightly wanted to do.
And that reality is what? A bunch of tax cuts paid for by borrowing money? How is that facing up to "reality" it's more fantasy economics. Where are the spending cuts, when is the sainted NHS going to actually be forced to modernise? Where are the state pension reforms and taper for high earning retirees? Where was the NI on pension income announcement?
There was absolutely no "reality" in the Friday statement, you are seeing what you want to see, not what they actually announced which was a series of unfunded tax cuts and new spending commitments. The Truss "prescription" is no different to Corbyn, just from the other side of the political divide, Corbyn wanted to borrow hundreds of billions for nationalisation and spending, Truss is borrowing hundreds of billions for tax cuts.
Fantasy economics is that we can tax and spend our way to growth.
The country has ratchetted up taxes to the highest level in 74 years and the notion that reversing some tax rises to the point they're still far higher than they were when Labour were last in office is "irresponsible" tax cutting is just a bad joke.
Cut taxes, grow the economy, and take a smaller slice of a bigger pie. That's how you solve it.
Maybe, but it's also fantasy economics to make a bunch of unfunded tax cuts and push up borrowing heading into a recession. Again, I have no issue with tax cuts, I just want them to be properly funded from cuts or be able to see the maths that shows the measures will push up trend growth to enough of a degree to be worthwhile. The Friday statement had neither of these aspects and now the PM is going begging to the OBR this morning to produce the latter, which they probably can't do because none of these tax cuts will make a dent in economic growth.
The other policy we've got is a real terms cut in working age benefits while maintaining the triple lock. It's a reasonable saving but it really is going to put people in a position of choosing between eating and heating this winter.
I simply don't see how you can support any of these policies, if they were coming from a Labour government you'd be screaming bloody murder at borrowing an extra £45bn per year.
Its a Catch-22 though Max.
If like me you believe we've gone well past the peak of the Laffer Curve then how do you properly fund tax cuts, when the spending on everything other than pensions has been cut as far as it can be cut, and high taxes are the root cause of your dilemma. Our welfare budget now is going on pensioners and nobody will touch that, all the easy cuts have been made, and we're still in trouble. Any tax rises to cut taxes is just shuffling the problem around. If you need cuts to grow the economy, then how do you self-fund those cuts, other than borrowing?
On your second point, I categorically do not support maintaining the triple lock. Not a bit.
Actually the laffer/tax curve shows that taxes on wealth tend to create more growth as the wealth is put to work to earn income, secondly you're just letting Truss off the hook for not cutting pensions. If she wants these big tax cuts then the state needs to make at least half of that in a saving and the only realistic saving is pensions. She shouldn't be afraid of that hurting her core voters, that's the cost of doing business and pushing big tax cuts.
All you're doing is saying "well it's too hard to cut spending, so fuck it lets just run a huge deficit and hope the markets don't realise" well they fucking realised.
I'm not saying Truss is perfect by any means, I'm saying she's better than Sunak and Starmer and all the other alternatives in my eyes.
Absolutely cut pensions. You and I are 100% on the same page there.
But taxes on earnings have to go down.
There's no such thing as partial credit though, all Liz Truss has done is taken the UK down a path of fiscal irresponsibility which is worse than doing nothing. Either you do both (tax cuts and spending cuts) or come up with a different plan.
I'm sorry I just don't agree with you. If cutting taxes that are strangling growth leads to economy growth then that is self-funding.
The second anyone else proposes to tax land or cut pensioner welfare, then I would embrace them as better than Truss, but until then Truss is closest to what has to be done.
But they haven't shown these tax cuts will generate growth. You're treating this as an article of faith.
Very quiet on here about this, and buried on the bbc. Agenda? It’s not great, but it could be worse.
Feels about right. 'It could be worse' and it will be worse, sadly.'
So much worse. After the GFC bail outs the idea has taken hold that the government can magic away any problems if they want to. It then becomes a moral failure not to. If you can bail out the banks why not me?
So you pay my wages when I can’t work, you pay my heating bill when it goes up, you are responsible for my mortgage.
It’s going to take a lot of time and pain to realise that the magic money tree has been cut down and burnt to keep us warm. The markets have said enough.
We are heading back to reality, when people have to accept they are responsible for themselves. It’s going to be a hell of a detox.
Well said, we are indeed. Truss and Kwasi have the right prescription for getting us back to reality, but the country doesn't want to hear it, and it might be frankly too little, too late now.
If the country wants to live in delusion that the government can magic away all our problems, then lets give Starmer a go and see if he can do it. When he can't, maybe people will realise Truss was ahead of her time and finally pay attention to what she rightly wanted to do.
And that reality is what? A bunch of tax cuts paid for by borrowing money? How is that facing up to "reality" it's more fantasy economics. Where are the spending cuts, when is the sainted NHS going to actually be forced to modernise? Where are the state pension reforms and taper for high earning retirees? Where was the NI on pension income announcement?
There was absolutely no "reality" in the Friday statement, you are seeing what you want to see, not what they actually announced which was a series of unfunded tax cuts and new spending commitments. The Truss "prescription" is no different to Corbyn, just from the other side of the political divide, Corbyn wanted to borrow hundreds of billions for nationalisation and spending, Truss is borrowing hundreds of billions for tax cuts.
I do not think Bart or myself are saying that. I certainly am not. Last Friday was deeply delusional and idiotic, done by people without even the most rudimentary understanding of economics or politics or even morality. Just beyond stupid and needing reversed. But that will not solve the problems we face.
Actually I am saying that. Cut taxes, grow the economy, and take a smaller slice of a bigger pie. Borrow for the transition, because taxes are already choking the economy and higher than they've ever been.
What spending cuts should have been announced? Other than the traditional third rail of slashing welfare for pensioners, which I agree should be done but nobody will go near, there is not much left to cut. Taxes have risen as high as they'll go, spending has been cut as far as it will go, and we're still out of money.
The only way forward is to stop strangling the economy with taxes, let it grow, and take a smaller slice.
What they did was combine tax cuts with a massive uncosted and uncostable increase in public spending subsidising fuel costs. That is nuts. In the medium term I agree that taxes on incomes have risen too high but the market made it very clear that you cannot cut taxes and increase spending at the same time.
So what can you do?
Increase taxes yet again, strangle growth even more yet again?
If fixing the fundamentals of too high taxes can't be done, what can be done, other than manage decline by taxing working people more and more and having a state that's nothing but an NHS and pension provider?
Switch taxes on earnings for taxes on assets.
The only asset it makes sense to tax is land, every other asset can be moved out of our tax jurisdiction.
If anyone proposes rebalancing taxes away from income and into land instead, then I would absolutely be prepared to vote for them. Even if its Keir Starmer. But I don't see anyone proposing that yet.
So foreigners stop buying land, it gets much cheaper, house prices crash, everyone hates you, and you lose the next election
Land gets cheaper, people can afford their own home, people aren't just working to pay rent to others, and we can grow the economy.
We need to start treating homes as a cost people have to pay, not an asset. We want cheap energy and cheap food, why do we not want cheap homes. And if foreigners stop buying land, then fanbloodytastic. Land is our most finite resource, it should be used productively, not as an "investment".
Very quiet on here about this, and buried on the bbc. Agenda? It’s not great, but it could be worse.
Feels about right. 'It could be worse' and it will be worse, sadly.'
So much worse. After the GFC bail outs the idea has taken hold that the government can magic away any problems if they want to. It then becomes a moral failure not to. If you can bail out the banks why not me?
So you pay my wages when I can’t work, you pay my heating bill when it goes up, you are responsible for my mortgage.
It’s going to take a lot of time and pain to realise that the magic money tree has been cut down and burnt to keep us warm. The markets have said enough.
We are heading back to reality, when people have to accept they are responsible for themselves. It’s going to be a hell of a detox.
Well said, we are indeed. Truss and Kwasi have the right prescription for getting us back to reality, but the country doesn't want to hear it, and it might be frankly too little, too late now.
If the country wants to live in delusion that the government can magic away all our problems, then lets give Starmer a go and see if he can do it. When he can't, maybe people will realise Truss was ahead of her time and finally pay attention to what she rightly wanted to do.
And that reality is what? A bunch of tax cuts paid for by borrowing money? How is that facing up to "reality" it's more fantasy economics. Where are the spending cuts, when is the sainted NHS going to actually be forced to modernise? Where are the state pension reforms and taper for high earning retirees? Where was the NI on pension income announcement?
There was absolutely no "reality" in the Friday statement, you are seeing what you want to see, not what they actually announced which was a series of unfunded tax cuts and new spending commitments. The Truss "prescription" is no different to Corbyn, just from the other side of the political divide, Corbyn wanted to borrow hundreds of billions for nationalisation and spending, Truss is borrowing hundreds of billions for tax cuts.
Fantasy economics is that we can tax and spend our way to growth.
The country has ratchetted up taxes to the highest level in 74 years and the notion that reversing some tax rises to the point they're still far higher than they were when Labour were last in office is "irresponsible" tax cutting is just a bad joke.
Cut taxes, grow the economy, and take a smaller slice of a bigger pie. That's how you solve it.
Maybe, but it's also fantasy economics to make a bunch of unfunded tax cuts and push up borrowing heading into a recession. Again, I have no issue with tax cuts, I just want them to be properly funded from cuts or be able to see the maths that shows the measures will push up trend growth to enough of a degree to be worthwhile. The Friday statement had neither of these aspects and now the PM is going begging to the OBR this morning to produce the latter, which they probably can't do because none of these tax cuts will make a dent in economic growth.
The other policy we've got is a real terms cut in working age benefits while maintaining the triple lock. It's a reasonable saving but it really is going to put people in a position of choosing between eating and heating this winter.
I simply don't see how you can support any of these policies, if they were coming from a Labour government you'd be screaming bloody murder at borrowing an extra £45bn per year.
Its a Catch-22 though Max.
If like me you believe we've gone well past the peak of the Laffer Curve then how do you properly fund tax cuts, when the spending on everything other than pensions has been cut as far as it can be cut, and high taxes are the root cause of your dilemma. Our welfare budget now is going on pensioners and nobody will touch that, all the easy cuts have been made, and we're still in trouble. Any tax rises to cut taxes is just shuffling the problem around. If you need cuts to grow the economy, then how do you self-fund those cuts, other than borrowing?
On your second point, I categorically do not support maintaining the triple lock. Not a bit.
Actually the laffer/tax curve shows that taxes on wealth tend to create more growth as the wealth is put to work to earn income, secondly you're just letting Truss off the hook for not cutting pensions. If she wants these big tax cuts then the state needs to make at least half of that in a saving and the only realistic saving is pensions. She shouldn't be afraid of that hurting her core voters, that's the cost of doing business and pushing big tax cuts.
All you're doing is saying "well it's too hard to cut spending, so fuck it lets just run a huge deficit and hope the markets don't realise" well they fucking realised.
I'm not saying Truss is perfect by any means, I'm saying she's better than Sunak and Starmer and all the other alternatives in my eyes.
Absolutely cut pensions. You and I are 100% on the same page there.
But taxes on earnings have to go down.
There's no such thing as partial credit though, all Liz Truss has done is taken the UK down a path of fiscal irresponsibility which is worse than doing nothing. Either you do both (tax cuts and spending cuts) or come up with a different plan.
I'm sorry I just don't agree with you. If cutting taxes that are strangling growth leads to economy growth then that is self-funding.
The second anyone else proposes to tax land or cut pensioner welfare, then I would embrace them as better than Truss, but until then Truss is closest to what has to be done.
But they haven't shown these tax cuts will generate growth. You're treating this as an article of faith.
I don't think the benefits proposal is that bigger deal politically as there is some residual loathing for 'benefit scroungers' that they can usefully exploit. The ruin of the conservative party will simply be the tax cut for the very rich.
The easiest way to cut benefit costs would be to freeze housing benefit for x years or even cut it a few percentage.
That would also have a side effect of reducing the pressure on rental prices everywhere. I suspect however the Government won't do that as Landlords are elderly and vote Tory provided the sweeties keep on coming.
I don't think that strategy will work. The number of available rental properties will decline. There is a problem with the supply of private rental sector properties as it is.
But if the houses are just withdrawn from the rented housing market and left empty.... still subject to taxes, deterioration etc, not to mention mortgage payments.... The erstwhile landlord will sell up at in an ever-falling market...
Isn't that what we all want to see? Cheaper property....
Those saying about how we were rooked before Truss and Kwarteng miss the main point.
A nation which had it's finances in as fragile a state as ours needed a chancellor whose first, last and only job was to retain the CONFIDENCE of our creditors. Sunak managed that, Kwarteng has utterly blown that and it will be a tough slog to get back. If there's an election in 23 or 24 and Truss/Kwarteng get back in we ARE headed to economic ruin if they don't reverse ferret.
Er, there’s no way they are “getting back in” bar nuclear meltdown = coalition govt or whatever
It’s over. Finito. Even if they pursue trussonomix the damage done to confidence/borrowing costs means Trussonomix won’t work, and even if the policy somehow works they haven’t got enough time to benefit
Plus: misery awaits
Starmer is a more nailed on prime minister than Jimmy Nail starring as “Nails Von Nail” in Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Nail
John Major waves rather forlornly from the back of the room. Or is it his ghost? Hard to tell.
From about 1993 onwards, his government didn't do a bad job as these things go. Not perfect, but not bad. Britain was Booming by 1997, albeit there was a backlog of repairs to be done. But none of it mattered- one considerable cockup on the currency front and that was it.
Even if things go well from here (and my uninfomed judgement is that Trussonomics is Cargo Cult Thatcherism, doing the external moves without understanding there was an internal mechanism, and only chumps and ninnies still think it will work), people won't remember that bit. They will remember the panic.
(There was discussion of this during Covidtide. Isn't the theory that the three bits of any story that people remember are the start, finish and most intense bit of the middle?)
Which is why Truss is Toast. Only question is how many Conservatives make it out of the building before the whole thing burns down.
“Cargo Cult Thatcherism” was depressingly accurate. And very good. I may steal it 👍
Very quiet on here about this, and buried on the bbc. Agenda? It’s not great, but it could be worse.
Feels about right. 'It could be worse' and it will be worse, sadly.'
So much worse. After the GFC bail outs the idea has taken hold that the government can magic away any problems if they want to. It then becomes a moral failure not to. If you can bail out the banks why not me?
So you pay my wages when I can’t work, you pay my heating bill when it goes up, you are responsible for my mortgage.
It’s going to take a lot of time and pain to realise that the magic money tree has been cut down and burnt to keep us warm. The markets have said enough.
We are heading back to reality, when people have to accept they are responsible for themselves. It’s going to be a hell of a detox.
Well said, we are indeed. Truss and Kwasi have the right prescription for getting us back to reality, but the country doesn't want to hear it, and it might be frankly too little, too late now.
If the country wants to live in delusion that the government can magic away all our problems, then lets give Starmer a go and see if he can do it. When he can't, maybe people will realise Truss was ahead of her time and finally pay attention to what she rightly wanted to do.
And that reality is what? A bunch of tax cuts paid for by borrowing money? How is that facing up to "reality" it's more fantasy economics. Where are the spending cuts, when is the sainted NHS going to actually be forced to modernise? Where are the state pension reforms and taper for high earning retirees? Where was the NI on pension income announcement?
There was absolutely no "reality" in the Friday statement, you are seeing what you want to see, not what they actually announced which was a series of unfunded tax cuts and new spending commitments. The Truss "prescription" is no different to Corbyn, just from the other side of the political divide, Corbyn wanted to borrow hundreds of billions for nationalisation and spending, Truss is borrowing hundreds of billions for tax cuts.
I do not think Bart or myself are saying that. I certainly am not. Last Friday was deeply delusional and idiotic, done by people without even the most rudimentary understanding of economics or politics or even morality. Just beyond stupid and needing reversed. But that will not solve the problems we face.
Actually I am saying that. Cut taxes, grow the economy, and take a smaller slice of a bigger pie. Borrow for the transition, because taxes are already choking the economy and higher than they've ever been.
What spending cuts should have been announced? Other than the traditional third rail of slashing welfare for pensioners, which I agree should be done but nobody will go near, there is not much left to cut. Taxes have risen as high as they'll go, spending has been cut as far as it will go, and we're still out of money.
The only way forward is to stop strangling the economy with taxes, let it grow, and take a smaller slice.
What they did was combine tax cuts with a massive uncosted and uncostable increase in public spending subsidising fuel costs. That is nuts. In the medium term I agree that taxes on incomes have risen too high but the market made it very clear that you cannot cut taxes and increase spending at the same time.
So what can you do?
Increase taxes yet again, strangle growth even more yet again?
If fixing the fundamentals of too high taxes can't be done, what can be done, other than manage decline by taxing working people more and more and having a state that's nothing but an NHS and pension provider?
Switch taxes on earnings for taxes on assets.
The only asset it makes sense to tax is land, every other asset can be moved out of our tax jurisdiction.
If anyone proposes rebalancing taxes away from income and into land instead, then I would absolutely be prepared to vote for them. Even if its Keir Starmer. But I don't see anyone proposing that yet.
So foreigners stop buying land, it gets much cheaper, house prices crash, everyone hates you, and you lose the next election
This is Barty's politics of envy. He loathes anyone that owns property because I assume he doesn't own any. If he spent less time being a keyboard warrior and more time doing something productive he might be able to afford some.
If party members had the final say Badenoch would now be Tory leader not Truss. It was Tory MPs who put Truss in the final 2.
Would Badenoch be doing anything different from Truss though?
Better communication of the crazy ideas?
She wasn't as mad on the economic side, we'd have probably left the ECHR and binned net zero so plenty of wind for the culture war sails, but economically she wasn't a million miles from Rishi.
Very quiet on here about this, and buried on the bbc. Agenda? It’s not great, but it could be worse.
Feels about right. 'It could be worse' and it will be worse, sadly.'
So much worse. After the GFC bail outs the idea has taken hold that the government can magic away any problems if they want to. It then becomes a moral failure not to. If you can bail out the banks why not me?
So you pay my wages when I can’t work, you pay my heating bill when it goes up, you are responsible for my mortgage.
It’s going to take a lot of time and pain to realise that the magic money tree has been cut down and burnt to keep us warm. The markets have said enough.
We are heading back to reality, when people have to accept they are responsible for themselves. It’s going to be a hell of a detox.
Well said, we are indeed. Truss and Kwasi have the right prescription for getting us back to reality, but the country doesn't want to hear it, and it might be frankly too little, too late now.
If the country wants to live in delusion that the government can magic away all our problems, then lets give Starmer a go and see if he can do it. When he can't, maybe people will realise Truss was ahead of her time and finally pay attention to what she rightly wanted to do.
And that reality is what? A bunch of tax cuts paid for by borrowing money? How is that facing up to "reality" it's more fantasy economics. Where are the spending cuts, when is the sainted NHS going to actually be forced to modernise? Where are the state pension reforms and taper for high earning retirees? Where was the NI on pension income announcement?
There was absolutely no "reality" in the Friday statement, you are seeing what you want to see, not what they actually announced which was a series of unfunded tax cuts and new spending commitments. The Truss "prescription" is no different to Corbyn, just from the other side of the political divide, Corbyn wanted to borrow hundreds of billions for nationalisation and spending, Truss is borrowing hundreds of billions for tax cuts.
Fantasy economics is that we can tax and spend our way to growth.
The country has ratchetted up taxes to the highest level in 74 years and the notion that reversing some tax rises to the point they're still far higher than they were when Labour were last in office is "irresponsible" tax cutting is just a bad joke.
Cut taxes, grow the economy, and take a smaller slice of a bigger pie. That's how you solve it.
Maybe, but it's also fantasy economics to make a bunch of unfunded tax cuts and push up borrowing heading into a recession. Again, I have no issue with tax cuts, I just want them to be properly funded from cuts or be able to see the maths that shows the measures will push up trend growth to enough of a degree to be worthwhile. The Friday statement had neither of these aspects and now the PM is going begging to the OBR this morning to produce the latter, which they probably can't do because none of these tax cuts will make a dent in economic growth.
The other policy we've got is a real terms cut in working age benefits while maintaining the triple lock. It's a reasonable saving but it really is going to put people in a position of choosing between eating and heating this winter.
I simply don't see how you can support any of these policies, if they were coming from a Labour government you'd be screaming bloody murder at borrowing an extra £45bn per year.
Its a Catch-22 though Max.
If like me you believe we've gone well past the peak of the Laffer Curve then how do you properly fund tax cuts, when the spending on everything other than pensions has been cut as far as it can be cut, and high taxes are the root cause of your dilemma. Our welfare budget now is going on pensioners and nobody will touch that, all the easy cuts have been made, and we're still in trouble. Any tax rises to cut taxes is just shuffling the problem around. If you need cuts to grow the economy, then how do you self-fund those cuts, other than borrowing?
On your second point, I categorically do not support maintaining the triple lock. Not a bit.
Actually the laffer/tax curve shows that taxes on wealth tend to create more growth as the wealth is put to work to earn income, secondly you're just letting Truss off the hook for not cutting pensions. If she wants these big tax cuts then the state needs to make at least half of that in a saving and the only realistic saving is pensions. She shouldn't be afraid of that hurting her core voters, that's the cost of doing business and pushing big tax cuts.
All you're doing is saying "well it's too hard to cut spending, so fuck it lets just run a huge deficit and hope the markets don't realise" well they fucking realised.
I'm not saying Truss is perfect by any means, I'm saying she's better than Sunak and Starmer and all the other alternatives in my eyes.
Absolutely cut pensions. You and I are 100% on the same page there.
But taxes on earnings have to go down.
There's no such thing as partial credit though, all Liz Truss has done is taken the UK down a path of fiscal irresponsibility which is worse than doing nothing. Either you do both (tax cuts and spending cuts) or come up with a different plan.
I'm sorry I just don't agree with you. If cutting taxes that are strangling growth leads to economy growth then that is self-funding.
The second anyone else proposes to tax land or cut pensioner welfare, then I would embrace them as better than Truss, but until then Truss is closest to what has to be done.
But they haven't shown these tax cuts will generate growth. You're treating this as an article of faith.
Agreed, I am.
Well in that case it's like arguing with a religious person about religion, worthless.
Very quiet on here about this, and buried on the bbc. Agenda? It’s not great, but it could be worse.
Feels about right. 'It could be worse' and it will be worse, sadly.'
So much worse. After the GFC bail outs the idea has taken hold that the government can magic away any problems if they want to. It then becomes a moral failure not to. If you can bail out the banks why not me?
So you pay my wages when I can’t work, you pay my heating bill when it goes up, you are responsible for my mortgage.
It’s going to take a lot of time and pain to realise that the magic money tree has been cut down and burnt to keep us warm. The markets have said enough.
We are heading back to reality, when people have to accept they are responsible for themselves. It’s going to be a hell of a detox.
Well said, we are indeed. Truss and Kwasi have the right prescription for getting us back to reality, but the country doesn't want to hear it, and it might be frankly too little, too late now.
If the country wants to live in delusion that the government can magic away all our problems, then lets give Starmer a go and see if he can do it. When he can't, maybe people will realise Truss was ahead of her time and finally pay attention to what she rightly wanted to do.
And that reality is what? A bunch of tax cuts paid for by borrowing money? How is that facing up to "reality" it's more fantasy economics. Where are the spending cuts, when is the sainted NHS going to actually be forced to modernise? Where are the state pension reforms and taper for high earning retirees? Where was the NI on pension income announcement?
There was absolutely no "reality" in the Friday statement, you are seeing what you want to see, not what they actually announced which was a series of unfunded tax cuts and new spending commitments. The Truss "prescription" is no different to Corbyn, just from the other side of the political divide, Corbyn wanted to borrow hundreds of billions for nationalisation and spending, Truss is borrowing hundreds of billions for tax cuts.
Fantasy economics is that we can tax and spend our way to growth.
The country has ratchetted up taxes to the highest level in 74 years and the notion that reversing some tax rises to the point they're still far higher than they were when Labour were last in office is "irresponsible" tax cutting is just a bad joke.
Cut taxes, grow the economy, and take a smaller slice of a bigger pie. That's how you solve it.
Maybe, but it's also fantasy economics to make a bunch of unfunded tax cuts and push up borrowing heading into a recession. Again, I have no issue with tax cuts, I just want them to be properly funded from cuts or be able to see the maths that shows the measures will push up trend growth to enough of a degree to be worthwhile. The Friday statement had neither of these aspects and now the PM is going begging to the OBR this morning to produce the latter, which they probably can't do because none of these tax cuts will make a dent in economic growth.
The other policy we've got is a real terms cut in working age benefits while maintaining the triple lock. It's a reasonable saving but it really is going to put people in a position of choosing between eating and heating this winter.
I simply don't see how you can support any of these policies, if they were coming from a Labour government you'd be screaming bloody murder at borrowing an extra £45bn per year.
Its a Catch-22 though Max.
If like me you believe we've gone well past the peak of the Laffer Curve then how do you properly fund tax cuts, when the spending on everything other than pensions has been cut as far as it can be cut, and high taxes are the root cause of your dilemma. Our welfare budget now is going on pensioners and nobody will touch that, all the easy cuts have been made, and we're still in trouble. Any tax rises to cut taxes is just shuffling the problem around. If you need cuts to grow the economy, then how do you self-fund those cuts, other than borrowing?
On your second point, I categorically do not support maintaining the triple lock. Not a bit.
Actually the laffer/tax curve shows that taxes on wealth tend to create more growth as the wealth is put to work to earn income, secondly you're just letting Truss off the hook for not cutting pensions. If she wants these big tax cuts then the state needs to make at least half of that in a saving and the only realistic saving is pensions. She shouldn't be afraid of that hurting her core voters, that's the cost of doing business and pushing big tax cuts.
All you're doing is saying "well it's too hard to cut spending, so fuck it lets just run a huge deficit and hope the markets don't realise" well they fucking realised.
I'm not saying Truss is perfect by any means, I'm saying she's better than Sunak and Starmer and all the other alternatives in my eyes.
Absolutely cut pensions. You and I are 100% on the same page there.
But taxes on earnings have to go down.
There's no such thing as partial credit though, all Liz Truss has done is taken the UK down a path of fiscal irresponsibility which is worse than doing nothing. Either you do both (tax cuts and spending cuts) or come up with a different plan.
I'm sorry I just don't agree with you. If cutting taxes that are strangling growth leads to economy growth then that is self-funding.
The second anyone else proposes to tax land or cut pensioner welfare, then I would embrace them as better than Truss, but until then Truss is closest to what has to be done.
But they haven't shown these tax cuts will generate growth. You're treating this as an article of faith.
+1. If the government was borrowing to invest in leading edge green tech, mass housebuilding, or innovative new education and skills I could be on board with it and so would more of the markets.
But they are not, they are borrowing to fund the rich and corporate profits.
The Treasury is proudly bragging that a "typical" first-time buyer, earning £30,000, can save £11,250 in stamp duty on a "representative" terraced house.
The average terraced house in London was valued at £694,000 in 2021.
They are utterly delusional about the scale of the crisis in London's housing market.
"Average" in this context is a bit misleading. You can go to zone 6 and it isn't anywhere near that price.
Well, yeah, that's how averages work! In some places it'll be less, in some places it'll be more, but the average across the city is £694,000, which is what the Treasury tweet is talking about (a "representative" terrace)!
I don't think the benefits proposal is that bigger deal politically as there is some residual loathing for 'benefit scroungers' that they can usefully exploit. The ruin of the conservative party will simply be the tax cut for the very rich.
The easiest way to cut benefit costs would be to freeze housing benefit for x years or even cut it a few percentage.
That would also have a side effect of reducing the pressure on rental prices everywhere. I suspect however the Government won't do that as Landlords are elderly and vote Tory provided the sweeties keep on coming.
I don't think that strategy will work. The number of available rental properties will decline. There is a problem with the supply of private rental sector properties as it is.
Can I just say that, for the next X weeks, every comment I make must have the implicit caveat “unless we all get turned into radioactive gammon dust by Putin” - as that distinct possibility renders all predictions/opinions absurd
Very quiet on here about this, and buried on the bbc. Agenda? It’s not great, but it could be worse.
Feels about right. 'It could be worse' and it will be worse, sadly.'
So much worse. After the GFC bail outs the idea has taken hold that the government can magic away any problems if they want to. It then becomes a moral failure not to. If you can bail out the banks why not me?
So you pay my wages when I can’t work, you pay my heating bill when it goes up, you are responsible for my mortgage.
It’s going to take a lot of time and pain to realise that the magic money tree has been cut down and burnt to keep us warm. The markets have said enough.
We are heading back to reality, when people have to accept they are responsible for themselves. It’s going to be a hell of a detox.
Well said, we are indeed. Truss and Kwasi have the right prescription for getting us back to reality, but the country doesn't want to hear it, and it might be frankly too little, too late now.
If the country wants to live in delusion that the government can magic away all our problems, then lets give Starmer a go and see if he can do it. When he can't, maybe people will realise Truss was ahead of her time and finally pay attention to what she rightly wanted to do.
And that reality is what? A bunch of tax cuts paid for by borrowing money? How is that facing up to "reality" it's more fantasy economics. Where are the spending cuts, when is the sainted NHS going to actually be forced to modernise? Where are the state pension reforms and taper for high earning retirees? Where was the NI on pension income announcement?
There was absolutely no "reality" in the Friday statement, you are seeing what you want to see, not what they actually announced which was a series of unfunded tax cuts and new spending commitments. The Truss "prescription" is no different to Corbyn, just from the other side of the political divide, Corbyn wanted to borrow hundreds of billions for nationalisation and spending, Truss is borrowing hundreds of billions for tax cuts.
I do not think Bart or myself are saying that. I certainly am not. Last Friday was deeply delusional and idiotic, done by people without even the most rudimentary understanding of economics or politics or even morality. Just beyond stupid and needing reversed. But that will not solve the problems we face.
Actually I am saying that. Cut taxes, grow the economy, and take a smaller slice of a bigger pie. Borrow for the transition, because taxes are already choking the economy and higher than they've ever been.
What spending cuts should have been announced? Other than the traditional third rail of slashing welfare for pensioners, which I agree should be done but nobody will go near, there is not much left to cut. Taxes have risen as high as they'll go, spending has been cut as far as it will go, and we're still out of money.
The only way forward is to stop strangling the economy with taxes, let it grow, and take a smaller slice.
What they did was combine tax cuts with a massive uncosted and uncostable increase in public spending subsidising fuel costs. That is nuts. In the medium term I agree that taxes on incomes have risen too high but the market made it very clear that you cannot cut taxes and increase spending at the same time.
So what can you do?
Increase taxes yet again, strangle growth even more yet again?
If fixing the fundamentals of too high taxes can't be done, what can be done, other than manage decline by taxing working people more and more and having a state that's nothing but an NHS and pension provider?
Switch taxes on earnings for taxes on assets.
The only asset it makes sense to tax is land, every other asset can be moved out of our tax jurisdiction.
If anyone proposes rebalancing taxes away from income and into land instead, then I would absolutely be prepared to vote for them. Even if its Keir Starmer. But I don't see anyone proposing that yet.
So foreigners stop buying land, it gets much cheaper, house prices crash, everyone hates you, and you lose the next election
This is Barty's politics of envy. He loathes anyone that owns property because I assume he doesn't own any. If he spent less time being a keyboard warrior and more time doing something productive he might be able to afford some.
Very quiet on here about this, and buried on the bbc. Agenda? It’s not great, but it could be worse.
Feels about right. 'It could be worse' and it will be worse, sadly.'
So much worse. After the GFC bail outs the idea has taken hold that the government can magic away any problems if they want to. It then becomes a moral failure not to. If you can bail out the banks why not me?
So you pay my wages when I can’t work, you pay my heating bill when it goes up, you are responsible for my mortgage.
It’s going to take a lot of time and pain to realise that the magic money tree has been cut down and burnt to keep us warm. The markets have said enough.
We are heading back to reality, when people have to accept they are responsible for themselves. It’s going to be a hell of a detox.
Well said, we are indeed. Truss and Kwasi have the right prescription for getting us back to reality, but the country doesn't want to hear it, and it might be frankly too little, too late now.
If the country wants to live in delusion that the government can magic away all our problems, then lets give Starmer a go and see if he can do it. When he can't, maybe people will realise Truss was ahead of her time and finally pay attention to what she rightly wanted to do.
And that reality is what? A bunch of tax cuts paid for by borrowing money? How is that facing up to "reality" it's more fantasy economics. Where are the spending cuts, when is the sainted NHS going to actually be forced to modernise? Where are the state pension reforms and taper for high earning retirees? Where was the NI on pension income announcement?
There was absolutely no "reality" in the Friday statement, you are seeing what you want to see, not what they actually announced which was a series of unfunded tax cuts and new spending commitments. The Truss "prescription" is no different to Corbyn, just from the other side of the political divide, Corbyn wanted to borrow hundreds of billions for nationalisation and spending, Truss is borrowing hundreds of billions for tax cuts.
Fantasy economics is that we can tax and spend our way to growth.
The country has ratchetted up taxes to the highest level in 74 years and the notion that reversing some tax rises to the point they're still far higher than they were when Labour were last in office is "irresponsible" tax cutting is just a bad joke.
Cut taxes, grow the economy, and take a smaller slice of a bigger pie. That's how you solve it.
Maybe, but it's also fantasy economics to make a bunch of unfunded tax cuts and push up borrowing heading into a recession. Again, I have no issue with tax cuts, I just want them to be properly funded from cuts or be able to see the maths that shows the measures will push up trend growth to enough of a degree to be worthwhile. The Friday statement had neither of these aspects and now the PM is going begging to the OBR this morning to produce the latter, which they probably can't do because none of these tax cuts will make a dent in economic growth.
The other policy we've got is a real terms cut in working age benefits while maintaining the triple lock. It's a reasonable saving but it really is going to put people in a position of choosing between eating and heating this winter.
I simply don't see how you can support any of these policies, if they were coming from a Labour government you'd be screaming bloody murder at borrowing an extra £45bn per year.
Its a Catch-22 though Max.
If like me you believe we've gone well past the peak of the Laffer Curve then how do you properly fund tax cuts, when the spending on everything other than pensions has been cut as far as it can be cut, and high taxes are the root cause of your dilemma. Our welfare budget now is going on pensioners and nobody will touch that, all the easy cuts have been made, and we're still in trouble. Any tax rises to cut taxes is just shuffling the problem around. If you need cuts to grow the economy, then how do you self-fund those cuts, other than borrowing?
On your second point, I categorically do not support maintaining the triple lock. Not a bit.
Actually the laffer/tax curve shows that taxes on wealth tend to create more growth as the wealth is put to work to earn income, secondly you're just letting Truss off the hook for not cutting pensions. If she wants these big tax cuts then the state needs to make at least half of that in a saving and the only realistic saving is pensions. She shouldn't be afraid of that hurting her core voters, that's the cost of doing business and pushing big tax cuts.
All you're doing is saying "well it's too hard to cut spending, so fuck it lets just run a huge deficit and hope the markets don't realise" well they fucking realised.
I'm not saying Truss is perfect by any means, I'm saying she's better than Sunak and Starmer and all the other alternatives in my eyes.
Absolutely cut pensions. You and I are 100% on the same page there.
But taxes on earnings have to go down.
There's no such thing as partial credit though, all Liz Truss has done is taken the UK down a path of fiscal irresponsibility which is worse than doing nothing. Either you do both (tax cuts and spending cuts) or come up with a different plan.
I'm sorry I just don't agree with you. If cutting taxes that are strangling growth leads to economy growth then that is self-funding.
The second anyone else proposes to tax land or cut pensioner welfare, then I would embrace them as better than Truss, but until then Truss is closest to what has to be done.
But they haven't shown these tax cuts will generate growth. You're treating this as an article of faith.
Agreed, I am.
Well in that case it's like arguing with a religious person about religion, worthless.
We all have our beliefs. I have explained before why I have that belief, in short our taxes have ratchetted inexorably up and our growth has gone down accordingly. That may be managed decline, but its not growth.
If tax and spend led to growth then with our taxes at record highs, why are we not having record growth?
When something isn't working, its time to try something else. Our growth was higher in the past when our taxes were lower, so why should they not be in the future if we return to what worked instead of continuing what isn't working?
The Treasury is proudly bragging that a "typical" first-time buyer, earning £30,000, can save £11,250 in stamp duty on a "representative" terraced house.
Next week pictures of delegates at the Tory conference applauding ministers as they proclaim huge tax cuts for the very richest and benefits cuts for the very poorest will be beamed into TV sets up and down the country.
Tax cuts for the richest at the moment may be problematic. However the benefits proposal to increase benefits in line with earnings not inflation I expect will be more popular
Next week pictures of delegates at the Tory conference applauding ministers as they proclaim huge tax cuts for the very richest and benefits cuts for the very poorest will be beamed into TV sets up and down the country.
Tax cuts for the richest at the moment may be problematic. However the benefits proposal to increase benefits in line with earnings not inflation I expect will be more popular
Not if pensioners receive the triple lock
Benefits and pensions have to rise equally and anyone who cannot see that deserves to be thrown out of office
And I say this as a pensioner
Pensioners are the Tories core vote and of course most state Pensioners paid in via NI their whole working lives
Forget core vote - do the right thing or get out of office
Spot on. The current Tory government is sn active danger to our livelihoods, homes, stability, income etc etc etc They have to go.
The Treasury is proudly bragging that a "typical" first-time buyer, earning £30,000, can save £11,250 in stamp duty on a "representative" terraced house.
The average terraced house in London was valued at £694,000 in 2021.
They are utterly delusional about the scale of the crisis in London's housing market.
"Average" in this context is a bit misleading. You can go to zone 6 and it isn't anywhere near that price.
Well, yeah, that's how averages work! In some places it'll be less, in some places it'll be more, but the average across the city is £694,000, which is what the Treasury tweet is talking about (a "representative" terrace)!
The average would not be an average FTB terrace though.
A representative terrace bought by FTB would be below your total average. Potentially significantly below.
Also a good example of where mean, median and modal averages matter. The mean average is much higher than the median average, but the typical FTB will be buying below the median average, let alone a high end property inflating the mean averages.
Very quiet on here about this, and buried on the bbc. Agenda? It’s not great, but it could be worse.
Feels about right. 'It could be worse' and it will be worse, sadly.'
So much worse. After the GFC bail outs the idea has taken hold that the government can magic away any problems if they want to. It then becomes a moral failure not to. If you can bail out the banks why not me?
So you pay my wages when I can’t work, you pay my heating bill when it goes up, you are responsible for my mortgage.
It’s going to take a lot of time and pain to realise that the magic money tree has been cut down and burnt to keep us warm. The markets have said enough.
We are heading back to reality, when people have to accept they are responsible for themselves. It’s going to be a hell of a detox.
Well said, we are indeed. Truss and Kwasi have the right prescription for getting us back to reality, but the country doesn't want to hear it, and it might be frankly too little, too late now.
If the country wants to live in delusion that the government can magic away all our problems, then lets give Starmer a go and see if he can do it. When he can't, maybe people will realise Truss was ahead of her time and finally pay attention to what she rightly wanted to do.
And that reality is what? A bunch of tax cuts paid for by borrowing money? How is that facing up to "reality" it's more fantasy economics. Where are the spending cuts, when is the sainted NHS going to actually be forced to modernise? Where are the state pension reforms and taper for high earning retirees? Where was the NI on pension income announcement?
There was absolutely no "reality" in the Friday statement, you are seeing what you want to see, not what they actually announced which was a series of unfunded tax cuts and new spending commitments. The Truss "prescription" is no different to Corbyn, just from the other side of the political divide, Corbyn wanted to borrow hundreds of billions for nationalisation and spending, Truss is borrowing hundreds of billions for tax cuts.
I do not think Bart or myself are saying that. I certainly am not. Last Friday was deeply delusional and idiotic, done by people without even the most rudimentary understanding of economics or politics or even morality. Just beyond stupid and needing reversed. But that will not solve the problems we face.
Actually I am saying that. Cut taxes, grow the economy, and take a smaller slice of a bigger pie. Borrow for the transition, because taxes are already choking the economy and higher than they've ever been.
What spending cuts should have been announced? Other than the traditional third rail of slashing welfare for pensioners, which I agree should be done but nobody will go near, there is not much left to cut. Taxes have risen as high as they'll go, spending has been cut as far as it will go, and we're still out of money.
The only way forward is to stop strangling the economy with taxes, let it grow, and take a smaller slice.
What they did was combine tax cuts with a massive uncosted and uncostable increase in public spending subsidising fuel costs. That is nuts. In the medium term I agree that taxes on incomes have risen too high but the market made it very clear that you cannot cut taxes and increase spending at the same time.
So what can you do?
Increase taxes yet again, strangle growth even more yet again?
If fixing the fundamentals of too high taxes can't be done, what can be done, other than manage decline by taxing working people more and more and having a state that's nothing but an NHS and pension provider?
Make the tough choices. That's what being in government is about. Cut public sector and state pension entitlements. That's the big saving right now but the government are too scared to do it because it hits their voters.
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship."
A rational argument, but is it true? 'Always' is a big claim. It needs empirical analysis with reference to mature democracies. France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Iceland, Japan, Canada, USA, as well as UK. Or try Botswana, South Africa.
Well I'm not sure it ends in dictatorship (or monarchy as I believe the quote ends). But look at us now. Cons won't make their core vote poorer because that's not what the core vote voted them in for.
Very quiet on here about this, and buried on the bbc. Agenda? It’s not great, but it could be worse.
Feels about right. 'It could be worse' and it will be worse, sadly.'
So much worse. After the GFC bail outs the idea has taken hold that the government can magic away any problems if they want to. It then becomes a moral failure not to. If you can bail out the banks why not me?
So you pay my wages when I can’t work, you pay my heating bill when it goes up, you are responsible for my mortgage.
It’s going to take a lot of time and pain to realise that the magic money tree has been cut down and burnt to keep us warm. The markets have said enough.
We are heading back to reality, when people have to accept they are responsible for themselves. It’s going to be a hell of a detox.
Well said, we are indeed. Truss and Kwasi have the right prescription for getting us back to reality, but the country doesn't want to hear it, and it might be frankly too little, too late now.
If the country wants to live in delusion that the government can magic away all our problems, then lets give Starmer a go and see if he can do it. When he can't, maybe people will realise Truss was ahead of her time and finally pay attention to what she rightly wanted to do.
And that reality is what? A bunch of tax cuts paid for by borrowing money? How is that facing up to "reality" it's more fantasy economics. Where are the spending cuts, when is the sainted NHS going to actually be forced to modernise? Where are the state pension reforms and taper for high earning retirees? Where was the NI on pension income announcement?
There was absolutely no "reality" in the Friday statement, you are seeing what you want to see, not what they actually announced which was a series of unfunded tax cuts and new spending commitments. The Truss "prescription" is no different to Corbyn, just from the other side of the political divide, Corbyn wanted to borrow hundreds of billions for nationalisation and spending, Truss is borrowing hundreds of billions for tax cuts.
Fantasy economics is that we can tax and spend our way to growth.
The country has ratchetted up taxes to the highest level in 74 years and the notion that reversing some tax rises to the point they're still far higher than they were when Labour were last in office is "irresponsible" tax cutting is just a bad joke.
Cut taxes, grow the economy, and take a smaller slice of a bigger pie. That's how you solve it.
Maybe, but it's also fantasy economics to make a bunch of unfunded tax cuts and push up borrowing heading into a recession. Again, I have no issue with tax cuts, I just want them to be properly funded from cuts or be able to see the maths that shows the measures will push up trend growth to enough of a degree to be worthwhile. The Friday statement had neither of these aspects and now the PM is going begging to the OBR this morning to produce the latter, which they probably can't do because none of these tax cuts will make a dent in economic growth.
The other policy we've got is a real terms cut in working age benefits while maintaining the triple lock. It's a reasonable saving but it really is going to put people in a position of choosing between eating and heating this winter.
I simply don't see how you can support any of these policies, if they were coming from a Labour government you'd be screaming bloody murder at borrowing an extra £45bn per year.
Its a Catch-22 though Max.
If like me you believe we've gone well past the peak of the Laffer Curve then how do you properly fund tax cuts, when the spending on everything other than pensions has been cut as far as it can be cut, and high taxes are the root cause of your dilemma. Our welfare budget now is going on pensioners and nobody will touch that, all the easy cuts have been made, and we're still in trouble. Any tax rises to cut taxes is just shuffling the problem around. If you need cuts to grow the economy, then how do you self-fund those cuts, other than borrowing?
On your second point, I categorically do not support maintaining the triple lock. Not a bit.
Actually the laffer/tax curve shows that taxes on wealth tend to create more growth as the wealth is put to work to earn income, secondly you're just letting Truss off the hook for not cutting pensions. If she wants these big tax cuts then the state needs to make at least half of that in a saving and the only realistic saving is pensions. She shouldn't be afraid of that hurting her core voters, that's the cost of doing business and pushing big tax cuts.
All you're doing is saying "well it's too hard to cut spending, so fuck it lets just run a huge deficit and hope the markets don't realise" well they fucking realised.
I'm not saying Truss is perfect by any means, I'm saying she's better than Sunak and Starmer and all the other alternatives in my eyes.
Absolutely cut pensions. You and I are 100% on the same page there.
But taxes on earnings have to go down.
There's no such thing as partial credit though, all Liz Truss has done is taken the UK down a path of fiscal irresponsibility which is worse than doing nothing. Either you do both (tax cuts and spending cuts) or come up with a different plan.
I'm sorry I just don't agree with you. If cutting taxes that are strangling growth leads to economy growth then that is self-funding.
The second anyone else proposes to tax land or cut pensioner welfare, then I would embrace them as better than Truss, but until then Truss is closest to what has to be done.
But they haven't shown these tax cuts will generate growth. You're treating this as an article of faith.
Agreed, I am.
Well in that case it's like arguing with a religious person about religion, worthless.
We all have our beliefs. I have explained before why I have that belief, in short our taxes have ratchetted inexorably up and our growth has gone down accordingly. That may be managed decline, but its not growth.
If tax and spend led to growth then with our taxes at record highs, why are we not having record growth?
When something isn't working, its time to try something else. Our growth was higher in the past when our taxes were lower, so why should they not be in the future if we return to what worked instead of continuing what isn't working?
Following your logic - our growth was higher when Corporation Tax rates were above 25% with big allowances for investment...
Because that encouraged companies to invest their profits on productivity rather than pocketing the profits today...
Nationwide announce house prices were unchanged in September but 9.5% higher than last September
These rises were unsustainable and this crisis has ended that and likely plunged many into negative equity for years to come
We have been here before
The prices people have been paying for properties round here has astounded me, people just seem to lose the plot when buying houses and have the daft idea that house prices will always rise when all evidence shows that they don't. Houses need to be seen as a place to live not an asset to make money on.
I agree house price rises since start of COVID have baffled me. But aren't most buyers just wanting a place to live, not doing it for speculation.
I wish that was the case, but people have massively overextending themselves just to get an extra bedroom or two. Housing is something that has always baffled me, I have never understood the desire to have a house that is far bigger than you actually need, even if I could afford it I wouldn't. When people buy 5 bedroom houses with massive mortgages just to have three extra rooms that they will never go in it seems madness to me. Unfortunately people forget about the previous housing crashes and young people are not taught about it. The idea that the crazy low interest rates of the last 14 years would always remain is plain stupid. The Government will get the blame and in many ways they should. I have always been in favour of a much more regulated mortgage market where 3 times income is a maximum legal rate. In the early 90s when I bought my first house I needed a £35,000 mortgage. The Halifax would not give it to me for 3 months whilst they monitored my income/spending to make sure I could afford it. Until this week huge mortgages were given out in 5 minutes. The Govenment deserves blame but so does the public for just losing all sense of value when it comes to housing.
Yes people have been very greedy...unfortunately in a democracy blaming the public doesnt work
Next week pictures of delegates at the Tory conference applauding ministers as they proclaim huge tax cuts for the very richest and benefits cuts for the very poorest will be beamed into TV sets up and down the country.
Tax cuts for the richest at the moment may be problematic. However the benefits proposal to increase benefits in line with earnings not inflation I expect will be more popular
Next week pictures of delegates at the Tory conference applauding ministers as they proclaim huge tax cuts for the very richest and benefits cuts for the very poorest will be beamed into TV sets up and down the country.
Tax cuts for the richest at the moment may be problematic. However the benefits proposal to increase benefits in line with earnings not inflation I expect will be more popular
Not if pensioners receive the triple lock
Benefits and pensions have to rise equally and anyone who cannot see that deserves to be thrown out of office
And I say this as a pensioner
Pensioners are the Tories core vote and of course most state Pensioners paid in via NI their whole working lives
Forget core vote - do the right thing or get out of office
Spot on. The current Tory government is sn active danger to our livelihoods, homes, stability, income etc etc etc They have to go.
Only been two weeks or so, but so far this must easily be the most dangerous government economically in my adult lifetime. The the two at the top are a clear and present danger to the fabric of this country.
Interesting thread, which I find slightly more convincing on the pipeline question than the combined opinions of @Leon , @Luckyguy1983 , and @Dura_Ace . FWIW.
I'm not sure what you think this thread tells us beyond any of the opinions offered by the users you've tagged in. The options listed here are purely (and admittedly) groundless speculation, and it seems obvious to me that the author has eked the Russian options out a lot, and dismissed evidence supporting the US option out of hand 'Biden's wierd Tweets' - Really? An actual threat saying 'we can do that' about ending Nordstream 2 is just a 'wierd Tweet' would a 'wierd Tweet' by Putin saying the same thing have been dismissed, or actually be held up as a smoking gun?
Of the Russian motives, there is only one that stands out to me as having validity, and that is Gazprom not having to pay penalties for not supplying gas. However, how that tallies with the cost of repairs, I don't know, and how it also tallies with Putin's willingness to upend normal ways of doing business (ie, why wouldn't he just refuse to pay the penalties), I also don't know.
In the other actors presented, there is also a failure to mention the likelihood of any of these states acting without American blessing/foreknowledge/support - which is practically zero. The Ukrainians are the only ones desperate enough to do that, and their capability of doing so is rightly questioned, and doing so without prior American knowledge risks future weapons supplies and financial support worth billions - the Americans are the only ones propping up the Ukrainian state.
Given all those things, the probable culprit is Ukraine, or one of the Baltic states, but with American blessing and support. This achieves American aims, but is deniable, and they will 100% wash their hands of anyone who gets fingered for it.
2nd like the LDs (Hoping for lots of MPs in the Tory wipeout)
Realistically, Bev, how many seats do you think the LDs can get?
Personally I'd love to see them become the official opposition and the few remaining Conservative MPs sent to one of Vlad's Gulags but I just can't see Team Davey getting above 50.
Whilst I don't expect them to pick up every seat in succession, in a "fuck the Tories" election you get all kinds of interesting results. And well into triple digits are seats held by the LibDems as recently as 2010...
That is an interesting list. Cheadle and Hazel Grove are two that were only a few miles from where I used to live and could see them being achievable. However, given that the expectation is of a massive Tory collapse, even a 10% swing only gets them up about 30 MPs and I doubt the Labour marginals will be winnable for them.
Thanks for sharing that.
In the current situation I suspect the Lib Dems are resource-constrained.
My constituency (Witney) is #39 on the LD target list, with a 12.4% swing required, and nowhere on the Labour list. With the polls as they are it's absolutely ripe for the plucking by the Lib Dems, especially given that the local MP is an ineffectual Tory boy who has pissed everyone off with his indifference to the sewage being dumped into the local rivers.
But for the Lib Dems to take it, there needs to be a Focus-bombing campaign of "Labour can't win here" to persuade people that the anti-Tory vote should rest with them, rather than with that nice Mr Starmer you keep seeing on the TV. And right now I don't see any sign that LDHQ has the budget or the personnel to throw at #39 in the target list, especially when next-door Wantage is in theory an easier catch.
So I was going to donate my British Gas shares to the Labour Party, do we reckon I'd get more defenestrated Tories for the buck if I gave them to the LibDems?
It occurs to me that we really are in the early 1970s again. It’s uncanny
Truss is Heath. She’s tried a “dash for growth” to solve long term issues, and it’s failed. Starmer will now win and do tepid socialist Wilson/Callaghan mismanagement for five years before losing to an actual Thatcherite in 2029 = 1979
We even have a 1970s energy crisis
On the downside the world is arguably much more menacing than it was then. On the upside the UK is better educated and the food is way nicer
Very quiet on here about this, and buried on the bbc. Agenda? It’s not great, but it could be worse.
Feels about right. 'It could be worse' and it will be worse, sadly.'
So much worse. After the GFC bail outs the idea has taken hold that the government can magic away any problems if they want to. It then becomes a moral failure not to. If you can bail out the banks why not me?
So you pay my wages when I can’t work, you pay my heating bill when it goes up, you are responsible for my mortgage.
It’s going to take a lot of time and pain to realise that the magic money tree has been cut down and burnt to keep us warm. The markets have said enough.
We are heading back to reality, when people have to accept they are responsible for themselves. It’s going to be a hell of a detox.
Well said, we are indeed. Truss and Kwasi have the right prescription for getting us back to reality, but the country doesn't want to hear it, and it might be frankly too little, too late now.
If the country wants to live in delusion that the government can magic away all our problems, then lets give Starmer a go and see if he can do it. When he can't, maybe people will realise Truss was ahead of her time and finally pay attention to what she rightly wanted to do.
And that reality is what? A bunch of tax cuts paid for by borrowing money? How is that facing up to "reality" it's more fantasy economics. Where are the spending cuts, when is the sainted NHS going to actually be forced to modernise? Where are the state pension reforms and taper for high earning retirees? Where was the NI on pension income announcement?
There was absolutely no "reality" in the Friday statement, you are seeing what you want to see, not what they actually announced which was a series of unfunded tax cuts and new spending commitments. The Truss "prescription" is no different to Corbyn, just from the other side of the political divide, Corbyn wanted to borrow hundreds of billions for nationalisation and spending, Truss is borrowing hundreds of billions for tax cuts.
Fantasy economics is that we can tax and spend our way to growth.
The country has ratchetted up taxes to the highest level in 74 years and the notion that reversing some tax rises to the point they're still far higher than they were when Labour were last in office is "irresponsible" tax cutting is just a bad joke.
Cut taxes, grow the economy, and take a smaller slice of a bigger pie. That's how you solve it.
Maybe, but it's also fantasy economics to make a bunch of unfunded tax cuts and push up borrowing heading into a recession. Again, I have no issue with tax cuts, I just want them to be properly funded from cuts or be able to see the maths that shows the measures will push up trend growth to enough of a degree to be worthwhile. The Friday statement had neither of these aspects and now the PM is going begging to the OBR this morning to produce the latter, which they probably can't do because none of these tax cuts will make a dent in economic growth.
The other policy we've got is a real terms cut in working age benefits while maintaining the triple lock. It's a reasonable saving but it really is going to put people in a position of choosing between eating and heating this winter.
I simply don't see how you can support any of these policies, if they were coming from a Labour government you'd be screaming bloody murder at borrowing an extra £45bn per year.
Its a Catch-22 though Max.
If like me you believe we've gone well past the peak of the Laffer Curve then how do you properly fund tax cuts, when the spending on everything other than pensions has been cut as far as it can be cut, and high taxes are the root cause of your dilemma. Our welfare budget now is going on pensioners and nobody will touch that, all the easy cuts have been made, and we're still in trouble. Any tax rises to cut taxes is just shuffling the problem around. If you need cuts to grow the economy, then how do you self-fund those cuts, other than borrowing?
On your second point, I categorically do not support maintaining the triple lock. Not a bit.
Actually the laffer/tax curve shows that taxes on wealth tend to create more growth as the wealth is put to work to earn income, secondly you're just letting Truss off the hook for not cutting pensions. If she wants these big tax cuts then the state needs to make at least half of that in a saving and the only realistic saving is pensions. She shouldn't be afraid of that hurting her core voters, that's the cost of doing business and pushing big tax cuts.
All you're doing is saying "well it's too hard to cut spending, so fuck it lets just run a huge deficit and hope the markets don't realise" well they fucking realised.
I'm not saying Truss is perfect by any means, I'm saying she's better than Sunak and Starmer and all the other alternatives in my eyes.
Absolutely cut pensions. You and I are 100% on the same page there.
But taxes on earnings have to go down.
There's no such thing as partial credit though, all Liz Truss has done is taken the UK down a path of fiscal irresponsibility which is worse than doing nothing. Either you do both (tax cuts and spending cuts) or come up with a different plan.
I'm sorry I just don't agree with you. If cutting taxes that are strangling growth leads to economy growth then that is self-funding.
The second anyone else proposes to tax land or cut pensioner welfare, then I would embrace them as better than Truss, but until then Truss is closest to what has to be done.
But they haven't shown these tax cuts will generate growth. You're treating this as an article of faith.
Agreed, I am.
Well in that case it's like arguing with a religious person about religion, worthless.
We all have our beliefs. I have explained before why I have that belief, in short our taxes have ratchetted inexorably up and our growth has gone down accordingly. That may be managed decline, but its not growth.
If tax and spend led to growth then with our taxes at record highs, why are we not having record growth?
When something isn't working, its time to try something else. Our growth was higher in the past when our taxes were lower, so why should they not be in the future if we return to what worked instead of continuing what isn't working?
The very essence of the cargo cult. If we build an airstrip and a few wooden planes, Prince Philip will arrive then the DC3s will land and everything will be grand again.
The Treasury is proudly bragging that a "typical" first-time buyer, earning £30,000, can save £11,250 in stamp duty on a "representative" terraced house.
The average terraced house in London was valued at £694,000 in 2021.
They are utterly delusional about the scale of the crisis in London's housing market.
"Average" in this context is a bit misleading. You can go to zone 6 and it isn't anywhere near that price.
Well, yeah, that's how averages work! In some places it'll be less, in some places it'll be more, but the average across the city is £694,000, which is what the Treasury tweet is talking about (a "representative" terrace)!
The average would not be an average FTB terrace though.
A representative terrace bought by FTB would be below your total average. Potentially significantly below.
Also a good example of where mean, median and modal averages matter. The mean average is much higher than the median average, but the typical FTB will be buying below the median average, let alone a high end property inflating the mean averages.
The govt put out a tweet saying someone on £30k a year can save £11,250 in stamp duty.
To save that they either need several hundred £k savings or find a lender willing to lend them money with annual repayments well over 100% of their pre tax salary........
The Treasury is proudly bragging that a "typical" first-time buyer, earning £30,000, can save £11,250 in stamp duty on a "representative" terraced house.
The average terraced house in London was valued at £694,000 in 2021.
They are utterly delusional about the scale of the crisis in London's housing market.
"Average" in this context is a bit misleading. You can go to zone 6 and it isn't anywhere near that price.
Well, yeah, that's how averages work! In some places it'll be less, in some places it'll be more, but the average across the city is £694,000, which is what the Treasury tweet is talking about (a "representative" terrace)!
The average would not be an average FTB terrace though.
A representative terrace bought by FTB would be below your total average. Potentially significantly below.
Also a good example of where mean, median and modal averages matter. The mean average is much higher than the median average, but the typical FTB will be buying below the median average, let alone a high end property inflating the mean averages.
ignore that look at the tweet
Thanks to the Growth Plan, a typical first time buyer in London moving into a representative terraced house will save £11,250 on stamp duty & £1,050 on the household's energy bills - and if they earn £30,000 almost an additional £400 on tax.
This is around £12,700 in total.
It merges 2 completely different things together because it's impossible for someone earning £30,000 to be in a position to get a mortgage that would buy you a £600,000 house which the first half of the example is about.
Basically its utter nonsense written by someone who knows better and is probably posting it to prove a point...
It occurs to me that we really are in the early 1970s again. It’s uncanny
Truss is Heath. She’s tried a “dash for growth” to solve long term issues, and it’s failed. Starmer will now win and do tepid socialist Wilson/Callaghan mismanagement for five years before losing to an actual Thatcherite in 2029 = 1979
We even have a 1970s energy crisis
On the downside the world is arguably much more menacing than it was then. On the upside the UK is better educated and the food is way nicer
It has not 'failed' at all. It hasn't even started. People have objected, and Truss and her Government are standing firm.
The thing about the HMT tweet is that there is no way on God's green earth a typical FTB in London will move into a representative terrace house. This is (was !) 2 or 3 purchases typically down the line.
The Treasury is proudly bragging that a "typical" first-time buyer, earning £30,000, can save £11,250 in stamp duty on a "representative" terraced house.
The average terraced house in London was valued at £694,000 in 2021.
They are utterly delusional about the scale of the crisis in London's housing market.
"Average" in this context is a bit misleading. You can go to zone 6 and it isn't anywhere near that price.
Well, yeah, that's how averages work! In some places it'll be less, in some places it'll be more, but the average across the city is £694,000, which is what the Treasury tweet is talking about (a "representative" terrace)!
The average would not be an average FTB terrace though.
A representative terrace bought by FTB would be below your total average. Potentially significantly below.
Also a good example of where mean, median and modal averages matter. The mean average is much higher than the median average, but the typical FTB will be buying below the median average, let alone a high end property inflating the mean averages.
ignore that look at the tweet
Thanks to the Growth Plan, a typical first time buyer in London moving into a representative terraced house will save £11,250 on stamp duty & £1,050 on the household's energy bills - and if they earn £30,000 almost an additional £400 on tax.
This is around £12,700 in total.
It merges 2 completely different things together because it's impossible for someone earning £30,000 to be in a position to get a mortgage that would buy you a £600,000 house which the first half of the example is about.
Basically its utter nonsense written by someone who knows better and is probably posting it to prove a point...
Is £11,250 based on a £600k terrace? I haven't ran the numbers.
Yes, if anyone is suggesting that someone on £30k can afford a £600k home then they're mental.
It occurs to me that we really are in the early 1970s again. It’s uncanny
Truss is Heath. She’s tried a “dash for growth” to solve long term issues, and it’s failed. Starmer will now win and do tepid socialist Wilson/Callaghan mismanagement for five years before losing to an actual Thatcherite in 2029 = 1979
We even have a 1970s energy crisis
On the downside the world is arguably much more menacing than it was then. On the upside the UK is better educated and the food is way nicer
The looming nuclear armadillo was much worse in the 70s though, there were 54,000 nukes in 1975, about 9,000 now with maybe 3 to 5,000 of them ready to rock and roll and ??? Of those useless rusty old tat
2nd like the LDs (Hoping for lots of MPs in the Tory wipeout)
Realistically, Bev, how many seats do you think the LDs can get?
Personally I'd love to see them become the official opposition and the few remaining Conservative MPs sent to one of Vlad's Gulags but I just can't see Team Davey getting above 50.
Whilst I don't expect them to pick up every seat in succession, in a "fuck the Tories" election you get all kinds of interesting results. And well into triple digits are seats held by the LibDems as recently as 2010...
That is an interesting list. Cheadle and Hazel Grove are two that were only a few miles from where I used to live and could see them being achievable. However, given that the expectation is of a massive Tory collapse, even a 10% swing only gets them up about 30 MPs and I doubt the Labour marginals will be winnable for them.
Thanks for sharing that.
In the current situation I suspect the Lib Dems are resource-constrained.
My constituency (Witney) is #39 on the LD target list, with a 12.4% swing required, and nowhere on the Labour list. With the polls as they are it's absolutely ripe for the plucking by the Lib Dems, especially given that the local MP is an ineffectual Tory boy who has pissed everyone off with his indifference to the sewage being dumped into the local rivers.
But for the Lib Dems to take it, there needs to be a Focus-bombing campaign of "Labour can't win here" to persuade people that the anti-Tory vote should rest with them, rather than with that nice Mr Starmer you keep seeing on the TV. And right now I don't see any sign that LDHQ has the budget or the personnel to throw at #39 in the target list, especially when next-door Wantage is in theory an easier catch.
So I was going to donate my British Gas shares to the Labour Party, do we reckon I'd get more defenestrated Tories for the buck if I gave them to the LibDems?
I think if you could fund a campaign to keep Truss in number 10 that should do the trick.
The Treasury is proudly bragging that a "typical" first-time buyer, earning £30,000, can save £11,250 in stamp duty on a "representative" terraced house.
The average terraced house in London was valued at £694,000 in 2021.
They are utterly delusional about the scale of the crisis in London's housing market.
"Average" in this context is a bit misleading. You can go to zone 6 and it isn't anywhere near that price.
Well, yeah, that's how averages work! In some places it'll be less, in some places it'll be more, but the average across the city is £694,000, which is what the Treasury tweet is talking about (a "representative" terrace)!
The average would not be an average FTB terrace though.
A representative terrace bought by FTB would be below your total average. Potentially significantly below.
Also a good example of where mean, median and modal averages matter. The mean average is much higher than the median average, but the typical FTB will be buying below the median average, let alone a high end property inflating the mean averages.
The tweet says you would save £11,250 in stamp duty. That implies a purchase price of £600K.
You can argue about averages all you like but those are the numbers.
Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng face a “very difficult conversation” with the Office for Budget Responsibility, a senior Conservative MP said before an emergency meeting with the independent economic forecaster.
Mel Stride, chairman of the Treasury committee, said the OBR would demand a “rethink” of plans for £45 billion in debt-funded tax cuts because “this circle cannot be squared”.
Very quiet on here about this, and buried on the bbc. Agenda? It’s not great, but it could be worse.
Feels about right. 'It could be worse' and it will be worse, sadly.'
So much worse. After the GFC bail outs the idea has taken hold that the government can magic away any problems if they want to. It then becomes a moral failure not to. If you can bail out the banks why not me?
So you pay my wages when I can’t work, you pay my heating bill when it goes up, you are responsible for my mortgage.
It’s going to take a lot of time and pain to realise that the magic money tree has been cut down and burnt to keep us warm. The markets have said enough.
We are heading back to reality, when people have to accept they are responsible for themselves. It’s going to be a hell of a detox.
Well said, we are indeed. Truss and Kwasi have the right prescription for getting us back to reality, but the country doesn't want to hear it, and it might be frankly too little, too late now.
If the country wants to live in delusion that the government can magic away all our problems, then lets give Starmer a go and see if he can do it. When he can't, maybe people will realise Truss was ahead of her time and finally pay attention to what she rightly wanted to do.
And that reality is what? A bunch of tax cuts paid for by borrowing money? How is that facing up to "reality" it's more fantasy economics. Where are the spending cuts, when is the sainted NHS going to actually be forced to modernise? Where are the state pension reforms and taper for high earning retirees? Where was the NI on pension income announcement?
There was absolutely no "reality" in the Friday statement, you are seeing what you want to see, not what they actually announced which was a series of unfunded tax cuts and new spending commitments. The Truss "prescription" is no different to Corbyn, just from the other side of the political divide, Corbyn wanted to borrow hundreds of billions for nationalisation and spending, Truss is borrowing hundreds of billions for tax cuts.
Fantasy economics is that we can tax and spend our way to growth.
The country has ratchetted up taxes to the highest level in 74 years and the notion that reversing some tax rises to the point they're still far higher than they were when Labour were last in office is "irresponsible" tax cutting is just a bad joke.
Cut taxes, grow the economy, and take a smaller slice of a bigger pie. That's how you solve it.
Maybe, but it's also fantasy economics to make a bunch of unfunded tax cuts and push up borrowing heading into a recession. Again, I have no issue with tax cuts, I just want them to be properly funded from cuts or be able to see the maths that shows the measures will push up trend growth to enough of a degree to be worthwhile. The Friday statement had neither of these aspects and now the PM is going begging to the OBR this morning to produce the latter, which they probably can't do because none of these tax cuts will make a dent in economic growth.
The other policy we've got is a real terms cut in working age benefits while maintaining the triple lock. It's a reasonable saving but it really is going to put people in a position of choosing between eating and heating this winter.
I simply don't see how you can support any of these policies, if they were coming from a Labour government you'd be screaming bloody murder at borrowing an extra £45bn per year.
Its a Catch-22 though Max.
If like me you believe we've gone well past the peak of the Laffer Curve then how do you properly fund tax cuts, when the spending on everything other than pensions has been cut as far as it can be cut, and high taxes are the root cause of your dilemma. Our welfare budget now is going on pensioners and nobody will touch that, all the easy cuts have been made, and we're still in trouble. Any tax rises to cut taxes is just shuffling the problem around. If you need cuts to grow the economy, then how do you self-fund those cuts, other than borrowing?
On your second point, I categorically do not support maintaining the triple lock. Not a bit.
Actually the laffer/tax curve shows that taxes on wealth tend to create more growth as the wealth is put to work to earn income, secondly you're just letting Truss off the hook for not cutting pensions. If she wants these big tax cuts then the state needs to make at least half of that in a saving and the only realistic saving is pensions. She shouldn't be afraid of that hurting her core voters, that's the cost of doing business and pushing big tax cuts.
All you're doing is saying "well it's too hard to cut spending, so fuck it lets just run a huge deficit and hope the markets don't realise" well they fucking realised.
I'm not saying Truss is perfect by any means, I'm saying she's better than Sunak and Starmer and all the other alternatives in my eyes.
Absolutely cut pensions. You and I are 100% on the same page there.
But taxes on earnings have to go down.
There's no such thing as partial credit though, all Liz Truss has done is taken the UK down a path of fiscal irresponsibility which is worse than doing nothing. Either you do both (tax cuts and spending cuts) or come up with a different plan.
I'm sorry I just don't agree with you. If cutting taxes that are strangling growth leads to economy growth then that is self-funding.
The second anyone else proposes to tax land or cut pensioner welfare, then I would embrace them as better than Truss, but until then Truss is closest to what has to be done.
But they haven't shown these tax cuts will generate growth. You're treating this as an article of faith.
Agreed, I am.
Well in that case it's like arguing with a religious person about religion, worthless.
We all have our beliefs. I have explained before why I have that belief, in short our taxes have ratchetted inexorably up and our growth has gone down accordingly. That may be managed decline, but its not growth.
If tax and spend led to growth then with our taxes at record highs, why are we not having record growth?
When something isn't working, its time to try something else. Our growth was higher in the past when our taxes were lower, so why should they not be in the future if we return to what worked instead of continuing what isn't working?
Following your logic - our growth was higher when Corporation Tax rates were above 25% with big allowances for investment...
Because that encouraged companies to invest their profits on productivity rather than pocketing the profits today...
Growth has been higher for most of the last couple of centuries, so we could randomly pick any policy from the past and say this must be tried. The modern economy is extremely complex, any single variable having a link with growth in the past is not anywhere near a sufficient reason to assume it will inevitably have a link with growth in the future.
Those claiming x will lead to growth need to show far more than a link with the past to convince the markets.
Interesting thread, which I find slightly more convincing on the pipeline question than the combined opinions of @Leon , @Luckyguy1983 , and @Dura_Ace . FWIW.
I'm not sure what you think this thread tells us beyond any of the opinions offered by the users you've tagged in. The options listed here are purely (and admittedly) groundless speculation, and it seems obvious to me that the author has eked the Russian options out a lot, and dismissed evidence supporting the US option out of hand 'Biden's wierd Tweets' - Really? An actual threat saying 'we can do that' about ending Nordstream 2 is just a 'wierd Tweet' would a 'wierd Tweet' by Putin saying the same thing have been dismissed, or actually be held up as a smoking gun?
Of the Russian motives, there is only one that stands out to me as having validity, and that is Gazprom not having to pay penalties for not supplying gas. However, how that tallies with the cost of repairs, I don't know, and how it also tallies with Putin's willingness to upend normal ways of doing business (ie, why wouldn't he just refuse to pay the penalties), I also don't know.
In the other actors presented, there is also a failure to mention the likelihood of any of these states acting without American blessing/foreknowledge/support - which is practically zero. The Ukrainians are the only ones desperate enough to do that, and their capability of doing so is rightly questioned, and doing so without prior American knowledge risks future weapons supplies and financial support worth billions - the Americans are the only ones propping up the Ukrainian state.
Given all those things, the probable culprit is Ukraine, or one of the Baltic states, but with American blessing and support. This achieves American aims, but is deniable, and they will 100% wash their hands of anyone who gets fingered for it.
The thing that astonishes me is the wilful blindness as to America’s stated aims. The USA has said categorically “we will end Nordstream2 one way or another if Putin invades”
Biden said it on camera. His Secretary of State said it on camera. No ifs or buts, and Germany can go fuck itself
“Germany's sovereignty has just flown out the window. - Victoria Nuland, U.S. Under Secretary of State, declares that 'if Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward' indicating that the US, not Germany, has the last word on the pipeline project”
Yet somehow this evidence is irrelevant and Putin must be responsible because of his weird left arm, or something
I’m not completely sure America did this (your argument they got the Balts/Ukes to do it is plausible) but the desperate desire not to believe the Yanks did it, despite this overt evidence, is frankly surreal
That said, at least @BartholomewRoberts is trying to plot a way out of the mess. He may be wrong but he’s trying. The rest of us continuously saying WTF They’re Mad doesn’t get us far
And I don’t see any of the PB Lefties offering any solution other than “tax the rich more” - well, great, that just means the rich will leave, and the economy stalls even more. That’s what happened to France with their wealth tax. And France has advantages we do not
It’s a rum do, alright. And almost every economy is in deep shit. How do we get out?
Accept that we’re poorer than we were five years ago, both for self-inflicted & external reasons.
We can’t do anything about the energy price shock (apart from hope that Putin is booted from power with extreme prejudice, but even then gas prices are, I suspect, going to remain permanently higher for a variety of reasons), but we can do something about the self-inflicted wounds.
Things we can & probably should do, but would need seriously political will:
1) break the triple lock. It’s completely unaffordable & has become grossly unfair to the working population. Replace it with a measured benefits package to prevent the poorest pensioners falling into poverty. Personally, I would leave in place a link to wages, so that pensioners both gain & lose in tandem with the rest of the country. That seems like a fair & equable arrangement to me.
2) Undo as much of Brexit as necessary to fix the economic damage. There are no sunlit uplands to Brexit - no great swathe of countries desperate to do trade deals with us to our benefit. We can gain most of the economic costs back by entering into a trade agreement with Brussels that says that we agree to follow all of their standards in return for the free flow trade & will police our borders to match. This unblocks the ports, kills the majority of the mountain of paperwork that we foisted on UK business & frees up company time to concentrate on atually making money.
We can regain a lot of the economic integration without giving up freedom of movement, but ought to think seriously about entering the EEA as well.
3) Get serious about housing & planning reform. The existing system isn’t working. Lot of detail work here though - just ripping off controls a la the Truss regime is a recipe for asset stripping, as we’ve already seen, which is of no long term benefit to the country.
There’s also a ton of stuff we should be doing that will pay long term dividends, but those things cost money in the here & now, and may not be possible, but some things we might spend money on include:
1) criminal justice reform. 2) energy security / green transition. 3) Early years education / care.
Next week pictures of delegates at the Tory conference applauding ministers as they proclaim huge tax cuts for the very richest and benefits cuts for the very poorest will be beamed into TV sets up and down the country.
Tax cuts for the richest at the moment may be problematic. However the benefits proposal to increase benefits in line with earnings not inflation I expect will be more popular
Next week pictures of delegates at the Tory conference applauding ministers as they proclaim huge tax cuts for the very richest and benefits cuts for the very poorest will be beamed into TV sets up and down the country.
Tax cuts for the richest at the moment may be problematic. However the benefits proposal to increase benefits in line with earnings not inflation I expect will be more popular
Not if pensioners receive the triple lock
Benefits and pensions have to rise equally and anyone who cannot see that deserves to be thrown out of office
And I say this as a pensioner
Pensioners are the Tories core vote and of course most state Pensioners paid in via NI their whole working lives
Forget core vote - do the right thing or get out of office
Spot on. The current Tory government is sn active danger to our livelihoods, homes, stability, income etc etc etc They have to go.
Only been two weeks or so, but so far this must easily be the most dangerous government economically in my adult lifetime. The the two at the top are a clear and present danger to the fabric of this country.
I am actually beginning to wonder if Corbyn would have been less damaging.
Exclusive: The trustees of Serco's pension schemes approached the outsourcing giant for financial support earlier this week as the crisis in the UK government bond market forced a wave of firesales to meet collatral demands. To be clear, the Serco schemes are well-funded and...
2/2 ...in surplus, according to the company's most recent financial results. Nevertheless, the fact that Serco's trustees had to seek a standby credit facility of this nature underlines the scale of the panic caused among UK corporate pension trustees.
The Treasury is proudly bragging that a "typical" first-time buyer, earning £30,000, can save £11,250 in stamp duty on a "representative" terraced house.
The average terraced house in London was valued at £694,000 in 2021.
They are utterly delusional about the scale of the crisis in London's housing market.
"Average" in this context is a bit misleading. You can go to zone 6 and it isn't anywhere near that price.
Well, yeah, that's how averages work! In some places it'll be less, in some places it'll be more, but the average across the city is £694,000, which is what the Treasury tweet is talking about (a "representative" terrace)!
The average would not be an average FTB terrace though.
A representative terrace bought by FTB would be below your total average. Potentially significantly below.
Also a good example of where mean, median and modal averages matter. The mean average is much higher than the median average, but the typical FTB will be buying below the median average, let alone a high end property inflating the mean averages.
The tweet says you would save £11,250 in stamp duty. That implies a purchase price of £600K.
You can argue about averages all you like but those are the numbers.
Yes, someone else already pointed that out. Its embarrassingly bad and indefensible gibberish.
No way someone on £30k can afford a £600k home, that's insane!
It occurs to me that we really are in the early 1970s again. It’s uncanny
Truss is Heath. She’s tried a “dash for growth” to solve long term issues, and it’s failed. Starmer will now win and do tepid socialist Wilson/Callaghan mismanagement for five years before losing to an actual Thatcherite in 2029 = 1979
We even have a 1970s energy crisis
On the downside the world is arguably much more menacing than it was then. On the upside the UK is better educated and the food is way nicer
Some truth in this, but actually I don´t think the pygmy Russian state is anything like the threat that the USSR was: in the 1970s, we really were within a 4 minute warning of total nuclear obliteration; whereas we are now within perhaps a few days warning of some kind of limited "tactical" strike. The CPSU was not under threat of immediate eviction from power, the way that Putin is. Communism in the 70s was on the march: Indo-China, Africa, Latin America. All Putin has is Eritrea, North Korea and the wreckage of Syria, and his kleptocratic system is about as attractive to the rest of the world as Syphilis.
Yeah its maybe dangerous that Putin is on borrowed time, but removing a dictator from time to time discourages the others, and the fat lady is absolutely clearing her throat for Putinism.
The Treasury is proudly bragging that a "typical" first-time buyer, earning £30,000, can save £11,250 in stamp duty on a "representative" terraced house.
The average terraced house in London was valued at £694,000 in 2021.
They are utterly delusional about the scale of the crisis in London's housing market.
"Average" in this context is a bit misleading. You can go to zone 6 and it isn't anywhere near that price.
Well, yeah, that's how averages work! In some places it'll be less, in some places it'll be more, but the average across the city is £694,000, which is what the Treasury tweet is talking about (a "representative" terrace)!
The average would not be an average FTB terrace though.
A representative terrace bought by FTB would be below your total average. Potentially significantly below.
Also a good example of where mean, median and modal averages matter. The mean average is much higher than the median average, but the typical FTB will be buying below the median average, let alone a high end property inflating the mean averages.
ignore that look at the tweet
Thanks to the Growth Plan, a typical first time buyer in London moving into a representative terraced house will save £11,250 on stamp duty & £1,050 on the household's energy bills - and if they earn £30,000 almost an additional £400 on tax.
This is around £12,700 in total.
It merges 2 completely different things together because it's impossible for someone earning £30,000 to be in a position to get a mortgage that would buy you a £600,000 house which the first half of the example is about.
Basically its utter nonsense written by someone who knows better and is probably posting it to prove a point...
Is £11,250 based on a £600k terrace? I haven't ran the numbers.
Yes, if anyone is suggesting that someone on £30k can afford a £600k home then they're mental.
Unfortunately the "anyone" is HM Treasury run by your idols, at least you are starting to realise they are not all there.
The Treasury is proudly bragging that a "typical" first-time buyer, earning £30,000, can save £11,250 in stamp duty on a "representative" terraced house.
The average terraced house in London was valued at £694,000 in 2021.
They are utterly delusional about the scale of the crisis in London's housing market.
"Average" in this context is a bit misleading. You can go to zone 6 and it isn't anywhere near that price.
Well, yeah, that's how averages work! In some places it'll be less, in some places it'll be more, but the average across the city is £694,000, which is what the Treasury tweet is talking about (a "representative" terrace)!
The average would not be an average FTB terrace though.
A representative terrace bought by FTB would be below your total average. Potentially significantly below.
Also a good example of where mean, median and modal averages matter. The mean average is much higher than the median average, but the typical FTB will be buying below the median average, let alone a high end property inflating the mean averages.
The tweet says you would save £11,250 in stamp duty. That implies a purchase price of £600K.
You can argue about averages all you like but those are the numbers.
So the Tory vote is pensioners and people who afford a 600k house. 20pc polls sound about right.
MOSCOW, Sept 30 (Reuters) - The Kremlin said on Friday it would consider attacks against any part of the regions of Ukraine that it is about to annex as acts of aggression against Russia itself. https://twitter.com/WJames_Reuters/status/1575777196672704512
The Treasury is proudly bragging that a "typical" first-time buyer, earning £30,000, can save £11,250 in stamp duty on a "representative" terraced house.
The average terraced house in London was valued at £694,000 in 2021.
They are utterly delusional about the scale of the crisis in London's housing market.
"Average" in this context is a bit misleading. You can go to zone 6 and it isn't anywhere near that price.
Well, yeah, that's how averages work! In some places it'll be less, in some places it'll be more, but the average across the city is £694,000, which is what the Treasury tweet is talking about (a "representative" terrace)!
The average would not be an average FTB terrace though.
A representative terrace bought by FTB would be below your total average. Potentially significantly below.
Also a good example of where mean, median and modal averages matter. The mean average is much higher than the median average, but the typical FTB will be buying below the median average, let alone a high end property inflating the mean averages.
The tweet says you would save £11,250 in stamp duty. That implies a purchase price of £600K.
You can argue about averages all you like but those are the numbers.
So the Tory vote is pensioners and people who afford a 600k house. 20pc polls sound about right.
It's not just those who can afford a 600k house it's those who can afford a 600k house on an income of £30,000...
Well, I thought the swirling maelstrom of confusion and very plausible motives from all parties meant it would be completely unclear as to who did it but now this pretty clearly means Moscow did it.
The Treasury is proudly bragging that a "typical" first-time buyer, earning £30,000, can save £11,250 in stamp duty on a "representative" terraced house.
The average terraced house in London was valued at £694,000 in 2021.
They are utterly delusional about the scale of the crisis in London's housing market.
"Average" in this context is a bit misleading. You can go to zone 6 and it isn't anywhere near that price.
Well, yeah, that's how averages work! In some places it'll be less, in some places it'll be more, but the average across the city is £694,000, which is what the Treasury tweet is talking about (a "representative" terrace)!
The average would not be an average FTB terrace though.
A representative terrace bought by FTB would be below your total average. Potentially significantly below.
Also a good example of where mean, median and modal averages matter. The mean average is much higher than the median average, but the typical FTB will be buying below the median average, let alone a high end property inflating the mean averages.
ignore that look at the tweet
Thanks to the Growth Plan, a typical first time buyer in London moving into a representative terraced house will save £11,250 on stamp duty & £1,050 on the household's energy bills - and if they earn £30,000 almost an additional £400 on tax.
This is around £12,700 in total.
It merges 2 completely different things together because it's impossible for someone earning £30,000 to be in a position to get a mortgage that would buy you a £600,000 house which the first half of the example is about.
Basically its utter nonsense written by someone who knows better and is probably posting it to prove a point...
Is £11,250 based on a £600k terrace? I haven't ran the numbers.
Yes, if anyone is suggesting that someone on £30k can afford a £600k home then they're mental.
Unfortunately the "anyone" is HM Treasury run by your idols, at least you are starting to realise they are not all there.
HMT are far from my idols.
The idea that the Government, any Government, aren't the solution to life's problems is kind of something I believe in. I have so little faith in the Government and the Treasury, I want to see less of it.
The fact that the numbers were ballsed up as badly as this, kind of feeds into my thinking. I doubt these figures were ran past Truss or Kwarteng, but this is the kind of bollocks the Treasury deals with.
I know alJazeera have been frequently criticised for all sorts of things, but I've read some pretty good reports from them about Ukraine. They are, of course, more or less neutral in this fight.
Neutrality is an interesting concept. When Ireland was neutral at the time the world, and UK, faced an existential threat of barbarian Nazi darkness does that mean they were equally comfortable (or uncomfortable) with all outcomes? Same question here.
As put by one Irish person speaking to Robert Kee in 1980: 'While there was no desire on the part of the Irish to see the Nazis win, there was always a certain amusement on hearing of British military reverses.'
Rather offset by the large numbers of Irish volunteers for the British military.
The Next Labour Government will be two or three terms at the least. The Tories aren't getting back in for a long time.
That is a very bold position Horse. If they get in with a 2005 style majority and have to enact very unpopular policy because of the state of the economy they might easily slip back into deep minority in 2029
Very quiet on here about this, and buried on the bbc. Agenda? It’s not great, but it could be worse.
Feels about right. 'It could be worse' and it will be worse, sadly.'
So much worse. After the GFC bail outs the idea has taken hold that the government can magic away any problems if they want to. It then becomes a moral failure not to. If you can bail out the banks why not me?
So you pay my wages when I can’t work, you pay my heating bill when it goes up, you are responsible for my mortgage.
It’s going to take a lot of time and pain to realise that the magic money tree has been cut down and burnt to keep us warm. The markets have said enough.
We are heading back to reality, when people have to accept they are responsible for themselves. It’s going to be a hell of a detox.
Well said, we are indeed. Truss and Kwasi have the right prescription for getting us back to reality, but the country doesn't want to hear it, and it might be frankly too little, too late now.
If the country wants to live in delusion that the government can magic away all our problems, then lets give Starmer a go and see if he can do it. When he can't, maybe people will realise Truss was ahead of her time and finally pay attention to what she rightly wanted to do.
And that reality is what? A bunch of tax cuts paid for by borrowing money? How is that facing up to "reality" it's more fantasy economics. Where are the spending cuts, when is the sainted NHS going to actually be forced to modernise? Where are the state pension reforms and taper for high earning retirees? Where was the NI on pension income announcement?
There was absolutely no "reality" in the Friday statement, you are seeing what you want to see, not what they actually announced which was a series of unfunded tax cuts and new spending commitments. The Truss "prescription" is no different to Corbyn, just from the other side of the political divide, Corbyn wanted to borrow hundreds of billions for nationalisation and spending, Truss is borrowing hundreds of billions for tax cuts.
Fantasy economics is that we can tax and spend our way to growth.
The country has ratchetted up taxes to the highest level in 74 years and the notion that reversing some tax rises to the point they're still far higher than they were when Labour were last in office is "irresponsible" tax cutting is just a bad joke.
Cut taxes, grow the economy, and take a smaller slice of a bigger pie. That's how you solve it.
Maybe, but it's also fantasy economics to make a bunch of unfunded tax cuts and push up borrowing heading into a recession. Again, I have no issue with tax cuts, I just want them to be properly funded from cuts or be able to see the maths that shows the measures will push up trend growth to enough of a degree to be worthwhile. The Friday statement had neither of these aspects and now the PM is going begging to the OBR this morning to produce the latter, which they probably can't do because none of these tax cuts will make a dent in economic growth.
The other policy we've got is a real terms cut in working age benefits while maintaining the triple lock. It's a reasonable saving but it really is going to put people in a position of choosing between eating and heating this winter.
I simply don't see how you can support any of these policies, if they were coming from a Labour government you'd be screaming bloody murder at borrowing an extra £45bn per year.
Its a Catch-22 though Max.
If like me you believe we've gone well past the peak of the Laffer Curve then how do you properly fund tax cuts, when the spending on everything other than pensions has been cut as far as it can be cut, and high taxes are the root cause of your dilemma. Our welfare budget now is going on pensioners and nobody will touch that, all the easy cuts have been made, and we're still in trouble. Any tax rises to cut taxes is just shuffling the problem around. If you need cuts to grow the economy, then how do you self-fund those cuts, other than borrowing?
On your second point, I categorically do not support maintaining the triple lock. Not a bit.
Actually the laffer/tax curve shows that taxes on wealth tend to create more growth as the wealth is put to work to earn income, secondly you're just letting Truss off the hook for not cutting pensions. If she wants these big tax cuts then the state needs to make at least half of that in a saving and the only realistic saving is pensions. She shouldn't be afraid of that hurting her core voters, that's the cost of doing business and pushing big tax cuts.
All you're doing is saying "well it's too hard to cut spending, so fuck it lets just run a huge deficit and hope the markets don't realise" well they fucking realised.
I'm not saying Truss is perfect by any means, I'm saying she's better than Sunak and Starmer and all the other alternatives in my eyes.
Absolutely cut pensions. You and I are 100% on the same page there.
But taxes on earnings have to go down.
There's no such thing as partial credit though, all Liz Truss has done is taken the UK down a path of fiscal irresponsibility which is worse than doing nothing. Either you do both (tax cuts and spending cuts) or come up with a different plan.
I'm sorry I just don't agree with you. If cutting taxes that are strangling growth leads to economy growth then that is self-funding.
The second anyone else proposes to tax land or cut pensioner welfare, then I would embrace them as better than Truss, but until then Truss is closest to what has to be done.
But they haven't shown these tax cuts will generate growth. You're treating this as an article of faith.
Agreed, I am.
Well in that case it's like arguing with a religious person about religion, worthless.
We all have our beliefs. I have explained before why I have that belief, in short our taxes have ratchetted inexorably up and our growth has gone down accordingly. That may be managed decline, but its not growth.
If tax and spend led to growth then with our taxes at record highs, why are we not having record growth?
When something isn't working, its time to try something else. Our growth was higher in the past when our taxes were lower, so why should they not be in the future if we return to what worked instead of continuing what isn't working?
Following your logic - our growth was higher when Corporation Tax rates were above 25% with big allowances for investment...
Because that encouraged companies to invest their profits on productivity rather than pocketing the profits today...
Growth has been higher for most of the last couple of centuries, so we could randomly pick any policy from the past and say this must be tried. The modern economy is extremely complex, any single variable having a link with growth in the past is not anywhere near a sufficient reason to assume it will inevitably have a link with growth in the future.
Those claiming x will lead to growth need to show far more than a link with the past to convince the markets.
I'm not claiming that higher corporation tax rates equals higher growth - what I'm pointing out is that 12 years of low Corporation tax has resulted in growth levels of 1.1% compared to 2.5% earlier.
It's not clear the higher Corporation tax rates will result in better growth but it is clear the low Corporation tax rates have existed alongside a period of sod all growth. And that's in a time when my productivity has probably tripled....
The Next Labour Government will be two or three terms at the least. The Tories aren't getting back in for a long time.
That is a very bold position Horse. If they get in with a 2005 style majority and have to enact very unpopular policy because of the state of the economy they might easily slip back into deep minority in 2029
It is bold but my prediction record since GE19 has been absolutely spot on.
Exclusive: The trustees of Serco's pension schemes approached the outsourcing giant for financial support earlier this week as the crisis in the UK government bond market forced a wave of firesales to meet collatral demands. To be clear, the Serco schemes are well-funded and...
2/2 ...in surplus, according to the company's most recent financial results. Nevertheless, the fact that Serco's trustees had to seek a standby credit facility of this nature underlines the scale of the panic caused among UK corporate pension trustees.
Comments
I mean, just jaw-droppingly "WTF??????" bad. They appear to be operating in an ability-free bubble.
Harold Hill is a massive ex-GLC estate, no tube, no Elizabeth line, rather cut off from the rest of Havering, let alone London.
The cheapest 2 bedroom terraced house a quick web search threw up is 260k, so about 8.5 times that typical FTB salary.
The numbers in the Treasury meme are yet another example of someone mucking around with numbers without thinking about their underlying meaning.
My constituency (Witney) is #39 on the LD target list, with a 12.4% swing required, and nowhere on the Labour list. With the polls as they are it's absolutely ripe for the plucking by the Lib Dems, especially given that the local MP is an ineffectual Tory boy who has pissed everyone off with his indifference to the sewage being dumped into the local rivers.
But for the Lib Dems to take it, there needs to be a Focus-bombing campaign of "Labour can't win here" to persuade people that the anti-Tory vote should rest with them, rather than with that nice Mr Starmer you keep seeing on the TV. And right now I don't see any sign that LDHQ has the budget or the personnel to throw at #39 in the target list, especially when next-door Wantage is in theory an easier catch.
People made a big deal about pound falling to £1.08 after Kwasi spoke, since then its fallen further to . . . £1.12
The pound is now roughly back to exactly where it was before Kwasi spoke last Friday. So lets not overreact to every move in every market.
All you're doing is saying "well it's too hard to cut spending, so fuck it lets just run a huge deficit and hope the markets don't realise" well they fucking realised.
Politically problematic I would have thought .
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/sep/30/arctic-monkeys-alex-turner-im-comfortable-with-the-idea-that-things-dont-have-to-be-a-pop-song
And I don’t see any of the PB Lefties offering any solution other than “tax the rich more” - well, great, that just means the rich will leave, and the economy stalls even more. That’s what happened to France with their wealth tax. And France has advantages we do not
It’s a rum do, alright. And almost every economy is in deep shit. How do we get out?
Absolutely cut pensions. You and I are 100% on the same page there.
But taxes on earnings have to go down.
They’re probably right tho, because there is no competition for this role. Rock bands are dead. No one cares. It’s like saying he’s the most “important quill sharpener of the last century”
Which leaves the NHS bearing the cuts - again not an option..
So we need £37bn of spending cuts and we can't see £37 of easily obtainable ones given that everything else has already had 12 years of cutting unnecessary spending...
If anyone proposes rebalancing taxes away from income and into land instead, then I would absolutely be prepared to vote for them. Even if its Keir Starmer. But I don't see anyone proposing that yet.
One of the rooms in my flat has a bay window where the wall is much thinner, and let's much more heat out, than the rest of the property. The landlord has no interest or motivation in improving this. If we owned the place then we'd have the option of spending the (considerable) sum of money to rectify the issue, and have a more comfortable and efficient to heat home as a result.
The most useful thing we could do is to make other forms of investment relatively more attractive to investors than residential property. There's broadly two different ways to do that, either clobber property investment with taxation on landlords, or make investment in other parts of the economy (productive businesses hopefully) more rewarding. Then at least people buying a home would only be competing with other aspirational homeowners, rather than with a tsunami of investment capital.
LAB: 47% (+6)
CON: 27% (-7)
LDEM: 11% (-)
GRN: 6% (+1)
via
@techneUK
, 28 - 29 Sep
Another 20 pointer
My Telegraph column, now online: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/09/29/liz-truss-has-shocked-allies-dangerously-close-edge/
The second anyone else proposes to tax land or cut pensioner welfare, then I would embrace them as better than Truss, but until then Truss is closest to what has to be done.
From about 1993 onwards, his government didn't do a bad job as these things go. Not perfect, but not bad. Britain was Booming by 1997, albeit there was a backlog of repairs to be done. But none of it mattered- one considerable cockup on the currency front and that was it.
Even if things go well from here (and my uninfomed judgement is that Trussonomics is Cargo Cult Thatcherism, doing the external moves without understanding there was an internal mechanism, and only chumps and ninnies still think it will work), people won't remember that bit. They will remember the panic.
(There was discussion of this during Covidtide. Isn't the theory that the three bits of any story that people remember are the start, finish and most intense bit of the middle?)
Which is why Truss is Toast. Only question is how many Conservatives make it out of the building before the whole thing burns down.
a. Magically disappear
b. Left empty and landlord receives £0, and pays surcharge council tax for empty homes
c. Landlord receives less rent
d. Landlord sells to another landlord who receives less rent
e. Landlord sells to buyer who would otherwise be unable to buy, and reduces the pool of renters accordingly
A clue - for the vast majority of homes it will not be a or b.
We need to start treating homes as a cost people have to pay, not an asset. We want cheap energy and cheap food, why do we not want cheap homes. And if foreigners stop buying land, then fanbloodytastic. Land is our most finite resource, it should be used productively, not as an "investment".
Isn't that what we all want to see? Cheaper property....
But they are not, they are borrowing to fund the rich and corporate profits.
Hand the dinghy arrivals a broom on landing.
I just can’t be arsed to type it out every time
If tax and spend led to growth then with our taxes at record highs, why are we not having record growth?
When something isn't working, its time to try something else. Our growth was higher in the past when our taxes were lower, so why should they not be in the future if we return to what worked instead of continuing what isn't working?
https://twitter.com/robfordmancs/status/1575770187030093824
Thanks to the growth plan someone on £30k a year will apparently be able to buy a 600k house with a mortgage costing nearly £40k a year?
Really is a mystery why the market lost faith in the Kwarteng Treasury.
They have to go.
A representative terrace bought by FTB would be below your total average. Potentially significantly below.
Also a good example of where mean, median and modal averages matter. The mean average is much higher than the median average, but the typical FTB will be buying below the median average, let alone a high end property inflating the mean averages.
I'm not saying it will end in apocalypse.
Because that encouraged companies to invest their profits on productivity rather than pocketing the profits today...
Of the Russian motives, there is only one that stands out to me as having validity, and that is Gazprom not having to pay penalties for not supplying gas. However, how that tallies with the cost of repairs, I don't know, and how it also tallies with Putin's willingness to upend normal ways of doing business (ie, why wouldn't he just refuse to pay the penalties), I also don't know.
In the other actors presented, there is also a failure to mention the likelihood of any of these states acting without American blessing/foreknowledge/support - which is practically zero. The Ukrainians are the only ones desperate enough to do that, and their capability of doing so is rightly questioned, and doing so without prior American knowledge risks future weapons supplies and financial support worth billions - the Americans are the only ones propping up the Ukrainian state.
Given all those things, the probable culprit is Ukraine, or one of the Baltic states, but with American blessing and support. This achieves American aims, but is deniable, and they will 100% wash their hands of anyone who gets fingered for it.
Truss is Heath. She’s tried a “dash for growth” to solve long term issues, and it’s failed. Starmer will now win and do tepid socialist Wilson/Callaghan mismanagement for five years before losing to an actual Thatcherite in 2029 = 1979
We even have a 1970s energy crisis
On the downside the world is arguably much more menacing than it was then. On the upside the UK is better educated and the food is way nicer
To save that they either need several hundred £k savings or find a lender willing to lend them money with annual repayments well over 100% of their pre tax salary........
It is ridiculous and worthy of ridicule.
Thanks to the Growth Plan, a typical first time buyer in London moving into a representative terraced house will save £11,250 on stamp duty & £1,050 on the household's energy bills - and if they earn £30,000 almost an additional £400 on tax.
This is around £12,700 in total.
It merges 2 completely different things together because it's impossible for someone earning £30,000 to be in a position to get a mortgage that would buy you a £600,000 house which the first half of the example is about.
Basically its utter nonsense written by someone who knows better and is probably posting it to prove a point...
This is (was !) 2 or 3 purchases typically down the line.
For a number plate…
Yes, if anyone is suggesting that someone on £30k can afford a £600k home then they're mental.
https://twitter.com/kelvmackenzie/status/1575724420894969856?s=20&t=migUg46x-ILbFbZe81issg
Number plate.
You can argue about averages all you like but those are the numbers.
Mel Stride, chairman of the Treasury committee, said the OBR would demand a “rethink” of plans for £45 billion in debt-funded tax cuts because “this circle cannot be squared”.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/obr-will-demand-budget-rethink-from-truss-and-kwarteng-n90lqlgf7
So when Truss emerges and says "Nothing has changed"...
https://twitter.com/WarfareReports/status/1575757512066076672?s=20&t=migUg46x-ILbFbZe81issg
Those claiming x will lead to growth need to show far more than a link with the past to convince the markets.
Biden said it on camera. His Secretary of State said it on camera. No ifs or buts, and Germany can go fuck itself
“Germany's sovereignty has just flown out the window. - Victoria Nuland, U.S. Under Secretary of State, declares that 'if Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward' indicating that the US, not Germany, has the last word on the pipeline project”
https://twitter.com/starboyhk/status/1487032297199001609?s=46&t=alkYmD_zw_SOwIYuuB5VQw
Yet somehow this evidence is irrelevant and Putin must be responsible because of his weird left arm, or something
I’m not completely sure America did this (your argument they got the Balts/Ukes to do it is plausible) but the desperate desire not to believe the Yanks did it, despite this overt evidence, is frankly surreal
We can’t do anything about the energy price shock (apart from hope that Putin is booted from power with extreme prejudice, but even then gas prices are, I suspect, going to remain permanently higher for a variety of reasons), but we can do something about the self-inflicted wounds.
Things we can & probably should do, but would need seriously political will:
1) break the triple lock. It’s completely unaffordable & has become grossly unfair to the working population. Replace it with a measured benefits package to prevent the poorest pensioners falling into poverty. Personally, I would leave in place a link to wages, so that pensioners both gain & lose in tandem with the rest of the country. That seems like a fair & equable arrangement to me.
2) Undo as much of Brexit as necessary to fix the economic damage. There are no sunlit uplands to Brexit - no great swathe of countries desperate to do trade deals with us to our benefit. We can gain most of the economic costs back by entering into a trade agreement with Brussels that says that we agree to follow all of their standards in return for the free flow trade & will police our borders to match. This unblocks the ports, kills the majority of the mountain of paperwork that we foisted on UK business & frees up company time to concentrate on atually making money.
We can regain a lot of the economic integration without giving up freedom of movement, but ought to think seriously about entering the EEA as well.
3) Get serious about housing & planning reform. The existing system isn’t working. Lot of detail work here though - just ripping off controls a la the Truss regime is a recipe for asset stripping, as we’ve already seen, which is of no long term benefit to the country.
There’s also a ton of stuff we should be doing that will pay long term dividends, but those things cost money in the here & now, and may not be possible, but some things we might spend money on include:
1) criminal justice reform.
2) energy security / green transition.
3) Early years education / care.
& a bunch of other things.
2/2 ...in surplus, according to the company's most recent financial results. Nevertheless, the fact that Serco's trustees had to seek a standby credit facility of this nature underlines the scale of the panic caused among UK corporate pension trustees.
https://news.sky.com/story/1bn-serco-pension-scheme-seeks-loan-from-outsourcer-amid-markets-turmoil-12708127
No way someone on £30k can afford a £600k home, that's insane!
Yeah its maybe dangerous that Putin is on borrowed time, but removing a dictator from time to time discourages the others, and the fat lady is absolutely clearing her throat for Putinism.
So that drink in Tallinn next year is totally on.
https://twitter.com/WJames_Reuters/status/1575777196672704512
The idea that the Government, any Government, aren't the solution to life's problems is kind of something I believe in. I have so little faith in the Government and the Treasury, I want to see less of it.
The fact that the numbers were ballsed up as badly as this, kind of feeds into my thinking. I doubt these figures were ran past Truss or Kwarteng, but this is the kind of bollocks the Treasury deals with.
5,000 deserted the Irish military to do so.
It's not clear the higher Corporation tax rates will result in better growth but it is clear the low Corporation tax rates have existed alongside a period of sod all growth. And that's in a time when my productivity has probably tripled....