Warmed over socialism, which will end up where socialism always ends up: with everyone worse off
But we have to endure this, the Tories have failed, and so we must go through the same process of experimenting with the left until it is proven that it does not work
Did Britain do something very bad to deserve all this?
I keep trying to warn about this, particularly those tempted by Starmer on the basis "things couldn't possibly be worse".
Of course, there are those who might be attracted by such a radical prospectus, but it's going to be very expensive, probably a drag on business & consumption, and thus growth, and we're all going to be paying an awful lot more tax.
I’m not sure what you are warning of here. This is a really promising policy offer, much of which is constantly demanded on here by left and right wing posters.
Shift taxes toward wealth.
Create a sovereign wealth fund and support domestic industry to reduce the balance of trade deficit.
Devolve power and second power to beefed up local government.
Improve R&D and capital investment to peer economy levels.
Maintain a balanced budget across the cycle.
Dismissing this as reheated 70s Labour or whatever is the sign of not paying attention.
Collective bargaining and action, and large extension of workers rights, is what worries me.
Also, the cost commitments they are listing there are vast, and current planned tax rises won't do it, so it will all put a huge burden on the economy.
I don’t think the cost commitments are vast and in any case nobody is now looking at the UK economy without diagnosing a chronic lack of investment.
I await the detail on collective bargaining. I would certainly welcome a modest tipping of the scales from capital to labour, though.
I think there's a huge amount buried in that with all sorts of things to come, including property and land taxes for ordinary homeowners and pension reliefs going.
What's been laid out there is probably £100bn+ pa of extra public spending.
The spending is necessary.
Britain feels highly taxed but that’s because the weight is on income rather than capital; it’s at the lower end of tax per GDP.
Housing and childcare reform to lower the costs of both would make a massive, massive impact. Tertiary fees, too.
Tax isn't a free lunch. It crowds out consumption and private investment, and we'd do well to remember that. It's also quite easy to make a long list of things that'd be solved by more spending and quite another to raise the funds.
I think we'd get high income and capital tax without the results.
I want to see government cutting back on drags like pensions and investing in things that raise productivity and grow the pie, and that includes competitive taxes. We can then afford more stuff.
No we would not do well to remember that. It’s not borne out at the macro level, as far as I know.
Of course there are harmful taxes that disincentivise things we want, there may also be a correlation between high tax and dirigiste economic policy, but to just say, oh high tax is harmful is belied by the global data.
I could just as easily say low tax is bad and point to the shocking fate of the worst off in the USA, or the economic piss-poverty of the UK today.
Whatever the problems of the UK, they can't fairly be said to be the result of low tax. Because that would assume we have low tax.
The UK is (still) a low tax economy by western standards.
You seem to think there's an easy answer: to tax the UK into prosperity.
That's so much bullshit, as decades of economic experience from countries that have tried to do the same will attest to.
The Scandinavian nations are prosperous
"Scandinavia" is the Godwin's law of the tax debate.
They exist though, and so does Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, etc etc etc.
Wishing them away doesn’t get you anywhere.
Germany, Austria and the Netherlands don't tax anything like Scandinavian levels.
European taxes average at about 41.1%, not much higher than us. And we are mid-range.
The idea there is some vast tax goldmine here that's untapped is laughable.
The next (Labour) government faces some very painful decisions, and putting up taxes is no free lunch. On the other hand, as I maintain, putting up taxes is not automatically and necessarily harmful to the economy as your own charts there surely confirm.
Economies we’d want to compare ourselves with (ie not Romania) take a greater percentage of tax than we do.
Switzerland is the very interesting outlier. It’s possible though that they have such high incomes that a lower percentage tax take delivers what they need in terms of real public spend.
I’ve seen a related argument made on healthcare spend, ie even though the UK now spends close to OECD averages as a percentage of GDP on healthcare it’s still not getting bang for buck because UK GDP is just lower. I don’t really buy it I think, but I’m not dismissing it either.
Donalds comes in on 19, down just the one. Jeffries still ahead
You’d think that the US House of all places would have some sort of push button electronic voting? Even ordinary local authorities in the UK have progressed away from calling the names one by one, nowadays.
Edit/ Donald gains a twentieth from the roll call of apparent abstainers.
The same result as before including the wilful abstention
If anyone wnats to see the biggest cheat in Horse Racing watch the riding of Kraken Power in the 3.20 at Newcastle today. Paul Mulrennan should be banned for life.
As someone who has no knowledge and no interest in horse racing I decided that I should watch the video expecting to see some blatant cheating. Watched the video and from my perspective with no knowledge I couldn't see anything wrong. Read the summary and whilst I know I am reading English I do not understand it. I know understand again why I have no interest in horse racing.
It doesn't look good to me. He backs right off and then gets going again but it's too late to catch the leaders.
In my 40 years of following horse racing this is the worse I have seen, With 2 furlongs to go he was in 3rd and cantering, with 1 furlong to go he had pulled the horse back to be 2 lengths last. When all chance had gone he let the horse run and it came flying through. Its the most obvious cheat I have ever seen.
Mulrennan's mistake was to get caught behind two weakening outsiders at a key moment - the two he tracked (who finished last and last but one) fell back as the rest of the field moved forward leaving Mulrennan trapped at the back. That was poor judgement but calling it a "cheat" is a bit of a stretch.
Horse racing may not be as honest as Pro Wrestling but it's a lot cleaner than football or cricket (perhaps).
Why did he pull the horse to 2 lengths last from 3rd with 2 furlongs to go, there was no need to do that at all, the whole left side of the course was available. He had a horse full of running, he could have just pulled his horse to the left and he would have won easily yet he decided to pull his horse to 2 lengths last. You can actually see him look up and see he had no chance before he let the horse run.
I have also never seen such a reaction to a ride on the Betfair Forum.
I had no financial interest in the race.
The race winner, CATHERINE CHROI, was tracking KRAKEN POWER and went to that horse's left to deliver the run which turned out to be the winning run. Again, not seen the head on so I'd like to see how much room there really was.
If anyone wnats to see the biggest cheat in Horse Racing watch the riding of Kraken Power in the 3.20 at Newcastle today. Paul Mulrennan should be banned for life.
As someone who has no knowledge and no interest in horse racing I decided that I should watch the video expecting to see some blatant cheating. Watched the video and from my perspective with no knowledge I couldn't see anything wrong. Read the summary and whilst I know I am reading English I do not understand it. I know understand again why I have no interest in horse racing.
It doesn't look good to me. He backs right off and then gets going again but it's too late to catch the leaders.
In my 40 years of following horse racing this is the worse I have seen, With 2 furlongs to go he was in 3rd and cantering, with 1 furlong to go he had pulled the horse back to be 2 lengths last. When all chance had gone he let the horse run and it came flying through. Its the most obvious cheat I have ever seen.
Mulrennan's mistake was to get caught behind two weakening outsiders at a key moment - the two he tracked (who finished last and last but one) fell back as the rest of the field moved forward leaving Mulrennan trapped at the back. That was poor judgement but calling it a "cheat" is a bit of a stretch.
Horse racing may not be as honest as Pro Wrestling but it's a lot cleaner than football or cricket (perhaps).
Pro wrestling has no pretensions of being an honest contest though.
I agree that the Lib Dems need to front up with a loose roadmap back toward the single market.
I also think they need to find a way to square the circle on the nimbyism. It would need a log post or perhaps a thread-header to explain how, but at the top level we need both a commitment to push toward building (or, for the market to build) half a million houses a year AND a commitment to respecting local plans AND protection for the green belt besides.
So apple pie for everyone.
Next time I see someone campaigning on "No houses round 'ere", I will challenge their proven racism.
If I lived in a lovely village in Wiltshire or whatever I would also campaign against new housing.
The English (and probably British) “dream” is a Georgian rectory up a long driveway. But clearly, given the landmass and the population, that can’t happen for everyone.
We need to use state power to encourage building higher in towns and cities, essentially, and break up the housing builder oligopoly.
Trouble is, most people don't want to live that way.
As you say they want the house and garden.
Two catches though.
The key one is that people who already have houses and gardens are often too happy to deny those boons to other people, whose main mistake was to be born too late.
The subtler (and less certain one) is the idea that all this lowrise sprawl is horribly inefficient. As in, makes cities less good at generating wealth. A quick primer with pictures;
As with some other cherished beliefs on left and right, we do come back to the question- how seriously do we want the country to be rich? How much wealth are we prepared to throw away?
There’s also a view that “no garden” is sub-par.
It is not beyond the wit of the British to design 6 floor towers, with balconies, around a garden square.
Indeed this may be preferable to the scrubby tip-heap seemingly the norm for many gardens.
These aren't six stories, but they show what could be done;
And what can be done now;
And people happily pay full whack for them. It's a bit Curtisland London, but it's baffling to me that we don't build more of these.
I get what you mean by Curtisland, and I am personally just as enthusiastic about modern domestic architecture (not in the Uk, but in NZ etc), but if the South East was wall to wall this instead of Barratt homes wouldn’t it look so much better?
If anyone wnats to see the biggest cheat in Horse Racing watch the riding of Kraken Power in the 3.20 at Newcastle today. Paul Mulrennan should be banned for life.
As someone who has no knowledge and no interest in horse racing I decided that I should watch the video expecting to see some blatant cheating. Watched the video and from my perspective with no knowledge I couldn't see anything wrong. Read the summary and whilst I know I am reading English I do not understand it. I know understand again why I have no interest in horse racing.
It doesn't look good to me. He backs right off and then gets going again but it's too late to catch the leaders.
In my 40 years of following horse racing this is the worse I have seen, With 2 furlongs to go he was in 3rd and cantering, with 1 furlong to go he had pulled the horse back to be 2 lengths last. When all chance had gone he let the horse run and it came flying through. Its the most obvious cheat I have ever seen.
Mulrennan's mistake was to get caught behind two weakening outsiders at a key moment - the two he tracked (who finished last and last but one) fell back as the rest of the field moved forward leaving Mulrennan trapped at the back. That was poor judgement but calling it a "cheat" is a bit of a stretch.
Horse racing may not be as honest as Pro Wrestling but it's a lot cleaner than football or cricket (perhaps).
Why did he pull the horse to 2 lengths last from 3rd with 2 furlongs to go, there was no need to do that at all, the whole left side of the course was available. He had a horse full of running, he could have just pulled his horse to the left and he would have won easily yet he decided to pull his horse to 2 lengths last. You can actually see him look up and see he had no chance before he let the horse run.
I have also never seen such a reaction to a ride on the Betfair Forum.
I had no financial interest in the race.
The race winner, CATHERINE CHROI, was tracking KRAKEN POWER and went to that horse's left to deliver the run which turned out to be the winning run. Again, not seen the head on so I'd like to see how much room there really was.
Those shocked by such events obviously never followed the career of Keiren Fallon.
Warmed over socialism, which will end up where socialism always ends up: with everyone worse off
But we have to endure this, the Tories have failed, and so we must go through the same process of experimenting with the left until it is proven that it does not work
Did Britain do something very bad to deserve all this?
I keep trying to warn about this, particularly those tempted by Starmer on the basis "things couldn't possibly be worse".
Of course, there are those who might be attracted by such a radical prospectus, but it's going to be very expensive, probably a drag on business & consumption, and thus growth, and we're all going to be paying an awful lot more tax.
I’m not sure what you are warning of here. This is a really promising policy offer, much of which is constantly demanded on here by left and right wing posters.
Shift taxes toward wealth.
Create a sovereign wealth fund and support domestic industry to reduce the balance of trade deficit.
Devolve power and second power to beefed up local government.
Improve R&D and capital investment to peer economy levels.
Maintain a balanced budget across the cycle.
Dismissing this as reheated 70s Labour or whatever is the sign of not paying attention.
Collective bargaining and action, and large extension of workers rights, is what worries me.
Also, the cost commitments they are listing there are vast, and current planned tax rises won't do it, so it will all put a huge burden on the economy.
I don’t think the cost commitments are vast and in any case nobody is now looking at the UK economy without diagnosing a chronic lack of investment.
I await the detail on collective bargaining. I would certainly welcome a modest tipping of the scales from capital to labour, though.
I think there's a huge amount buried in that with all sorts of things to come, including property and land taxes for ordinary homeowners and pension reliefs going.
What's been laid out there is probably £100bn+ pa of extra public spending.
The spending is necessary.
Britain feels highly taxed but that’s because the weight is on income rather than capital; it’s at the lower end of tax per GDP.
Housing and childcare reform to lower the costs of both would make a massive, massive impact. Tertiary fees, too.
Tax isn't a free lunch. It crowds out consumption and private investment, and we'd do well to remember that. It's also quite easy to make a long list of things that'd be solved by more spending and quite another to raise the funds.
I think we'd get high income and capital tax without the results.
I want to see government cutting back on drags like pensions and investing in things that raise productivity and grow the pie, and that includes competitive taxes. We can then afford more stuff.
No we would not do well to remember that. It’s not borne out at the macro level, as far as I know.
Of course there are harmful taxes that disincentivise things we want, there may also be a correlation between high tax and dirigiste economic policy, but to just say, oh high tax is harmful is belied by the global data.
I could just as easily say low tax is bad and point to the shocking fate of the worst off in the USA, or the economic piss-poverty of the UK today.
Whatever the problems of the UK, they can't fairly be said to be the result of low tax. Because that would assume we have low tax.
The UK is (still) a low tax economy by western standards.
You seem to think there's an easy answer: to tax the UK into prosperity.
That's so much bullshit, as decades of economic experience from countries that have tried to do the same will attest to.
No I didn’t say that.
I just think that it’s preposterous to say “we would do well to remember higher taxes crowd out…”
Decades of economic experience does not support you, you’ve been weaned on too much Telegraph.
I would argue the underlying economic model (market versus statist), labour flexibility, property rights, treatment of investment costs and various other things are more impactful than the raw percentage of GDP taken in tax.
High tax creates the problems it always has: it crowds out consumption, innovation, and investment in the private sector, and reduces the incentives to take risks because its the government appropriating more of the economy to spend on social programmes and they tend to misallocate resources or skew them away from where they'd most profitably be applied.
High tax countries tend to be less innovative, dynamic and creative, and struggle to sustain prosperity and growth over time.
None of these rules have changed. It's not a free lunch.
Donalds comes in on 19, down just the one. Jeffries still ahead
You’d think that the US House of all places would have some sort of push button electronic voting? Even ordinary local authorities in the UK have progressed away from calling the names one by one, nowadays.
Edit/ Donald gains a twentieth from the roll call of apparent abstainers.
The same result as before including the wilful abstention
Donalds did NOT lose a vote. Roll call #5 identical to roll call #4.
Byron Donalds called Wednesday an "invigorating" day for America because it illustrated that tough conversations can happen on Capitol Hill and lawmakers can "do things for the betterment of their constituents."
Addendum - note that increasing number of members are NOT in chamber when their name is called the first time through the alphabet. However, the clerk then goes back and re-reads names of the missing.
Higher state taxes in rich US states were subsidised for a long time by the federal mortgage interest relief (or "deduction") that transferred a lot more household tax relief to high-price blue states. Paul Ryan insisted on capping it to pay for the Trump tax bill, at a debt level that affected New York a lot more than Houston. Almost immediately suburbs across the US swung to the Democrats, but the point is that federal and state tax policies were balancing each other, until they weren't.
"Scandinavia" is the Godwin's law of the tax debate.
It is possible to achieve economic growth alongside high(er) levels of personal and corporate taxation. The argument however isn't about what works for Denmark, Belgium or Austria but what would work in the UK and as with so much else, we're caught between the European and American economic models and instead of taking the best bits of both to create the best country possible, we've somehow contrived to do something different.
You can't run a Scandinavian social welfare model on our levels of taxation - nor perhaps should we try. There's an argument the NHS is no longer fit for purpose but nor must we get to a point when a sick individual is unable to seek medical help because they can't afford to see a doctor.
The thing about tax is it isn't hypothecated - my money goes into the same pot as yours and pays for nuclear weapons, education and capital infrastructure as much as yours. I might prefer my taxation to be spent differently but democracy doesn't work that way.
That doesn't mean I don't want to get the deficit down and reduce the burden of debt to be passed on to future generations - the unsupportable borrowing of recent times was always going to have a reckoning, whether political or fiscal. Spending £120 billion on debt interest payments seems appalling - that £120 billion could and should be spent elsewhere (or perhaps given back as tax cuts).
High Scandinavian taxes here wouldn't work in the same way low Singapore taxes wouldn't. We are a large, complex and economically and socially diverse country, not a small, monolithic, and closely knit one.
There's not an economy in the world that's copied that model in either Europe, North America, or the wider world of comparable size to our own.
France and Germany come closest but, yes, they achieve that through much higher compulsory social insurance contributions not higher income tax - France tried it a few years ago under Hollande's 75% supertax and had to back pedal sharpish.
Fair point - we are a complex and diverse economy and society. That, to a certain extent, mitigates against simple solutions such as simple tax cutting or raising.
The big change is or are the demographics and that hasn't happened overnight though it seems to have been a surprise to several Governments, both Conservative and Labour.
Warmed over socialism, which will end up where socialism always ends up: with everyone worse off
But we have to endure this, the Tories have failed, and so we must go through the same process of experimenting with the left until it is proven that it does not work
Did Britain do something very bad to deserve all this?
I keep trying to warn about this, particularly those tempted by Starmer on the basis "things couldn't possibly be worse".
Of course, there are those who might be attracted by such a radical prospectus, but it's going to be very expensive, probably a drag on business & consumption, and thus growth, and we're all going to be paying an awful lot more tax.
I’m not sure what you are warning of here. This is a really promising policy offer, much of which is constantly demanded on here by left and right wing posters.
Shift taxes toward wealth.
Create a sovereign wealth fund and support domestic industry to reduce the balance of trade deficit.
Devolve power and second power to beefed up local government.
Improve R&D and capital investment to peer economy levels.
Maintain a balanced budget across the cycle.
Dismissing this as reheated 70s Labour or whatever is the sign of not paying attention.
Collective bargaining and action, and large extension of workers rights, is what worries me.
Also, the cost commitments they are listing there are vast, and current planned tax rises won't do it, so it will all put a huge burden on the economy.
I don’t think the cost commitments are vast and in any case nobody is now looking at the UK economy without diagnosing a chronic lack of investment.
I await the detail on collective bargaining. I would certainly welcome a modest tipping of the scales from capital to labour, though.
I think there's a huge amount buried in that with all sorts of things to come, including property and land taxes for ordinary homeowners and pension reliefs going.
What's been laid out there is probably £100bn+ pa of extra public spending.
The spending is necessary.
Britain feels highly taxed but that’s because the weight is on income rather than capital; it’s at the lower end of tax per GDP.
Housing and childcare reform to lower the costs of both would make a massive, massive impact. Tertiary fees, too.
Tax isn't a free lunch. It crowds out consumption and private investment, and we'd do well to remember that. It's also quite easy to make a long list of things that'd be solved by more spending and quite another to raise the funds.
I think we'd get high income and capital tax without the results.
I want to see government cutting back on drags like pensions and investing in things that raise productivity and grow the pie, and that includes competitive taxes. We can then afford more stuff.
No we would not do well to remember that. It’s not borne out at the macro level, as far as I know.
Of course there are harmful taxes that disincentivise things we want, there may also be a correlation between high tax and dirigiste economic policy, but to just say, oh high tax is harmful is belied by the global data.
I could just as easily say low tax is bad and point to the shocking fate of the worst off in the USA, or the economic piss-poverty of the UK today.
Whatever the problems of the UK, they can't fairly be said to be the result of low tax. Because that would assume we have low tax.
The UK is (still) a low tax economy by western standards.
You seem to think there's an easy answer: to tax the UK into prosperity.
That's so much bullshit, as decades of economic experience from countries that have tried to do the same will attest to.
The Scandinavian nations are prosperous
"Scandinavia" is the Godwin's law of the tax debate.
They exist though, and so does Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, etc etc etc.
Wishing them away doesn’t get you anywhere.
Germany, Austria and the Netherlands don't tax anything like Scandinavian levels.
European taxes average at about 41.1%, not much higher than us. And we are mid-range.
The idea there is some vast tax goldmine here that's untapped is laughable.
The next (Labour) government faces some very painful decisions, and putting up taxes is no free lunch. On the other hand, as I maintain, putting up taxes is not automatically and necessarily harmful to the economy as your own charts there surely confirm.
Economies we’d want to compare ourselves with (ie not Romania) take a greater percentage of tax than we do.
Switzerland is the very interesting outlier. It’s possible though that they have such high incomes that a lower percentage tax take delivers what they need in terms of real public spend.
I’ve seen a related argument made on healthcare spend, ie even though the UK now spends close to OECD averages as a percentage of GDP on healthcare it’s still not getting bang for buck because UK GDP is just lower. I don’t really buy it I think, but I’m not dismissing it either.
Yes, if you have very high income and growth, and good demographics, you can have your cake and eat it - good public services and low taxation at the same time.
My thesis is just different to yours: I think we need to earn the growth and grow the pie through higher investment and better productivity first, and then spend the fruits on public services; not the other way round and hope the growth follows- because I don't think it will.
Warmed over socialism, which will end up where socialism always ends up: with everyone worse off
But we have to endure this, the Tories have failed, and so we must go through the same process of experimenting with the left until it is proven that it does not work
Did Britain do something very bad to deserve all this?
I keep trying to warn about this, particularly those tempted by Starmer on the basis "things couldn't possibly be worse".
Of course, there are those who might be attracted by such a radical prospectus, but it's going to be very expensive, probably a drag on business & consumption, and thus growth, and we're all going to be paying an awful lot more tax.
I’m not sure what you are warning of here. This is a really promising policy offer, much of which is constantly demanded on here by left and right wing posters.
Shift taxes toward wealth.
Create a sovereign wealth fund and support domestic industry to reduce the balance of trade deficit.
Devolve power and second power to beefed up local government.
Improve R&D and capital investment to peer economy levels.
Maintain a balanced budget across the cycle.
Dismissing this as reheated 70s Labour or whatever is the sign of not paying attention.
Collective bargaining and action, and large extension of workers rights, is what worries me.
Also, the cost commitments they are listing there are vast, and current planned tax rises won't do it, so it will all put a huge burden on the economy.
I don’t think the cost commitments are vast and in any case nobody is now looking at the UK economy without diagnosing a chronic lack of investment.
I await the detail on collective bargaining. I would certainly welcome a modest tipping of the scales from capital to labour, though.
I think there's a huge amount buried in that with all sorts of things to come, including property and land taxes for ordinary homeowners and pension reliefs going.
What's been laid out there is probably £100bn+ pa of extra public spending.
The spending is necessary.
Britain feels highly taxed but that’s because the weight is on income rather than capital; it’s at the lower end of tax per GDP.
Housing and childcare reform to lower the costs of both would make a massive, massive impact. Tertiary fees, too.
Tax isn't a free lunch. It crowds out consumption and private investment, and we'd do well to remember that. It's also quite easy to make a long list of things that'd be solved by more spending and quite another to raise the funds.
I think we'd get high income and capital tax without the results.
I want to see government cutting back on drags like pensions and investing in things that raise productivity and grow the pie, and that includes competitive taxes. We can then afford more stuff.
No we would not do well to remember that. It’s not borne out at the macro level, as far as I know.
Of course there are harmful taxes that disincentivise things we want, there may also be a correlation between high tax and dirigiste economic policy, but to just say, oh high tax is harmful is belied by the global data.
I could just as easily say low tax is bad and point to the shocking fate of the worst off in the USA, or the economic piss-poverty of the UK today.
Whatever the problems of the UK, they can't fairly be said to be the result of low tax. Because that would assume we have low tax.
The UK is (still) a low tax economy by western standards.
You seem to think there's an easy answer: to tax the UK into prosperity.
That's so much bullshit, as decades of economic experience from countries that have tried to do the same will attest to.
No I didn’t say that.
I just think that it’s preposterous to say “we would do well to remember higher taxes crowd out…”
Decades of economic experience does not support you, you’ve been weaned on too much Telegraph.
I would argue the underlying economic model (market versus statist), labour flexibility, property rights, treatment of investment costs and various other things are more impactful than the raw percentage of GDP taken in tax.
High tax creates the problems it always has: it crowds out consumption, innovation, and investment in the private sector, and reduces the incentives to take risks because its the government appropriating more of the economy to spend on social programmes and they tend to misallocate resources or skew them away from where they'd most profitably be applied.
High tax countries tend to be less innovative, dynamic and creative, and struggle to sustain prosperity and growth over time.
None of these rules have changed. It's not a free lunch.
Even accepting the point, it would be interesting to consider whether the same factors would apply were the taxation to be shifted away from income, and toward wealth? An argument could be made that this would have the opposite effect, taxing capital sitting idle and encouraging people to maximise their income?
Warmed over socialism, which will end up where socialism always ends up: with everyone worse off
But we have to endure this, the Tories have failed, and so we must go through the same process of experimenting with the left until it is proven that it does not work
Did Britain do something very bad to deserve all this?
I keep trying to warn about this, particularly those tempted by Starmer on the basis "things couldn't possibly be worse".
Of course, there are those who might be attracted by such a radical prospectus, but it's going to be very expensive, probably a drag on business & consumption, and thus growth, and we're all going to be paying an awful lot more tax.
I’m not sure what you are warning of here. This is a really promising policy offer, much of which is constantly demanded on here by left and right wing posters.
Shift taxes toward wealth.
Create a sovereign wealth fund and support domestic industry to reduce the balance of trade deficit.
Devolve power and second power to beefed up local government.
Improve R&D and capital investment to peer economy levels.
Maintain a balanced budget across the cycle.
Dismissing this as reheated 70s Labour or whatever is the sign of not paying attention.
Collective bargaining and action, and large extension of workers rights, is what worries me.
Also, the cost commitments they are listing there are vast, and current planned tax rises won't do it, so it will all put a huge burden on the economy.
I don’t think the cost commitments are vast and in any case nobody is now looking at the UK economy without diagnosing a chronic lack of investment.
I await the detail on collective bargaining. I would certainly welcome a modest tipping of the scales from capital to labour, though.
I think there's a huge amount buried in that with all sorts of things to come, including property and land taxes for ordinary homeowners and pension reliefs going.
What's been laid out there is probably £100bn+ pa of extra public spending.
The spending is necessary.
Britain feels highly taxed but that’s because the weight is on income rather than capital; it’s at the lower end of tax per GDP.
Housing and childcare reform to lower the costs of both would make a massive, massive impact. Tertiary fees, too.
Tax isn't a free lunch. It crowds out consumption and private investment, and we'd do well to remember that. It's also quite easy to make a long list of things that'd be solved by more spending and quite another to raise the funds.
I think we'd get high income and capital tax without the results.
I want to see government cutting back on drags like pensions and investing in things that raise productivity and grow the pie, and that includes competitive taxes. We can then afford more stuff.
No we would not do well to remember that. It’s not borne out at the macro level, as far as I know.
Of course there are harmful taxes that disincentivise things we want, there may also be a correlation between high tax and dirigiste economic policy, but to just say, oh high tax is harmful is belied by the global data.
I could just as easily say low tax is bad and point to the shocking fate of the worst off in the USA, or the economic piss-poverty of the UK today.
Whatever the problems of the UK, they can't fairly be said to be the result of low tax. Because that would assume we have low tax.
The UK is (still) a low tax economy by western standards.
You seem to think there's an easy answer: to tax the UK into prosperity.
That's so much bullshit, as decades of economic experience from countries that have tried to do the same will attest to.
No I didn’t say that.
I just think that it’s preposterous to say “we would do well to remember higher taxes crowd out…”
Decades of economic experience does not support you, you’ve been weaned on too much Telegraph.
I would argue the underlying economic model (market versus statist), labour flexibility, property rights, treatment of investment costs and various other things are more impactful than the raw percentage of GDP taken in tax.
High tax creates the problems it always has: it crowds out consumption, innovation, and investment in the private sector, and reduces the incentives to take risks because its the government appropriating more of the economy to spend on social programmes and they tend to misallocate resources or skew them away from where they'd most profitably be applied.
High tax countries tend to be less innovative, dynamic and creative, and struggle to sustain prosperity and growth over time.
None of these rules have changed. It's not a free lunch.
Thats fine but your own chart shows that the richest countries in Europe bar Ireland (whose figures are suspect), Switzerland (which exception I noted) and perhaps Spain (worth delving into) all tax more than the UK.
Britain tax level, interestingly, is on a par with Australia, NZ and I think Canada. Seems the Anglosphere like it in the mid to late 30s.
McCarthy has slipped back another 1 but to present rather than Donald, who seems to have taken over from Jim Jordan. Basically going nowhere at the moment.
Donalds comes in on 19, down just the one. Jeffries still ahead
You’d think that the US House of all places would have some sort of push button electronic voting? Even ordinary local authorities in the UK have progressed away from calling the names one by one, nowadays.
Edit/ Donald gains a twentieth from the roll call of apparent abstainers.
The same result as before including the wilful abstention
Donalds did NOT lose a vote. Roll call #5 identical to roll call #4.
Byron Donalds called Wednesday an "invigorating" day for America because it illustrated that tough conversations can happen on Capitol Hill and lawmakers can "do things for the betterment of their constituents."
Hence the edit to my post, which you yourself have quoted
McCarthy has slipped back another 1 but to present rather than Donald, who seems to have taken over from Jim Jordan. Basically going nowhere at the moment.
Actually the result was precisely the same, after the abstentions had been called again
Warmed over socialism, which will end up where socialism always ends up: with everyone worse off
But we have to endure this, the Tories have failed, and so we must go through the same process of experimenting with the left until it is proven that it does not work
Did Britain do something very bad to deserve all this?
I keep trying to warn about this, particularly those tempted by Starmer on the basis "things couldn't possibly be worse".
Of course, there are those who might be attracted by such a radical prospectus, but it's going to be very expensive, probably a drag on business & consumption, and thus growth, and we're all going to be paying an awful lot more tax.
I’m not sure what you are warning of here. This is a really promising policy offer, much of which is constantly demanded on here by left and right wing posters.
Shift taxes toward wealth.
Create a sovereign wealth fund and support domestic industry to reduce the balance of trade deficit.
Devolve power and second power to beefed up local government.
Improve R&D and capital investment to peer economy levels.
Maintain a balanced budget across the cycle.
Dismissing this as reheated 70s Labour or whatever is the sign of not paying attention.
Collective bargaining and action, and large extension of workers rights, is what worries me.
Also, the cost commitments they are listing there are vast, and current planned tax rises won't do it, so it will all put a huge burden on the economy.
I don’t think the cost commitments are vast and in any case nobody is now looking at the UK economy without diagnosing a chronic lack of investment.
I await the detail on collective bargaining. I would certainly welcome a modest tipping of the scales from capital to labour, though.
I think there's a huge amount buried in that with all sorts of things to come, including property and land taxes for ordinary homeowners and pension reliefs going.
What's been laid out there is probably £100bn+ pa of extra public spending.
The spending is necessary.
Britain feels highly taxed but that’s because the weight is on income rather than capital; it’s at the lower end of tax per GDP.
Housing and childcare reform to lower the costs of both would make a massive, massive impact. Tertiary fees, too.
Tax isn't a free lunch. It crowds out consumption and private investment, and we'd do well to remember that. It's also quite easy to make a long list of things that'd be solved by more spending and quite another to raise the funds.
I think we'd get high income and capital tax without the results.
I want to see government cutting back on drags like pensions and investing in things that raise productivity and grow the pie, and that includes competitive taxes. We can then afford more stuff.
No we would not do well to remember that. It’s not borne out at the macro level, as far as I know.
Of course there are harmful taxes that disincentivise things we want, there may also be a correlation between high tax and dirigiste economic policy, but to just say, oh high tax is harmful is belied by the global data.
I could just as easily say low tax is bad and point to the shocking fate of the worst off in the USA, or the economic piss-poverty of the UK today.
Whatever the problems of the UK, they can't fairly be said to be the result of low tax. Because that would assume we have low tax.
The UK is (still) a low tax economy by western standards.
You seem to think there's an easy answer: to tax the UK into prosperity.
That's so much bullshit, as decades of economic experience from countries that have tried to do the same will attest to.
The Scandinavian nations are prosperous
"Scandinavia" is the Godwin's law of the tax debate.
They exist though, and so does Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, etc etc etc.
Wishing them away doesn’t get you anywhere.
Germany, Austria and the Netherlands don't tax anything like Scandinavian levels.
European taxes average at about 41.1%, not much higher than us. And we are mid-range.
The idea there is some vast tax goldmine here that's untapped is laughable.
From those 2019 figures, if we taxed at the same rate as France the UK could have had an extra £145bn of tax revenue (6.5% GDP) that year and run a surplus of £100bn rather than a deficit, or ran a surplus of say £50bn and invested in £50bn in hospital, school and transport infrastructure.
If anyone wnats to see the biggest cheat in Horse Racing watch the riding of Kraken Power in the 3.20 at Newcastle today. Paul Mulrennan should be banned for life.
As someone who has no knowledge and no interest in horse racing I decided that I should watch the video expecting to see some blatant cheating. Watched the video and from my perspective with no knowledge I couldn't see anything wrong. Read the summary and whilst I know I am reading English I do not understand it. I know understand again why I have no interest in horse racing.
It doesn't look good to me. He backs right off and then gets going again but it's too late to catch the leaders.
In my 40 years of following horse racing this is the worse I have seen, With 2 furlongs to go he was in 3rd and cantering, with 1 furlong to go he had pulled the horse back to be 2 lengths last. When all chance had gone he let the horse run and it came flying through. Its the most obvious cheat I have ever seen.
Mulrennan's mistake was to get caught behind two weakening outsiders at a key moment - the two he tracked (who finished last and last but one) fell back as the rest of the field moved forward leaving Mulrennan trapped at the back. That was poor judgement but calling it a "cheat" is a bit of a stretch.
Horse racing may not be as honest as Pro Wrestling but it's a lot cleaner than football or cricket (perhaps).
Why did he pull the horse to 2 lengths last from 3rd with 2 furlongs to go, there was no need to do that at all, the whole left side of the course was available. He had a horse full of running, he could have just pulled his horse to the left and he would have won easily yet he decided to pull his horse to 2 lengths last. You can actually see him look up and see he had no chance before he let the horse run.
I have also never seen such a reaction to a ride on the Betfair Forum.
I had no financial interest in the race.
The race winner, CATHERINE CHROI, was tracking KRAKEN POWER and went to that horse's left to deliver the run which turned out to be the winning run. Again, not seen the head on so I'd like to see how much room there really was.
Those shocked by such events obviously never followed the career of Keiren Fallon.
Warmed over socialism, which will end up where socialism always ends up: with everyone worse off
But we have to endure this, the Tories have failed, and so we must go through the same process of experimenting with the left until it is proven that it does not work
Did Britain do something very bad to deserve all this?
I keep trying to warn about this, particularly those tempted by Starmer on the basis "things couldn't possibly be worse".
Of course, there are those who might be attracted by such a radical prospectus, but it's going to be very expensive, probably a drag on business & consumption, and thus growth, and we're all going to be paying an awful lot more tax.
I’m not sure what you are warning of here. This is a really promising policy offer, much of which is constantly demanded on here by left and right wing posters.
Shift taxes toward wealth.
Create a sovereign wealth fund and support domestic industry to reduce the balance of trade deficit.
Devolve power and second power to beefed up local government.
Improve R&D and capital investment to peer economy levels.
Maintain a balanced budget across the cycle.
Dismissing this as reheated 70s Labour or whatever is the sign of not paying attention.
Collective bargaining and action, and large extension of workers rights, is what worries me.
Also, the cost commitments they are listing there are vast, and current planned tax rises won't do it, so it will all put a huge burden on the economy.
I don’t think the cost commitments are vast and in any case nobody is now looking at the UK economy without diagnosing a chronic lack of investment.
I await the detail on collective bargaining. I would certainly welcome a modest tipping of the scales from capital to labour, though.
I think there's a huge amount buried in that with all sorts of things to come, including property and land taxes for ordinary homeowners and pension reliefs going.
What's been laid out there is probably £100bn+ pa of extra public spending.
The spending is necessary.
Britain feels highly taxed but that’s because the weight is on income rather than capital; it’s at the lower end of tax per GDP.
Housing and childcare reform to lower the costs of both would make a massive, massive impact. Tertiary fees, too.
Tax isn't a free lunch. It crowds out consumption and private investment, and we'd do well to remember that. It's also quite easy to make a long list of things that'd be solved by more spending and quite another to raise the funds.
I think we'd get high income and capital tax without the results.
I want to see government cutting back on drags like pensions and investing in things that raise productivity and grow the pie, and that includes competitive taxes. We can then afford more stuff.
No we would not do well to remember that. It’s not borne out at the macro level, as far as I know.
Of course there are harmful taxes that disincentivise things we want, there may also be a correlation between high tax and dirigiste economic policy, but to just say, oh high tax is harmful is belied by the global data.
I could just as easily say low tax is bad and point to the shocking fate of the worst off in the USA, or the economic piss-poverty of the UK today.
Whatever the problems of the UK, they can't fairly be said to be the result of low tax. Because that would assume we have low tax.
The UK is (still) a low tax economy by western standards.
You seem to think there's an easy answer: to tax the UK into prosperity.
That's so much bullshit, as decades of economic experience from countries that have tried to do the same will attest to.
No I didn’t say that.
I just think that it’s preposterous to say “we would do well to remember higher taxes crowd out…”
Decades of economic experience does not support you, you’ve been weaned on too much Telegraph.
I would argue the underlying economic model (market versus statist), labour flexibility, property rights, treatment of investment costs and various other things are more impactful than the raw percentage of GDP taken in tax.
High tax creates the problems it always has: it crowds out consumption, innovation, and investment in the private sector, and reduces the incentives to take risks because its the government appropriating more of the economy to spend on social programmes and they tend to misallocate resources or skew them away from where they'd most profitably be applied.
High tax countries tend to be less innovative, dynamic and creative, and struggle to sustain prosperity and growth over time.
None of these rules have changed. It's not a free lunch.
Even accepting the point, it would be interesting to consider whether the same factors would apply were the taxation to be shifted away from income, and toward wealth? An argument could be made that this would have the opposite effect, taxing capital sitting idle and encouraging people to maximise their income?
I tried to make a similar point in my first post way back, you’ve made it better.
If one accepts we have a significant infrastructure deficit and an ageing society, we probably have to accept a slowly growing tax rate for a while. Maybe half to three quarters of a percent per year as a percentage of GDP for a decade.
(A similar logic, I think, applies to national debt, though this needs to be framed within a fiscal rule which I do see Reeves is signing up to).
But within that (very modestly growing) tax take, I’d like to see a shift toward wealth and away from income, and I’d like to see relief one way or another on the costs of housing, childcare, and tertiary education.
Finally, how you manage the spend is critical. A semi-competitive stateco is better than a fully state owned monopoly, surely we know that.
McCarthy has slipped back another 1 but to present rather than Donald, who seems to have taken over from Jim Jordan. Basically going nowhere at the moment.
Actually the result was precisely the same, after the abstentions had been called again
McCarthy lost the 1 to Present in roll call #4.
"Absentions" isn't the right word, really.
They simply weren't in the chamber when their names were called first time, in some cases involved in negotiations with whomever they're negotiating with. No big deal, because the vote is still open until the clerk (in this case) closes it.
Pretty standard operating procedure for voice votes in legislative chambers across US, including the US Senate.
C-SPAN reporting GOP are going to bring forward a sixth ballot.
He fights on. He fights to win!
They seem to have stopped mentioning what concessions would apparently bring the rebels on side, so I guess he's decided that's not worth it and to just push on through their little tantrum as they'll give in eventually?
McCarthy has slipped back another 1 but to present rather than Donald, who seems to have taken over from Jim Jordan. Basically going nowhere at the moment.
Actually the result was precisely the same, after the abstentions had been called again
McCarthy lost the 1 to Present in roll call #4.
"Absentions" isn't the right word, really.
They simply weren't in the chamber when their names were called first time, in some cases involved in negotiations with whomever they're negotiating with. No big deal, because the vote is still open until the clerk (in this case) closes it.
Pretty standard operating procedure for voice votes in legislative chambers across US, including the US Senate.
Well their average age is strikingly old so I would imagine there’s a fair queue for the ‘restrooms’
Warmed over socialism, which will end up where socialism always ends up: with everyone worse off
But we have to endure this, the Tories have failed, and so we must go through the same process of experimenting with the left until it is proven that it does not work
Did Britain do something very bad to deserve all this?
I keep trying to warn about this, particularly those tempted by Starmer on the basis "things couldn't possibly be worse".
Of course, there are those who might be attracted by such a radical prospectus, but it's going to be very expensive, probably a drag on business & consumption, and thus growth, and we're all going to be paying an awful lot more tax.
I’m not sure what you are warning of here. This is a really promising policy offer, much of which is constantly demanded on here by left and right wing posters.
Shift taxes toward wealth.
Create a sovereign wealth fund and support domestic industry to reduce the balance of trade deficit.
Devolve power and second power to beefed up local government.
Improve R&D and capital investment to peer economy levels.
Maintain a balanced budget across the cycle.
Dismissing this as reheated 70s Labour or whatever is the sign of not paying attention.
Collective bargaining and action, and large extension of workers rights, is what worries me.
Also, the cost commitments they are listing there are vast, and current planned tax rises won't do it, so it will all put a huge burden on the economy.
I don’t think the cost commitments are vast and in any case nobody is now looking at the UK economy without diagnosing a chronic lack of investment.
I await the detail on collective bargaining. I would certainly welcome a modest tipping of the scales from capital to labour, though.
I think there's a huge amount buried in that with all sorts of things to come, including property and land taxes for ordinary homeowners and pension reliefs going.
What's been laid out there is probably £100bn+ pa of extra public spending.
The spending is necessary.
Britain feels highly taxed but that’s because the weight is on income rather than capital; it’s at the lower end of tax per GDP.
Housing and childcare reform to lower the costs of both would make a massive, massive impact. Tertiary fees, too.
Tax isn't a free lunch. It crowds out consumption and private investment, and we'd do well to remember that. It's also quite easy to make a long list of things that'd be solved by more spending and quite another to raise the funds.
I think we'd get high income and capital tax without the results.
I want to see government cutting back on drags like pensions and investing in things that raise productivity and grow the pie, and that includes competitive taxes. We can then afford more stuff.
No we would not do well to remember that. It’s not borne out at the macro level, as far as I know.
Of course there are harmful taxes that disincentivise things we want, there may also be a correlation between high tax and dirigiste economic policy, but to just say, oh high tax is harmful is belied by the global data.
I could just as easily say low tax is bad and point to the shocking fate of the worst off in the USA, or the economic piss-poverty of the UK today.
Whatever the problems of the UK, they can't fairly be said to be the result of low tax. Because that would assume we have low tax.
The UK is (still) a low tax economy by western standards.
You seem to think there's an easy answer: to tax the UK into prosperity.
That's so much bullshit, as decades of economic experience from countries that have tried to do the same will attest to.
No I didn’t say that.
I just think that it’s preposterous to say “we would do well to remember higher taxes crowd out…”
Decades of economic experience does not support you, you’ve been weaned on too much Telegraph.
I would argue the underlying economic model (market versus statist), labour flexibility, property rights, treatment of investment costs and various other things are more impactful than the raw percentage of GDP taken in tax.
High tax creates the problems it always has: it crowds out consumption, innovation, and investment in the private sector, and reduces the incentives to take risks because its the government appropriating more of the economy to spend on social programmes and they tend to misallocate resources or skew them away from where they'd most profitably be applied.
High tax countries tend to be less innovative, dynamic and creative, and struggle to sustain prosperity and growth over time.
None of these rules have changed. It's not a free lunch.
Even accepting the point, it would be interesting to consider whether the same factors would apply were the taxation to be shifted away from income, and toward wealth? An argument could be made that this would have the opposite effect, taxing capital sitting idle and encouraging people to maximise their income?
We should tax the crap out of assets and lower taxation of earned incomes - and the biggest target ought to be housing. The most straightforward way to reduce inequality, both between the rich and poor and the old and young (and there's a great deal of crossover between those groups, of course,) would be to tax housing wealth hard and transfer the money directly to the poor through higher social security payments, and indirectly to all workers by using the money raised to offset the lowering of income tax and national insurance rates.
I agree that the Lib Dems need to front up with a loose roadmap back toward the single market.
I also think they need to find a way to square the circle on the nimbyism. It would need a log post or perhaps a thread-header to explain how, but at the top level we need both a commitment to push toward building (or, for the market to build) half a million houses a year AND a commitment to respecting local plans AND protection for the green belt besides.
So apple pie for everyone.
Next time I see someone campaigning on "No houses round 'ere", I will challenge their proven racism.
If I lived in a lovely village in Wiltshire or whatever I would also campaign against new housing.
The English (and probably British) “dream” is a Georgian rectory up a long driveway. But clearly, given the landmass and the population, that can’t happen for everyone.
We need to use state power to encourage building higher in towns and cities, essentially, and break up the housing builder oligopoly.
Trouble is, most people don't want to live that way.
As you say they want the house and garden.
Two catches though.
The key one is that people who already have houses and gardens are often too happy to deny those boons to other people, whose main mistake was to be born too late.
The subtler (and less certain one) is the idea that all this lowrise sprawl is horribly inefficient. As in, makes cities less good at generating wealth. A quick primer with pictures;
As with some other cherished beliefs on left and right, we do come back to the question- how seriously do we want the country to be rich? How much wealth are we prepared to throw away?
There’s also a view that “no garden” is sub-par.
It is not beyond the wit of the British to design 6 floor towers, with balconies, around a garden square.
Indeed this may be preferable to the scrubby tip-heap seemingly the norm for many gardens.
These aren't six stories, but they show what could be done;
And what can be done now;
And people happily pay full whack for them. It's a bit Curtisland London, but it's baffling to me that we don't build more of these.
I get what you mean by Curtisland, and I am personally just as enthusiastic about modern domestic architecture (not in the Uk, but in NZ etc), but if the South East was wall to wall this instead of Barratt homes wouldn’t it look so much better?
Even the large housebuilders vary massively. The village I live in isn't too bad, architecturally, with a large variety of house styles and even colours. But the new extension they're building, Cambourne West, is looking decidedly dreary, with a fair few timber-framed houses going in, and also several flat-roofed monstrosities ala Eddington. When did architects start to use only right angles in their designs?
And another from the same development, where they do actually try for some different angles. But the same blooming dreary colours everywhere... https://goo.gl/maps/u6REiH6GcqHSkzQV6
C-SPAN reporting GOP are going to bring forward a sixth ballot.
He fights on. He fights to win!
They seem to have stopped mentioning what concessions would apparently bring the rebels on side, so I guess he's decided that's not worth it and to just push on through their little tantrum as they'll give in eventually?
McCarthy's pretty much already offered them the whole store, with extra kitchen sink thrown in.
I agree that the Lib Dems need to front up with a loose roadmap back toward the single market.
I also think they need to find a way to square the circle on the nimbyism. It would need a log post or perhaps a thread-header to explain how, but at the top level we need both a commitment to push toward building (or, for the market to build) half a million houses a year AND a commitment to respecting local plans AND protection for the green belt besides.
So apple pie for everyone.
Next time I see someone campaigning on "No houses round 'ere", I will challenge their proven racism.
If I lived in a lovely village in Wiltshire or whatever I would also campaign against new housing.
The English (and probably British) “dream” is a Georgian rectory up a long driveway. But clearly, given the landmass and the population, that can’t happen for everyone.
We need to use state power to encourage building higher in towns and cities, essentially, and break up the housing builder oligopoly.
Trouble is, most people don't want to live that way.
As you say they want the house and garden.
Two catches though.
The key one is that people who already have houses and gardens are often too happy to deny those boons to other people, whose main mistake was to be born too late.
The subtler (and less certain one) is the idea that all this lowrise sprawl is horribly inefficient. As in, makes cities less good at generating wealth. A quick primer with pictures;
As with some other cherished beliefs on left and right, we do come back to the question- how seriously do we want the country to be rich? How much wealth are we prepared to throw away?
There’s also a view that “no garden” is sub-par.
It is not beyond the wit of the British to design 6 floor towers, with balconies, around a garden square.
Indeed this may be preferable to the scrubby tip-heap seemingly the norm for many gardens.
These aren't six stories, but they show what could be done;
And what can be done now;
And people happily pay full whack for them. It's a bit Curtisland London, but it's baffling to me that we don't build more of these.
I get what you mean by Curtisland, and I am personally just as enthusiastic about modern domestic architecture (not in the Uk, but in NZ etc), but if the South East was wall to wall this instead of Barratt homes wouldn’t it look so much better?
Even the large housebuilders vary massively. The village I live in isn't too bad, architecturally, with a large variety of house styles and even colours. But the new extension they're building, Cambourne West, is looking decidedly dreary, with a fair few timber-framed houses going in, and also several flat-roofed monstrosities ala Eddington. When did architects start to use only right angles in their designs?
And another from the same development, where they do actually try for some different angles. But the same blooming dreary colours everywhere... https://goo.gl/maps/u6REiH6GcqHSkzQV6
Those are not too bad but, I’d argue, weird for Cambourne. They look denser than much of Hackney.
I would hope to see greater attention to local vernacular, too.
The battle for the Speaker's Chain shows BJO and the Corbynites where they went wrong. McCarthy has LOST this election. but keeps asking people to vote again. And again. And again. And again. Hoping that people will be worn down until they give up and vote for him.
Think about it. Red Wall voter turn out and don't vote for Corbyn. Despite him winning the argument. So simply run the election again and keep running it until victory.
McCarthy has slipped back another 1 but to present rather than Donald, who seems to have taken over from Jim Jordan. Basically going nowhere at the moment.
Actually the result was precisely the same, after the abstentions had been called again
McCarthy lost the 1 to Present in roll call #4.
"Absentions" isn't the right word, really.
They simply weren't in the chamber when their names were called first time, in some cases involved in negotiations with whomever they're negotiating with. No big deal, because the vote is still open until the clerk (in this case) closes it.
Pretty standard operating procedure for voice votes in legislative chambers across US, including the US Senate.
Well their average age is strikingly old so I would imagine there’s a fair queue for the ‘restrooms’
True. Except no line to take a wiz for Members of Congress, can assure you of that, under ANY regime.
Plus think most of those skipped in first round last vote, were largely leadership (or what passes for it these days) types, involved in scheme-plotting and/or sound-biting.
Addendum - Also keep in mind, that since roll is alphabetical, members have a pretty good idea when their name is gonna come up; Nancy Pelosi does NOT need to be in the Chamber for the first half hour or more.
Further Addendum - Though as to rest room facilities, this WAS a problem for women members of both House and Senate for decades after passage of 19th Amendment.
Warmed over socialism, which will end up where socialism always ends up: with everyone worse off
But we have to endure this, the Tories have failed, and so we must go through the same process of experimenting with the left until it is proven that it does not work
Did Britain do something very bad to deserve all this?
I keep trying to warn about this, particularly those tempted by Starmer on the basis "things couldn't possibly be worse".
Of course, there are those who might be attracted by such a radical prospectus, but it's going to be very expensive, probably a drag on business & consumption, and thus growth, and we're all going to be paying an awful lot more tax.
I’m not sure what you are warning of here. This is a really promising policy offer, much of which is constantly demanded on here by left and right wing posters.
Shift taxes toward wealth.
Create a sovereign wealth fund and support domestic industry to reduce the balance of trade deficit.
Devolve power and second power to beefed up local government.
Improve R&D and capital investment to peer economy levels.
Maintain a balanced budget across the cycle.
Dismissing this as reheated 70s Labour or whatever is the sign of not paying attention.
Collective bargaining and action, and large extension of workers rights, is what worries me.
Also, the cost commitments they are listing there are vast, and current planned tax rises won't do it, so it will all put a huge burden on the economy.
I don’t think the cost commitments are vast and in any case nobody is now looking at the UK economy without diagnosing a chronic lack of investment.
I await the detail on collective bargaining. I would certainly welcome a modest tipping of the scales from capital to labour, though.
I think there's a huge amount buried in that with all sorts of things to come, including property and land taxes for ordinary homeowners and pension reliefs going.
What's been laid out there is probably £100bn+ pa of extra public spending.
The spending is necessary.
Britain feels highly taxed but that’s because the weight is on income rather than capital; it’s at the lower end of tax per GDP.
Housing and childcare reform to lower the costs of both would make a massive, massive impact. Tertiary fees, too.
Tax isn't a free lunch. It crowds out consumption and private investment, and we'd do well to remember that. It's also quite easy to make a long list of things that'd be solved by more spending and quite another to raise the funds.
I think we'd get high income and capital tax without the results.
I want to see government cutting back on drags like pensions and investing in things that raise productivity and grow the pie, and that includes competitive taxes. We can then afford more stuff.
No we would not do well to remember that. It’s not borne out at the macro level, as far as I know.
Of course there are harmful taxes that disincentivise things we want, there may also be a correlation between high tax and dirigiste economic policy, but to just say, oh high tax is harmful is belied by the global data.
I could just as easily say low tax is bad and point to the shocking fate of the worst off in the USA, or the economic piss-poverty of the UK today.
Whatever the problems of the UK, they can't fairly be said to be the result of low tax. Because that would assume we have low tax.
The UK is (still) a low tax economy by western standards.
You seem to think there's an easy answer: to tax the UK into prosperity.
That's so much bullshit, as decades of economic experience from countries that have tried to do the same will attest to.
No I didn’t say that.
I just think that it’s preposterous to say “we would do well to remember higher taxes crowd out…”
Decades of economic experience does not support you, you’ve been weaned on too much Telegraph.
I would argue the underlying economic model (market versus statist), labour flexibility, property rights, treatment of investment costs and various other things are more impactful than the raw percentage of GDP taken in tax.
High tax creates the problems it always has: it crowds out consumption, innovation, and investment in the private sector, and reduces the incentives to take risks because its the government appropriating more of the economy to spend on social programmes and they tend to misallocate resources or skew them away from where they'd most profitably be applied.
High tax countries tend to be less innovative, dynamic and creative, and struggle to sustain prosperity and growth over time.
None of these rules have changed. It's not a free lunch.
Even accepting the point, it would be interesting to consider whether the same factors would apply were the taxation to be shifted away from income, and toward wealth? An argument could be made that this would have the opposite effect, taxing capital sitting idle and encouraging people to maximise their income?
We should tax the crap out of assets and lower taxation of earned incomes - and the biggest target ought to be housing. The most straightforward way to reduce inequality, both between the rich and poor and the old and young (and there's a great deal of crossover between those groups, of course,) would be to tax housing wealth hard and transfer the money directly to the poor through higher social security payments, and indirectly to all workers by using the money raised to offset the lowering of income tax and national insurance rates.
Thing about assets is that somebody has to create them for financial gain, whereas people seem to enjoy the process of creating labour, without regard for the productivity of the worker 25 years later. So asset taxes discourage investment more than labour taxes discourage work. Now maybe people reckon that's a good thing for housing: homebuyers would settle for smaller dwellings and invest more in productive assets that can better carry the tax bill by producing a flow of sterling income. But it's a big shift from today where most people do eventually get to buy the big, well-furnished semi-d or detached houses that they like, assisted by low taxation.
Warmed over socialism, which will end up where socialism always ends up: with everyone worse off
But we have to endure this, the Tories have failed, and so we must go through the same process of experimenting with the left until it is proven that it does not work
Did Britain do something very bad to deserve all this?
I keep trying to warn about this, particularly those tempted by Starmer on the basis "things couldn't possibly be worse".
Of course, there are those who might be attracted by such a radical prospectus, but it's going to be very expensive, probably a drag on business & consumption, and thus growth, and we're all going to be paying an awful lot more tax.
I’m not sure what you are warning of here. This is a really promising policy offer, much of which is constantly demanded on here by left and right wing posters.
Shift taxes toward wealth.
Create a sovereign wealth fund and support domestic industry to reduce the balance of trade deficit.
Devolve power and second power to beefed up local government.
Improve R&D and capital investment to peer economy levels.
Maintain a balanced budget across the cycle.
Dismissing this as reheated 70s Labour or whatever is the sign of not paying attention.
Collective bargaining and action, and large extension of workers rights, is what worries me.
Also, the cost commitments they are listing there are vast, and current planned tax rises won't do it, so it will all put a huge burden on the economy.
I don’t think the cost commitments are vast and in any case nobody is now looking at the UK economy without diagnosing a chronic lack of investment.
I await the detail on collective bargaining. I would certainly welcome a modest tipping of the scales from capital to labour, though.
I think there's a huge amount buried in that with all sorts of things to come, including property and land taxes for ordinary homeowners and pension reliefs going.
What's been laid out there is probably £100bn+ pa of extra public spending.
The spending is necessary.
Britain feels highly taxed but that’s because the weight is on income rather than capital; it’s at the lower end of tax per GDP.
Housing and childcare reform to lower the costs of both would make a massive, massive impact. Tertiary fees, too.
Tax isn't a free lunch. It crowds out consumption and private investment, and we'd do well to remember that. It's also quite easy to make a long list of things that'd be solved by more spending and quite another to raise the funds.
I think we'd get high income and capital tax without the results.
I want to see government cutting back on drags like pensions and investing in things that raise productivity and grow the pie, and that includes competitive taxes. We can then afford more stuff.
No we would not do well to remember that. It’s not borne out at the macro level, as far as I know.
Of course there are harmful taxes that disincentivise things we want, there may also be a correlation between high tax and dirigiste economic policy, but to just say, oh high tax is harmful is belied by the global data.
I could just as easily say low tax is bad and point to the shocking fate of the worst off in the USA, or the economic piss-poverty of the UK today.
Whatever the problems of the UK, they can't fairly be said to be the result of low tax. Because that would assume we have low tax.
The UK is (still) a low tax economy by western standards.
You seem to think there's an easy answer: to tax the UK into prosperity.
That's so much bullshit, as decades of economic experience from countries that have tried to do the same will attest to.
The Scandinavian nations are prosperous
"Scandinavia" is the Godwin's law of the tax debate.
They exist though, and so does Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, etc etc etc.
Wishing them away doesn’t get you anywhere.
Germany, Austria and the Netherlands don't tax anything like Scandinavian levels.
European taxes average at about 41.1%, not much higher than us. And we are mid-range.
The idea there is some vast tax goldmine here that's untapped is laughable.
From those 2019 figures, if we taxed at the same rate as France the UK could have had an extra £145bn of tax revenue (6.5% GDP) that year and run a surplus of £100bn rather than a deficit, or ran a surplus of say £50bn and invested in £50bn in hospital, school and transport infrastructure.
And given that the algorithm for house prices is "whatever you can afford plus a bit", I suspect that a fair bit of that £145 billion ended up in house price inflation.
If anyone wnats to see the biggest cheat in Horse Racing watch the riding of Kraken Power in the 3.20 at Newcastle today. Paul Mulrennan should be banned for life.
As someone who has no knowledge and no interest in horse racing I decided that I should watch the video expecting to see some blatant cheating. Watched the video and from my perspective with no knowledge I couldn't see anything wrong. Read the summary and whilst I know I am reading English I do not understand it. I know understand again why I have no interest in horse racing.
It doesn't look good to me. He backs right off and then gets going again but it's too late to catch the leaders.
In my 40 years of following horse racing this is the worse I have seen, With 2 furlongs to go he was in 3rd and cantering, with 1 furlong to go he had pulled the horse back to be 2 lengths last. When all chance had gone he let the horse run and it came flying through. Its the most obvious cheat I have ever seen.
Mulrennan's mistake was to get caught behind two weakening outsiders at a key moment - the two he tracked (who finished last and last but one) fell back as the rest of the field moved forward leaving Mulrennan trapped at the back. That was poor judgement but calling it a "cheat" is a bit of a stretch.
Horse racing may not be as honest as Pro Wrestling but it's a lot cleaner than football or cricket (perhaps).
Pro wrestling has no pretensions of being an honest contest though.
But it can be great entertainment.
Is your profile name a nod to the Human Suplex Machine?
I do love pro-wrestling, a much-misunderstood form of storytelling. It’s the real working class ballet (and not a coincidence that Aronofsky’s Black Swan and The Wrestler make for a great double bill).
Warmed over socialism, which will end up where socialism always ends up: with everyone worse off
But we have to endure this, the Tories have failed, and so we must go through the same process of experimenting with the left until it is proven that it does not work
Did Britain do something very bad to deserve all this?
I keep trying to warn about this, particularly those tempted by Starmer on the basis "things couldn't possibly be worse".
Of course, there are those who might be attracted by such a radical prospectus, but it's going to be very expensive, probably a drag on business & consumption, and thus growth, and we're all going to be paying an awful lot more tax.
I’m not sure what you are warning of here. This is a really promising policy offer, much of which is constantly demanded on here by left and right wing posters.
Shift taxes toward wealth.
Create a sovereign wealth fund and support domestic industry to reduce the balance of trade deficit.
Devolve power and second power to beefed up local government.
Improve R&D and capital investment to peer economy levels.
Maintain a balanced budget across the cycle.
Dismissing this as reheated 70s Labour or whatever is the sign of not paying attention.
Collective bargaining and action, and large extension of workers rights, is what worries me.
Also, the cost commitments they are listing there are vast, and current planned tax rises won't do it, so it will all put a huge burden on the economy.
I don’t think the cost commitments are vast and in any case nobody is now looking at the UK economy without diagnosing a chronic lack of investment.
I await the detail on collective bargaining. I would certainly welcome a modest tipping of the scales from capital to labour, though.
I think there's a huge amount buried in that with all sorts of things to come, including property and land taxes for ordinary homeowners and pension reliefs going.
What's been laid out there is probably £100bn+ pa of extra public spending.
The spending is necessary.
Britain feels highly taxed but that’s because the weight is on income rather than capital; it’s at the lower end of tax per GDP.
Housing and childcare reform to lower the costs of both would make a massive, massive impact. Tertiary fees, too.
Tax isn't a free lunch. It crowds out consumption and private investment, and we'd do well to remember that. It's also quite easy to make a long list of things that'd be solved by more spending and quite another to raise the funds.
I think we'd get high income and capital tax without the results.
I want to see government cutting back on drags like pensions and investing in things that raise productivity and grow the pie, and that includes competitive taxes. We can then afford more stuff.
No we would not do well to remember that. It’s not borne out at the macro level, as far as I know.
Of course there are harmful taxes that disincentivise things we want, there may also be a correlation between high tax and dirigiste economic policy, but to just say, oh high tax is harmful is belied by the global data.
I could just as easily say low tax is bad and point to the shocking fate of the worst off in the USA, or the economic piss-poverty of the UK today.
Whatever the problems of the UK, they can't fairly be said to be the result of low tax. Because that would assume we have low tax.
The UK is (still) a low tax economy by western standards.
You seem to think there's an easy answer: to tax the UK into prosperity.
That's so much bullshit, as decades of economic experience from countries that have tried to do the same will attest to.
The Scandinavian nations are prosperous
"Scandinavia" is the Godwin's law of the tax debate.
They exist though, and so does Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, etc etc etc.
Wishing them away doesn’t get you anywhere.
Germany, Austria and the Netherlands don't tax anything like Scandinavian levels.
European taxes average at about 41.1%, not much higher than us. And we are mid-range.
The idea there is some vast tax goldmine here that's untapped is laughable.
From those 2019 figures, if we taxed at the same rate as France the UK could have had an extra £145bn of tax revenue (6.5% GDP) that year and run a surplus of £100bn rather than a deficit, or ran a surplus of say £50bn and invested in £50bn in hospital, school and transport infrastructure.
And given that the algorithm for house prices is "whatever you can afford plus a bit", I suspect that a fair bit of that £145 billion ended up in house price inflation.
Which is an investment of sorts, I suppose.
Yet it is house price inflation that has been the principal driver of growing inequality, with property ownership increasingly concentrated among the older and more wealthy, inexorably undoing the progress made during the last century
Warmed over socialism, which will end up where socialism always ends up: with everyone worse off
But we have to endure this, the Tories have failed, and so we must go through the same process of experimenting with the left until it is proven that it does not work
Did Britain do something very bad to deserve all this?
I keep trying to warn about this, particularly those tempted by Starmer on the basis "things couldn't possibly be worse".
Of course, there are those who might be attracted by such a radical prospectus, but it's going to be very expensive, probably a drag on business & consumption, and thus growth, and we're all going to be paying an awful lot more tax.
I’m not sure what you are warning of here. This is a really promising policy offer, much of which is constantly demanded on here by left and right wing posters.
Shift taxes toward wealth.
Create a sovereign wealth fund and support domestic industry to reduce the balance of trade deficit.
Devolve power and second power to beefed up local government.
Improve R&D and capital investment to peer economy levels.
Maintain a balanced budget across the cycle.
Dismissing this as reheated 70s Labour or whatever is the sign of not paying attention.
Collective bargaining and action, and large extension of workers rights, is what worries me.
Also, the cost commitments they are listing there are vast, and current planned tax rises won't do it, so it will all put a huge burden on the economy.
I don’t think the cost commitments are vast and in any case nobody is now looking at the UK economy without diagnosing a chronic lack of investment.
I await the detail on collective bargaining. I would certainly welcome a modest tipping of the scales from capital to labour, though.
I think there's a huge amount buried in that with all sorts of things to come, including property and land taxes for ordinary homeowners and pension reliefs going.
What's been laid out there is probably £100bn+ pa of extra public spending.
The spending is necessary.
Britain feels highly taxed but that’s because the weight is on income rather than capital; it’s at the lower end of tax per GDP.
Housing and childcare reform to lower the costs of both would make a massive, massive impact. Tertiary fees, too.
Tax isn't a free lunch. It crowds out consumption and private investment, and we'd do well to remember that. It's also quite easy to make a long list of things that'd be solved by more spending and quite another to raise the funds.
I think we'd get high income and capital tax without the results.
I want to see government cutting back on drags like pensions and investing in things that raise productivity and grow the pie, and that includes competitive taxes. We can then afford more stuff.
No we would not do well to remember that. It’s not borne out at the macro level, as far as I know.
Of course there are harmful taxes that disincentivise things we want, there may also be a correlation between high tax and dirigiste economic policy, but to just say, oh high tax is harmful is belied by the global data.
I could just as easily say low tax is bad and point to the shocking fate of the worst off in the USA, or the economic piss-poverty of the UK today.
Whatever the problems of the UK, they can't fairly be said to be the result of low tax. Because that would assume we have low tax.
The UK is (still) a low tax economy by western standards.
You seem to think there's an easy answer: to tax the UK into prosperity.
That's so much bullshit, as decades of economic experience from countries that have tried to do the same will attest to.
No I didn’t say that.
I just think that it’s preposterous to say “we would do well to remember higher taxes crowd out…”
Decades of economic experience does not support you, you’ve been weaned on too much Telegraph.
I would argue the underlying economic model (market versus statist), labour flexibility, property rights, treatment of investment costs and various other things are more impactful than the raw percentage of GDP taken in tax.
High tax creates the problems it always has: it crowds out consumption, innovation, and investment in the private sector, and reduces the incentives to take risks because its the government appropriating more of the economy to spend on social programmes and they tend to misallocate resources or skew them away from where they'd most profitably be applied.
High tax countries tend to be less innovative, dynamic and creative, and struggle to sustain prosperity and growth over time.
None of these rules have changed. It's not a free lunch.
Even accepting the point, it would be interesting to consider whether the same factors would apply were the taxation to be shifted away from income, and toward wealth? An argument could be made that this would have the opposite effect, taxing capital sitting idle and encouraging people to maximise their income?
We should tax the crap out of assets and lower taxation of earned incomes - and the biggest target ought to be housing. The most straightforward way to reduce inequality, both between the rich and poor and the old and young (and there's a great deal of crossover between those groups, of course,) would be to tax housing wealth hard and transfer the money directly to the poor through higher social security payments, and indirectly to all workers by using the money raised to offset the lowering of income tax and national insurance rates.
Even though I'm a confirmed lefty I wouldn't increase social security payments across the board - the danger is that that just subsidises rentiers and low-wage employers.
I'd look for other ways to help the poor (increase minimum wage, cut VAT, free school meals, cheaper public transport, etc.) But yes tax wealth, and unearned more, whilst reducing taxes on earned income where possible.
I agree that the Lib Dems need to front up with a loose roadmap back toward the single market.
I also think they need to find a way to square the circle on the nimbyism. It would need a log post or perhaps a thread-header to explain how, but at the top level we need both a commitment to push toward building (or, for the market to build) half a million houses a year AND a commitment to respecting local plans AND protection for the green belt besides.
So apple pie for everyone.
Next time I see someone campaigning on "No houses round 'ere", I will challenge their proven racism.
If I lived in a lovely village in Wiltshire or whatever I would also campaign against new housing.
The English (and probably British) “dream” is a Georgian rectory up a long driveway. But clearly, given the landmass and the population, that can’t happen for everyone.
We need to use state power to encourage building higher in towns and cities, essentially, and break up the housing builder oligopoly.
Trouble is, most people don't want to live that way.
As you say they want the house and garden.
Two catches though.
The key one is that people who already have houses and gardens are often too happy to deny those boons to other people, whose main mistake was to be born too late.
The subtler (and less certain one) is the idea that all this lowrise sprawl is horribly inefficient. As in, makes cities less good at generating wealth. A quick primer with pictures;
As with some other cherished beliefs on left and right, we do come back to the question- how seriously do we want the country to be rich? How much wealth are we prepared to throw away?
There’s also a view that “no garden” is sub-par.
It is not beyond the wit of the British to design 6 floor towers, with balconies, around a garden square.
Indeed this may be preferable to the scrubby tip-heap seemingly the norm for many gardens.
These aren't six stories, but they show what could be done;
And what can be done now;
And people happily pay full whack for them. It's a bit Curtisland London, but it's baffling to me that we don't build more of these.
I get what you mean by Curtisland, and I am personally just as enthusiastic about modern domestic architecture (not in the Uk, but in NZ etc), but if the South East was wall to wall this instead of Barratt homes wouldn’t it look so much better?
Even the large housebuilders vary massively. The village I live in isn't too bad, architecturally, with a large variety of house styles and even colours. But the new extension they're building, Cambourne West, is looking decidedly dreary, with a fair few timber-framed houses going in, and also several flat-roofed monstrosities ala Eddington. When did architects start to use only right angles in their designs?
And another from the same development, where they do actually try for some different angles. But the same blooming dreary colours everywhere... https://goo.gl/maps/u6REiH6GcqHSkzQV6
Those are not too bad but, I’d argue, weird for Cambourne. They look denser than much of Hackney.
I would hope to see greater attention to local vernacular, too.
That's not Cambourne; that's Eddington (the Cambridge NW development)
Warmed over socialism, which will end up where socialism always ends up: with everyone worse off
But we have to endure this, the Tories have failed, and so we must go through the same process of experimenting with the left until it is proven that it does not work
Did Britain do something very bad to deserve all this?
I keep trying to warn about this, particularly those tempted by Starmer on the basis "things couldn't possibly be worse".
Of course, there are those who might be attracted by such a radical prospectus, but it's going to be very expensive, probably a drag on business & consumption, and thus growth, and we're all going to be paying an awful lot more tax.
I’m not sure what you are warning of here. This is a really promising policy offer, much of which is constantly demanded on here by left and right wing posters.
Shift taxes toward wealth.
Create a sovereign wealth fund and support domestic industry to reduce the balance of trade deficit.
Devolve power and second power to beefed up local government.
Improve R&D and capital investment to peer economy levels.
Maintain a balanced budget across the cycle.
Dismissing this as reheated 70s Labour or whatever is the sign of not paying attention.
Collective bargaining and action, and large extension of workers rights, is what worries me.
Also, the cost commitments they are listing there are vast, and current planned tax rises won't do it, so it will all put a huge burden on the economy.
I don’t think the cost commitments are vast and in any case nobody is now looking at the UK economy without diagnosing a chronic lack of investment.
I await the detail on collective bargaining. I would certainly welcome a modest tipping of the scales from capital to labour, though.
I think there's a huge amount buried in that with all sorts of things to come, including property and land taxes for ordinary homeowners and pension reliefs going.
What's been laid out there is probably £100bn+ pa of extra public spending.
The spending is necessary.
Britain feels highly taxed but that’s because the weight is on income rather than capital; it’s at the lower end of tax per GDP.
Housing and childcare reform to lower the costs of both would make a massive, massive impact. Tertiary fees, too.
Tax isn't a free lunch. It crowds out consumption and private investment, and we'd do well to remember that. It's also quite easy to make a long list of things that'd be solved by more spending and quite another to raise the funds.
I think we'd get high income and capital tax without the results.
I want to see government cutting back on drags like pensions and investing in things that raise productivity and grow the pie, and that includes competitive taxes. We can then afford more stuff.
No we would not do well to remember that. It’s not borne out at the macro level, as far as I know.
Of course there are harmful taxes that disincentivise things we want, there may also be a correlation between high tax and dirigiste economic policy, but to just say, oh high tax is harmful is belied by the global data.
I could just as easily say low tax is bad and point to the shocking fate of the worst off in the USA, or the economic piss-poverty of the UK today.
Whatever the problems of the UK, they can't fairly be said to be the result of low tax. Because that would assume we have low tax.
The UK is (still) a low tax economy by western standards.
You seem to think there's an easy answer: to tax the UK into prosperity.
That's so much bullshit, as decades of economic experience from countries that have tried to do the same will attest to.
No I didn’t say that.
I just think that it’s preposterous to say “we would do well to remember higher taxes crowd out…”
Decades of economic experience does not support you, you’ve been weaned on too much Telegraph.
I would argue the underlying economic model (market versus statist), labour flexibility, property rights, treatment of investment costs and various other things are more impactful than the raw percentage of GDP taken in tax.
High tax creates the problems it always has: it crowds out consumption, innovation, and investment in the private sector, and reduces the incentives to take risks because its the government appropriating more of the economy to spend on social programmes and they tend to misallocate resources or skew them away from where they'd most profitably be applied.
High tax countries tend to be less innovative, dynamic and creative, and struggle to sustain prosperity and growth over time.
None of these rules have changed. It's not a free lunch.
Even accepting the point, it would be interesting to consider whether the same factors would apply were the taxation to be shifted away from income, and toward wealth? An argument could be made that this would have the opposite effect, taxing capital sitting idle and encouraging people to maximise their income?
We should tax the crap out of assets and lower taxation of earned incomes - and the biggest target ought to be housing. The most straightforward way to reduce inequality, both between the rich and poor and the old and young (and there's a great deal of crossover between those groups, of course,) would be to tax housing wealth hard and transfer the money directly to the poor through higher social security payments, and indirectly to all workers by using the money raised to offset the lowering of income tax and national insurance rates.
Even though I'm a confirmed lefty I wouldn't increase social security payments across the board - the danger is that that just subsidises rentiers and low-wage employers.
I'd look for other ways to help the poor (increase minimum wage, cut VAT, free school meals, cheaper public transport, etc.) But yes tax wealth, and unearned more, whilst reducing taxes on earned income where possible.
And so we reach the usual denouement - what appears to be the economically sensible way out of our current fix is politically impossible because the elderly are numerous and vote whereas those of working age aren’t so much. Amplified by the toxic effect of our winner takes all voting system, where some votes in some places count and others in others don’t.
I agree that the Lib Dems need to front up with a loose roadmap back toward the single market.
I also think they need to find a way to square the circle on the nimbyism. It would need a log post or perhaps a thread-header to explain how, but at the top level we need both a commitment to push toward building (or, for the market to build) half a million houses a year AND a commitment to respecting local plans AND protection for the green belt besides.
So apple pie for everyone.
Next time I see someone campaigning on "No houses round 'ere", I will challenge their proven racism.
If I lived in a lovely village in Wiltshire or whatever I would also campaign against new housing.
The English (and probably British) “dream” is a Georgian rectory up a long driveway. But clearly, given the landmass and the population, that can’t happen for everyone.
We need to use state power to encourage building higher in towns and cities, essentially, and break up the housing builder oligopoly.
Trouble is, most people don't want to live that way.
As you say they want the house and garden.
Two catches though.
The key one is that people who already have houses and gardens are often too happy to deny those boons to other people, whose main mistake was to be born too late.
The subtler (and less certain one) is the idea that all this lowrise sprawl is horribly inefficient. As in, makes cities less good at generating wealth. A quick primer with pictures;
As with some other cherished beliefs on left and right, we do come back to the question- how seriously do we want the country to be rich? How much wealth are we prepared to throw away?
There’s also a view that “no garden” is sub-par.
It is not beyond the wit of the British to design 6 floor towers, with balconies, around a garden square.
Indeed this may be preferable to the scrubby tip-heap seemingly the norm for many gardens.
These aren't six stories, but they show what could be done;
And what can be done now;
And people happily pay full whack for them. It's a bit Curtisland London, but it's baffling to me that we don't build more of these.
I get what you mean by Curtisland, and I am personally just as enthusiastic about modern domestic architecture (not in the Uk, but in NZ etc), but if the South East was wall to wall this instead of Barratt homes wouldn’t it look so much better?
Even the large housebuilders vary massively. The village I live in isn't too bad, architecturally, with a large variety of house styles and even colours. But the new extension they're building, Cambourne West, is looking decidedly dreary, with a fair few timber-framed houses going in, and also several flat-roofed monstrosities ala Eddington. When did architects start to use only right angles in their designs?
And another from the same development, where they do actually try for some different angles. But the same blooming dreary colours everywhere... https://goo.gl/maps/u6REiH6GcqHSkzQV6
It is a very British thing to name architectural monstrosities after great scientists.
Eddington himself lived with his mother & his sister (who both doted on him) in rooms in his University department.
Warmed over socialism, which will end up where socialism always ends up: with everyone worse off
But we have to endure this, the Tories have failed, and so we must go through the same process of experimenting with the left until it is proven that it does not work
Did Britain do something very bad to deserve all this?
I keep trying to warn about this, particularly those tempted by Starmer on the basis "things couldn't possibly be worse".
Of course, there are those who might be attracted by such a radical prospectus, but it's going to be very expensive, probably a drag on business & consumption, and thus growth, and we're all going to be paying an awful lot more tax.
I’m not sure what you are warning of here. This is a really promising policy offer, much of which is constantly demanded on here by left and right wing posters.
Shift taxes toward wealth.
Create a sovereign wealth fund and support domestic industry to reduce the balance of trade deficit.
Devolve power and second power to beefed up local government.
Improve R&D and capital investment to peer economy levels.
Maintain a balanced budget across the cycle.
Dismissing this as reheated 70s Labour or whatever is the sign of not paying attention.
Collective bargaining and action, and large extension of workers rights, is what worries me.
Also, the cost commitments they are listing there are vast, and current planned tax rises won't do it, so it will all put a huge burden on the economy.
I don’t think the cost commitments are vast and in any case nobody is now looking at the UK economy without diagnosing a chronic lack of investment.
I await the detail on collective bargaining. I would certainly welcome a modest tipping of the scales from capital to labour, though.
I think there's a huge amount buried in that with all sorts of things to come, including property and land taxes for ordinary homeowners and pension reliefs going.
What's been laid out there is probably £100bn+ pa of extra public spending.
The spending is necessary.
Britain feels highly taxed but that’s because the weight is on income rather than capital; it’s at the lower end of tax per GDP.
Housing and childcare reform to lower the costs of both would make a massive, massive impact. Tertiary fees, too.
Tax isn't a free lunch. It crowds out consumption and private investment, and we'd do well to remember that. It's also quite easy to make a long list of things that'd be solved by more spending and quite another to raise the funds.
I think we'd get high income and capital tax without the results.
I want to see government cutting back on drags like pensions and investing in things that raise productivity and grow the pie, and that includes competitive taxes. We can then afford more stuff.
No we would not do well to remember that. It’s not borne out at the macro level, as far as I know.
Of course there are harmful taxes that disincentivise things we want, there may also be a correlation between high tax and dirigiste economic policy, but to just say, oh high tax is harmful is belied by the global data.
I could just as easily say low tax is bad and point to the shocking fate of the worst off in the USA, or the economic piss-poverty of the UK today.
Whatever the problems of the UK, they can't fairly be said to be the result of low tax. Because that would assume we have low tax.
The UK is (still) a low tax economy by western standards.
You seem to think there's an easy answer: to tax the UK into prosperity.
That's so much bullshit, as decades of economic experience from countries that have tried to do the same will attest to.
No I didn’t say that.
I just think that it’s preposterous to say “we would do well to remember higher taxes crowd out…”
Decades of economic experience does not support you, you’ve been weaned on too much Telegraph.
I would argue the underlying economic model (market versus statist), labour flexibility, property rights, treatment of investment costs and various other things are more impactful than the raw percentage of GDP taken in tax.
High tax creates the problems it always has: it crowds out consumption, innovation, and investment in the private sector, and reduces the incentives to take risks because its the government appropriating more of the economy to spend on social programmes and they tend to misallocate resources or skew them away from where they'd most profitably be applied.
High tax countries tend to be less innovative, dynamic and creative, and struggle to sustain prosperity and growth over time.
None of these rules have changed. It's not a free lunch.
Even accepting the point, it would be interesting to consider whether the same factors would apply were the taxation to be shifted away from income, and toward wealth? An argument could be made that this would have the opposite effect, taxing capital sitting idle and encouraging people to maximise their income?
Possibly. I've said before I think asset wealth overall is undertaxed and income overtaxed, but I don't see any real proposals to make a switch - just to increase the overall burden.
However, you'd have to pluck the goose fairly lightly as people would simply stop investing and sell up if it got too severe, and the asset base would just shrink.
This is more interminable than Mrs May’s Brexit votes. At least she was moving in the right direction with each one….
If McCarthy’s vote starts to slip, at least it underlines that his candidacy is done and they can go find a compromise alternative. If it doesn’t, they may as well go home.
Warmed over socialism, which will end up where socialism always ends up: with everyone worse off
But we have to endure this, the Tories have failed, and so we must go through the same process of experimenting with the left until it is proven that it does not work
Did Britain do something very bad to deserve all this?
I keep trying to warn about this, particularly those tempted by Starmer on the basis "things couldn't possibly be worse".
Of course, there are those who might be attracted by such a radical prospectus, but it's going to be very expensive, probably a drag on business & consumption, and thus growth, and we're all going to be paying an awful lot more tax.
I’m not sure what you are warning of here. This is a really promising policy offer, much of which is constantly demanded on here by left and right wing posters.
Shift taxes toward wealth.
Create a sovereign wealth fund and support domestic industry to reduce the balance of trade deficit.
Devolve power and second power to beefed up local government.
Improve R&D and capital investment to peer economy levels.
Maintain a balanced budget across the cycle.
Dismissing this as reheated 70s Labour or whatever is the sign of not paying attention.
Collective bargaining and action, and large extension of workers rights, is what worries me.
Also, the cost commitments they are listing there are vast, and current planned tax rises won't do it, so it will all put a huge burden on the economy.
I don’t think the cost commitments are vast and in any case nobody is now looking at the UK economy without diagnosing a chronic lack of investment.
I await the detail on collective bargaining. I would certainly welcome a modest tipping of the scales from capital to labour, though.
I think there's a huge amount buried in that with all sorts of things to come, including property and land taxes for ordinary homeowners and pension reliefs going.
What's been laid out there is probably £100bn+ pa of extra public spending.
The spending is necessary.
Britain feels highly taxed but that’s because the weight is on income rather than capital; it’s at the lower end of tax per GDP.
Housing and childcare reform to lower the costs of both would make a massive, massive impact. Tertiary fees, too.
Tax isn't a free lunch. It crowds out consumption and private investment, and we'd do well to remember that. It's also quite easy to make a long list of things that'd be solved by more spending and quite another to raise the funds.
I think we'd get high income and capital tax without the results.
I want to see government cutting back on drags like pensions and investing in things that raise productivity and grow the pie, and that includes competitive taxes. We can then afford more stuff.
No we would not do well to remember that. It’s not borne out at the macro level, as far as I know.
Of course there are harmful taxes that disincentivise things we want, there may also be a correlation between high tax and dirigiste economic policy, but to just say, oh high tax is harmful is belied by the global data.
I could just as easily say low tax is bad and point to the shocking fate of the worst off in the USA, or the economic piss-poverty of the UK today.
Whatever the problems of the UK, they can't fairly be said to be the result of low tax. Because that would assume we have low tax.
The UK is (still) a low tax economy by western standards.
You seem to think there's an easy answer: to tax the UK into prosperity.
That's so much bullshit, as decades of economic experience from countries that have tried to do the same will attest to.
No I didn’t say that.
I just think that it’s preposterous to say “we would do well to remember higher taxes crowd out…”
Decades of economic experience does not support you, you’ve been weaned on too much Telegraph.
I would argue the underlying economic model (market versus statist), labour flexibility, property rights, treatment of investment costs and various other things are more impactful than the raw percentage of GDP taken in tax.
High tax creates the problems it always has: it crowds out consumption, innovation, and investment in the private sector, and reduces the incentives to take risks because its the government appropriating more of the economy to spend on social programmes and they tend to misallocate resources or skew them away from where they'd most profitably be applied.
High tax countries tend to be less innovative, dynamic and creative, and struggle to sustain prosperity and growth over time.
None of these rules have changed. It's not a free lunch.
Even accepting the point, it would be interesting to consider whether the same factors would apply were the taxation to be shifted away from income, and toward wealth? An argument could be made that this would have the opposite effect, taxing capital sitting idle and encouraging people to maximise their income?
We should tax the crap out of assets and lower taxation of earned incomes - and the biggest target ought to be housing. The most straightforward way to reduce inequality, both between the rich and poor and the old and young (and there's a great deal of crossover between those groups, of course,) would be to tax housing wealth hard and transfer the money directly to the poor through higher social security payments, and indirectly to all workers by using the money raised to offset the lowering of income tax and national insurance rates.
Even though I'm a confirmed lefty I wouldn't increase social security payments across the board - the danger is that that just subsidises rentiers and low-wage employers.
I'd look for other ways to help the poor (increase minimum wage, cut VAT, free school meals, cheaper public transport, etc.) But yes tax wealth, and unearned more, whilst reducing taxes on earned income where possible.
And so we reach the usual denouement - what appears to be the economically sensible way out of our current fix is politically impossible because the elderly are numerous and vote whereas those of working age aren’t so much. Amplified by the toxic effect of our winner takes all voting system, where some votes in some places count and others in others don’t.
Nah. Labour will win and do a lot of this stuff, I reckon.
Warmed over socialism, which will end up where socialism always ends up: with everyone worse off
But we have to endure this, the Tories have failed, and so we must go through the same process of experimenting with the left until it is proven that it does not work
Did Britain do something very bad to deserve all this?
I keep trying to warn about this, particularly those tempted by Starmer on the basis "things couldn't possibly be worse".
Of course, there are those who might be attracted by such a radical prospectus, but it's going to be very expensive, probably a drag on business & consumption, and thus growth, and we're all going to be paying an awful lot more tax.
I’m not sure what you are warning of here. This is a really promising policy offer, much of which is constantly demanded on here by left and right wing posters.
Shift taxes toward wealth.
Create a sovereign wealth fund and support domestic industry to reduce the balance of trade deficit.
Devolve power and second power to beefed up local government.
Improve R&D and capital investment to peer economy levels.
Maintain a balanced budget across the cycle.
Dismissing this as reheated 70s Labour or whatever is the sign of not paying attention.
Collective bargaining and action, and large extension of workers rights, is what worries me.
Also, the cost commitments they are listing there are vast, and current planned tax rises won't do it, so it will all put a huge burden on the economy.
I don’t think the cost commitments are vast and in any case nobody is now looking at the UK economy without diagnosing a chronic lack of investment.
I await the detail on collective bargaining. I would certainly welcome a modest tipping of the scales from capital to labour, though.
I think there's a huge amount buried in that with all sorts of things to come, including property and land taxes for ordinary homeowners and pension reliefs going.
What's been laid out there is probably £100bn+ pa of extra public spending.
The spending is necessary.
Britain feels highly taxed but that’s because the weight is on income rather than capital; it’s at the lower end of tax per GDP.
Housing and childcare reform to lower the costs of both would make a massive, massive impact. Tertiary fees, too.
Tax isn't a free lunch. It crowds out consumption and private investment, and we'd do well to remember that. It's also quite easy to make a long list of things that'd be solved by more spending and quite another to raise the funds.
I think we'd get high income and capital tax without the results.
I want to see government cutting back on drags like pensions and investing in things that raise productivity and grow the pie, and that includes competitive taxes. We can then afford more stuff.
No we would not do well to remember that. It’s not borne out at the macro level, as far as I know.
Of course there are harmful taxes that disincentivise things we want, there may also be a correlation between high tax and dirigiste economic policy, but to just say, oh high tax is harmful is belied by the global data.
I could just as easily say low tax is bad and point to the shocking fate of the worst off in the USA, or the economic piss-poverty of the UK today.
Whatever the problems of the UK, they can't fairly be said to be the result of low tax. Because that would assume we have low tax.
The UK is (still) a low tax economy by western standards.
You seem to think there's an easy answer: to tax the UK into prosperity.
That's so much bullshit, as decades of economic experience from countries that have tried to do the same will attest to.
The Scandinavian nations are prosperous
"Scandinavia" is the Godwin's law of the tax debate.
They exist though, and so does Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, etc etc etc.
Wishing them away doesn’t get you anywhere.
Germany, Austria and the Netherlands don't tax anything like Scandinavian levels.
European taxes average at about 41.1%, not much higher than us. And we are mid-range.
The idea there is some vast tax goldmine here that's untapped is laughable.
From those 2019 figures, if we taxed at the same rate as France the UK could have had an extra £145bn of tax revenue (6.5% GDP) that year and run a surplus of £100bn rather than a deficit, or ran a surplus of say £50bn and invested in £50bn in hospital, school and transport infrastructure.
France includes social security contributions in its figures.
Warmed over socialism, which will end up where socialism always ends up: with everyone worse off
But we have to endure this, the Tories have failed, and so we must go through the same process of experimenting with the left until it is proven that it does not work
Did Britain do something very bad to deserve all this?
I keep trying to warn about this, particularly those tempted by Starmer on the basis "things couldn't possibly be worse".
Of course, there are those who might be attracted by such a radical prospectus, but it's going to be very expensive, probably a drag on business & consumption, and thus growth, and we're all going to be paying an awful lot more tax.
I’m not sure what you are warning of here. This is a really promising policy offer, much of which is constantly demanded on here by left and right wing posters.
Shift taxes toward wealth.
Create a sovereign wealth fund and support domestic industry to reduce the balance of trade deficit.
Devolve power and second power to beefed up local government.
Improve R&D and capital investment to peer economy levels.
Maintain a balanced budget across the cycle.
Dismissing this as reheated 70s Labour or whatever is the sign of not paying attention.
Collective bargaining and action, and large extension of workers rights, is what worries me.
Also, the cost commitments they are listing there are vast, and current planned tax rises won't do it, so it will all put a huge burden on the economy.
I don’t think the cost commitments are vast and in any case nobody is now looking at the UK economy without diagnosing a chronic lack of investment.
I await the detail on collective bargaining. I would certainly welcome a modest tipping of the scales from capital to labour, though.
I think there's a huge amount buried in that with all sorts of things to come, including property and land taxes for ordinary homeowners and pension reliefs going.
What's been laid out there is probably £100bn+ pa of extra public spending.
The spending is necessary.
Britain feels highly taxed but that’s because the weight is on income rather than capital; it’s at the lower end of tax per GDP.
Housing and childcare reform to lower the costs of both would make a massive, massive impact. Tertiary fees, too.
Tax isn't a free lunch. It crowds out consumption and private investment, and we'd do well to remember that. It's also quite easy to make a long list of things that'd be solved by more spending and quite another to raise the funds.
I think we'd get high income and capital tax without the results.
I want to see government cutting back on drags like pensions and investing in things that raise productivity and grow the pie, and that includes competitive taxes. We can then afford more stuff.
No we would not do well to remember that. It’s not borne out at the macro level, as far as I know.
Of course there are harmful taxes that disincentivise things we want, there may also be a correlation between high tax and dirigiste economic policy, but to just say, oh high tax is harmful is belied by the global data.
I could just as easily say low tax is bad and point to the shocking fate of the worst off in the USA, or the economic piss-poverty of the UK today.
Whatever the problems of the UK, they can't fairly be said to be the result of low tax. Because that would assume we have low tax.
The UK is (still) a low tax economy by western standards.
You seem to think there's an easy answer: to tax the UK into prosperity.
That's so much bullshit, as decades of economic experience from countries that have tried to do the same will attest to.
The Scandinavian nations are prosperous
"Scandinavia" is the Godwin's law of the tax debate.
They exist though, and so does Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, etc etc etc.
Wishing them away doesn’t get you anywhere.
They did not get wealthy by having high tax high spend is the point. They got wealthy by having low tax low spend, then they could afford high tax high spend, so they did, with the requisite slowing of growth. You are pointing to the private jet of the millionaire and suggesting that we could all be millionaires if we got private jets. The opposite is true. We need to know how that millionaire got that way, not what he does now.
If anyone wnats to see the biggest cheat in Horse Racing watch the riding of Kraken Power in the 3.20 at Newcastle today. Paul Mulrennan should be banned for life.
As someone who has no knowledge and no interest in horse racing I decided that I should watch the video expecting to see some blatant cheating. Watched the video and from my perspective with no knowledge I couldn't see anything wrong. Read the summary and whilst I know I am reading English I do not understand it. I know understand again why I have no interest in horse racing.
It doesn't look good to me. He backs right off and then gets going again but it's too late to catch the leaders.
In my 40 years of following horse racing this is the worse I have seen, With 2 furlongs to go he was in 3rd and cantering, with 1 furlong to go he had pulled the horse back to be 2 lengths last. When all chance had gone he let the horse run and it came flying through. Its the most obvious cheat I have ever seen.
Mulrennan's mistake was to get caught behind two weakening outsiders at a key moment - the two he tracked (who finished last and last but one) fell back as the rest of the field moved forward leaving Mulrennan trapped at the back. That was poor judgement but calling it a "cheat" is a bit of a stretch.
Horse racing may not be as honest as Pro Wrestling but it's a lot cleaner than football or cricket (perhaps).
Pro wrestling has no pretensions of being an honest contest though.
But it can be great entertainment.
Is your profile name a nod to the Human Suplex Machine?
I do love pro-wrestling, a much-misunderstood form of storytelling. It’s the real working class ballet (and not a coincidence that Aronofsky’s Black Swan and The Wrestler make for a great double bill).
My username certainly is a nod to him. Yes.
Pro wrestling is great. Don’t watch it nearly as much as I used to in the old WWF v WCW days but I still like to watch it when I can. I especially love all the shoot videos on YouTube.
Jim Cornette is really entertaining.
The legitimate tough guys were usually the ones who made mid card at best. Haku, Paul Orndorff, Bob Holly etc etc.
Warmed over socialism, which will end up where socialism always ends up: with everyone worse off
But we have to endure this, the Tories have failed, and so we must go through the same process of experimenting with the left until it is proven that it does not work
Did Britain do something very bad to deserve all this?
I keep trying to warn about this, particularly those tempted by Starmer on the basis "things couldn't possibly be worse".
Of course, there are those who might be attracted by such a radical prospectus, but it's going to be very expensive, probably a drag on business & consumption, and thus growth, and we're all going to be paying an awful lot more tax.
I’m not sure what you are warning of here. This is a really promising policy offer, much of which is constantly demanded on here by left and right wing posters.
Shift taxes toward wealth.
Create a sovereign wealth fund and support domestic industry to reduce the balance of trade deficit.
Devolve power and second power to beefed up local government.
Improve R&D and capital investment to peer economy levels.
Maintain a balanced budget across the cycle.
Dismissing this as reheated 70s Labour or whatever is the sign of not paying attention.
Collective bargaining and action, and large extension of workers rights, is what worries me.
Also, the cost commitments they are listing there are vast, and current planned tax rises won't do it, so it will all put a huge burden on the economy.
I don’t think the cost commitments are vast and in any case nobody is now looking at the UK economy without diagnosing a chronic lack of investment.
I await the detail on collective bargaining. I would certainly welcome a modest tipping of the scales from capital to labour, though.
I think there's a huge amount buried in that with all sorts of things to come, including property and land taxes for ordinary homeowners and pension reliefs going.
What's been laid out there is probably £100bn+ pa of extra public spending.
The spending is necessary.
Britain feels highly taxed but that’s because the weight is on income rather than capital; it’s at the lower end of tax per GDP.
Housing and childcare reform to lower the costs of both would make a massive, massive impact. Tertiary fees, too.
Tax isn't a free lunch. It crowds out consumption and private investment, and we'd do well to remember that. It's also quite easy to make a long list of things that'd be solved by more spending and quite another to raise the funds.
I think we'd get high income and capital tax without the results.
I want to see government cutting back on drags like pensions and investing in things that raise productivity and grow the pie, and that includes competitive taxes. We can then afford more stuff.
No we would not do well to remember that. It’s not borne out at the macro level, as far as I know.
Of course there are harmful taxes that disincentivise things we want, there may also be a correlation between high tax and dirigiste economic policy, but to just say, oh high tax is harmful is belied by the global data.
I could just as easily say low tax is bad and point to the shocking fate of the worst off in the USA, or the economic piss-poverty of the UK today.
Whatever the problems of the UK, they can't fairly be said to be the result of low tax. Because that would assume we have low tax.
The UK is (still) a low tax economy by western standards.
You seem to think there's an easy answer: to tax the UK into prosperity.
That's so much bullshit, as decades of economic experience from countries that have tried to do the same will attest to.
No I didn’t say that.
I just think that it’s preposterous to say “we would do well to remember higher taxes crowd out…”
Decades of economic experience does not support you, you’ve been weaned on too much Telegraph.
I would argue the underlying economic model (market versus statist), labour flexibility, property rights, treatment of investment costs and various other things are more impactful than the raw percentage of GDP taken in tax.
High tax creates the problems it always has: it crowds out consumption, innovation, and investment in the private sector, and reduces the incentives to take risks because its the government appropriating more of the economy to spend on social programmes and they tend to misallocate resources or skew them away from where they'd most profitably be applied.
High tax countries tend to be less innovative, dynamic and creative, and struggle to sustain prosperity and growth over time.
None of these rules have changed. It's not a free lunch.
Even accepting the point, it would be interesting to consider whether the same factors would apply were the taxation to be shifted away from income, and toward wealth? An argument could be made that this would have the opposite effect, taxing capital sitting idle and encouraging people to maximise their income?
We should tax the crap out of assets and lower taxation of earned incomes - and the biggest target ought to be housing. The most straightforward way to reduce inequality, both between the rich and poor and the old and young (and there's a great deal of crossover between those groups, of course,) would be to tax housing wealth hard and transfer the money directly to the poor through higher social security payments, and indirectly to all workers by using the money raised to offset the lowering of income tax and national insurance rates.
Thing about assets is that somebody has to create them for financial gain, whereas people seem to enjoy the process of creating labour, without regard for the productivity of the worker 25 years later. So asset taxes discourage investment more than labour taxes discourage work. Now maybe people reckon that's a good thing for housing: homebuyers would settle for smaller dwellings and invest more in productive assets that can better carry the tax bill by producing a flow of sterling income. But it's a big shift from today where most people do eventually get to buy the big, well-furnished semi-d or detached houses that they like, assisted by low taxation.
An economy where a huge (and ever-increasing) share of national income is sunk into totally non-productive piles of bricks is a fucked economy. Which is what Britain is. Fucked.
Simply put, we screw workers over for vast sums of money to throw at our problems - in particular our colossal burden of sick and elderly people and their pensions, health and social care - whilst pussyfooting around houses as much as possible. So disposable incomes that could go into everything from consumer spending to investing in the stock market get sucked into the great NHS-Triple Lock Black Hole, whereas the full quarter of the retired population who are millionaires get to sit on their huge assets whilst getting their free healthcare for their complex medical needs and inflation-proofed pensions, and when they eventually shuffle off those assets are passed on to their heirs completely intact. The poor are, for the most part, kept poor because they're excluded from the housing market, the rich get richer simply by sitting on top of a pile of bricks doing nothing, and the incomes of productive workers are gradually whittled down to nothing by ever increasing taxation and rampant inflation, so that unproductive assets (houses) and unproductive people (the old) can be protected and enriched at all costs. This is no way to ensure long-term prosperity and socio-economic stability.
We either tax incomes less and assets more, or we means test pensions and healthcare for the aged, prioritise the poorer ones and make the richer ones put up with less generous benefits, or some combination of the two. The current system is not sustainable.
Also worth noting you can't whack up top rate much more or it makes the UK very uncompetitive.
I think 45% is about right given our need to attract international capital and workers. I think 50% (52% with NI) would result in a net reduction to the exchequer over time.
Warmed over socialism, which will end up where socialism always ends up: with everyone worse off
But we have to endure this, the Tories have failed, and so we must go through the same process of experimenting with the left until it is proven that it does not work
Did Britain do something very bad to deserve all this?
I keep trying to warn about this, particularly those tempted by Starmer on the basis "things couldn't possibly be worse".
Of course, there are those who might be attracted by such a radical prospectus, but it's going to be very expensive, probably a drag on business & consumption, and thus growth, and we're all going to be paying an awful lot more tax.
I’m not sure what you are warning of here. This is a really promising policy offer, much of which is constantly demanded on here by left and right wing posters.
Shift taxes toward wealth.
Create a sovereign wealth fund and support domestic industry to reduce the balance of trade deficit.
Devolve power and second power to beefed up local government.
Improve R&D and capital investment to peer economy levels.
Maintain a balanced budget across the cycle.
Dismissing this as reheated 70s Labour or whatever is the sign of not paying attention.
Collective bargaining and action, and large extension of workers rights, is what worries me.
Also, the cost commitments they are listing there are vast, and current planned tax rises won't do it, so it will all put a huge burden on the economy.
I don’t think the cost commitments are vast and in any case nobody is now looking at the UK economy without diagnosing a chronic lack of investment.
I await the detail on collective bargaining. I would certainly welcome a modest tipping of the scales from capital to labour, though.
I think there's a huge amount buried in that with all sorts of things to come, including property and land taxes for ordinary homeowners and pension reliefs going.
What's been laid out there is probably £100bn+ pa of extra public spending.
The spending is necessary.
Britain feels highly taxed but that’s because the weight is on income rather than capital; it’s at the lower end of tax per GDP.
Housing and childcare reform to lower the costs of both would make a massive, massive impact. Tertiary fees, too.
Tax isn't a free lunch. It crowds out consumption and private investment, and we'd do well to remember that. It's also quite easy to make a long list of things that'd be solved by more spending and quite another to raise the funds.
I think we'd get high income and capital tax without the results.
I want to see government cutting back on drags like pensions and investing in things that raise productivity and grow the pie, and that includes competitive taxes. We can then afford more stuff.
No we would not do well to remember that. It’s not borne out at the macro level, as far as I know.
Of course there are harmful taxes that disincentivise things we want, there may also be a correlation between high tax and dirigiste economic policy, but to just say, oh high tax is harmful is belied by the global data.
I could just as easily say low tax is bad and point to the shocking fate of the worst off in the USA, or the economic piss-poverty of the UK today.
Whatever the problems of the UK, they can't fairly be said to be the result of low tax. Because that would assume we have low tax.
The UK is (still) a low tax economy by western standards.
You seem to think there's an easy answer: to tax the UK into prosperity.
That's so much bullshit, as decades of economic experience from countries that have tried to do the same will attest to.
The Scandinavian nations are prosperous
"Scandinavia" is the Godwin's law of the tax debate.
They exist though, and so does Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, etc etc etc.
Wishing them away doesn’t get you anywhere.
Germany, Austria and the Netherlands don't tax anything like Scandinavian levels.
European taxes average at about 41.1%, not much higher than us. And we are mid-range.
The idea there is some vast tax goldmine here that's untapped is laughable.
From those 2019 figures, if we taxed at the same rate as France the UK could have had an extra £145bn of tax revenue (6.5% GDP) that year and run a surplus of £100bn rather than a deficit, or ran a surplus of say £50bn and invested in £50bn in hospital, school and transport infrastructure.
And given that the algorithm for house prices is "whatever you can afford plus a bit", I suspect that a fair bit of that £145 billion ended up in house price inflation.
Which is an investment of sorts, I suppose.
Yet it is house price inflation that has been the principal driver of growing inequality, with property ownership increasingly concentrated among the older and more wealthy, inexorably undoing the progress made during the last century
It's not clear that home ownership is more concentrated than even the 1970s, when the welfare state had to cover a lot more people's housing needs. My prior is that a lot of below-average earners own houses whose grandparents wouldn't have owned houses - and that's before even considering inward migration. What's certainly true is that the widespread extension of lifespans has lengthened the average tenure of retirements and slowed the biologically inevitable transfers of wealth from the old to the middle-aged, at least for a while.
Warmed over socialism, which will end up where socialism always ends up: with everyone worse off
But we have to endure this, the Tories have failed, and so we must go through the same process of experimenting with the left until it is proven that it does not work
Did Britain do something very bad to deserve all this?
I keep trying to warn about this, particularly those tempted by Starmer on the basis "things couldn't possibly be worse".
Of course, there are those who might be attracted by such a radical prospectus, but it's going to be very expensive, probably a drag on business & consumption, and thus growth, and we're all going to be paying an awful lot more tax.
I’m not sure what you are warning of here. This is a really promising policy offer, much of which is constantly demanded on here by left and right wing posters.
Shift taxes toward wealth.
Create a sovereign wealth fund and support domestic industry to reduce the balance of trade deficit.
Devolve power and second power to beefed up local government.
Improve R&D and capital investment to peer economy levels.
Maintain a balanced budget across the cycle.
Dismissing this as reheated 70s Labour or whatever is the sign of not paying attention.
Collective bargaining and action, and large extension of workers rights, is what worries me.
Also, the cost commitments they are listing there are vast, and current planned tax rises won't do it, so it will all put a huge burden on the economy.
I don’t think the cost commitments are vast and in any case nobody is now looking at the UK economy without diagnosing a chronic lack of investment.
I await the detail on collective bargaining. I would certainly welcome a modest tipping of the scales from capital to labour, though.
I think there's a huge amount buried in that with all sorts of things to come, including property and land taxes for ordinary homeowners and pension reliefs going.
What's been laid out there is probably £100bn+ pa of extra public spending.
The spending is necessary.
Britain feels highly taxed but that’s because the weight is on income rather than capital; it’s at the lower end of tax per GDP.
Housing and childcare reform to lower the costs of both would make a massive, massive impact. Tertiary fees, too.
Tax isn't a free lunch. It crowds out consumption and private investment, and we'd do well to remember that. It's also quite easy to make a long list of things that'd be solved by more spending and quite another to raise the funds.
I think we'd get high income and capital tax without the results.
I want to see government cutting back on drags like pensions and investing in things that raise productivity and grow the pie, and that includes competitive taxes. We can then afford more stuff.
No we would not do well to remember that. It’s not borne out at the macro level, as far as I know.
Of course there are harmful taxes that disincentivise things we want, there may also be a correlation between high tax and dirigiste economic policy, but to just say, oh high tax is harmful is belied by the global data.
I could just as easily say low tax is bad and point to the shocking fate of the worst off in the USA, or the economic piss-poverty of the UK today.
Whatever the problems of the UK, they can't fairly be said to be the result of low tax. Because that would assume we have low tax.
The UK is (still) a low tax economy by western standards.
You seem to think there's an easy answer: to tax the UK into prosperity.
That's so much bullshit, as decades of economic experience from countries that have tried to do the same will attest to.
No I didn’t say that.
I just think that it’s preposterous to say “we would do well to remember higher taxes crowd out…”
Decades of economic experience does not support you, you’ve been weaned on too much Telegraph.
I would argue the underlying economic model (market versus statist), labour flexibility, property rights, treatment of investment costs and various other things are more impactful than the raw percentage of GDP taken in tax.
High tax creates the problems it always has: it crowds out consumption, innovation, and investment in the private sector, and reduces the incentives to take risks because its the government appropriating more of the economy to spend on social programmes and they tend to misallocate resources or skew them away from where they'd most profitably be applied.
High tax countries tend to be less innovative, dynamic and creative, and struggle to sustain prosperity and growth over time.
None of these rules have changed. It's not a free lunch.
Even accepting the point, it would be interesting to consider whether the same factors would apply were the taxation to be shifted away from income, and toward wealth? An argument could be made that this would have the opposite effect, taxing capital sitting idle and encouraging people to maximise their income?
We should tax the crap out of assets and lower taxation of earned incomes - and the biggest target ought to be housing. The most straightforward way to reduce inequality, both between the rich and poor and the old and young (and there's a great deal of crossover between those groups, of course,) would be to tax housing wealth hard and transfer the money directly to the poor through higher social security payments, and indirectly to all workers by using the money raised to offset the lowering of income tax and national insurance rates.
Even though I'm a confirmed lefty I wouldn't increase social security payments across the board - the danger is that that just subsidises rentiers and low-wage employers.
I'd look for other ways to help the poor (increase minimum wage, cut VAT, free school meals, cheaper public transport, etc.) But yes tax wealth, and unearned more, whilst reducing taxes on earned income where possible.
And so we reach the usual denouement - what appears to be the economically sensible way out of our current fix is politically impossible because the elderly are numerous and vote whereas those of working age aren’t so much. Amplified by the toxic effect of our winner takes all voting system, where some votes in some places count and others in others don’t.
Nah. Labour will win and do a lot of this stuff, I reckon.
Your faith is greater than mine. Although it is the one argument for a massive landslide, I suppose. In the hope it might inject a bit of oomph.
The House should adopt the plurality rule as per 1849...
"After 59 ballots without a majority choice, the House adopted a plurality rule stating that, if after three more ballots no one garnered a majority of the votes, the person receiving the highest number of votes on the next ensuing ballot would be declared to have been chosen speaker.[16] On the decisive 63rd ballot, Howell Cobb received the most votes, 102 votes out of 221, or nine less than a majority, and was elected speaker"
The House should adopt the plurality rule as per 1849...
"After 59 ballots without a majority choice, the House adopted a plurality rule stating that, if after three more ballots no one garnered a majority of the votes, the person receiving the highest number of votes on the next ensuing ballot would be declared to have been chosen speaker.[16] On the decisive 63rd ballot, Howell Cobb received the most votes, 102 votes out of 221, or nine less than a majority, and was elected speaker"
The House should adopt the plurality rule as per 1849...
"After 59 ballots without a majority choice, the House adopted a plurality rule stating that, if after three more ballots no one garnered a majority of the votes, the person receiving the highest number of votes on the next ensuing ballot would be declared to have been chosen speaker.[16] On the decisive 63rd ballot, Howell Cobb received the most votes, 102 votes out of 221, or nine less than a majority, and was elected speaker"
Warmed over socialism, which will end up where socialism always ends up: with everyone worse off
But we have to endure this, the Tories have failed, and so we must go through the same process of experimenting with the left until it is proven that it does not work
Did Britain do something very bad to deserve all this?
I keep trying to warn about this, particularly those tempted by Starmer on the basis "things couldn't possibly be worse".
Of course, there are those who might be attracted by such a radical prospectus, but it's going to be very expensive, probably a drag on business & consumption, and thus growth, and we're all going to be paying an awful lot more tax.
I’m not sure what you are warning of here. This is a really promising policy offer, much of which is constantly demanded on here by left and right wing posters.
Shift taxes toward wealth.
Create a sovereign wealth fund and support domestic industry to reduce the balance of trade deficit.
Devolve power and second power to beefed up local government.
Improve R&D and capital investment to peer economy levels.
Maintain a balanced budget across the cycle.
Dismissing this as reheated 70s Labour or whatever is the sign of not paying attention.
Collective bargaining and action, and large extension of workers rights, is what worries me.
Also, the cost commitments they are listing there are vast, and current planned tax rises won't do it, so it will all put a huge burden on the economy.
I don’t think the cost commitments are vast and in any case nobody is now looking at the UK economy without diagnosing a chronic lack of investment.
I await the detail on collective bargaining. I would certainly welcome a modest tipping of the scales from capital to labour, though.
I think there's a huge amount buried in that with all sorts of things to come, including property and land taxes for ordinary homeowners and pension reliefs going.
What's been laid out there is probably £100bn+ pa of extra public spending.
The spending is necessary.
Britain feels highly taxed but that’s because the weight is on income rather than capital; it’s at the lower end of tax per GDP.
Housing and childcare reform to lower the costs of both would make a massive, massive impact. Tertiary fees, too.
Tax isn't a free lunch. It crowds out consumption and private investment, and we'd do well to remember that. It's also quite easy to make a long list of things that'd be solved by more spending and quite another to raise the funds.
I think we'd get high income and capital tax without the results.
I want to see government cutting back on drags like pensions and investing in things that raise productivity and grow the pie, and that includes competitive taxes. We can then afford more stuff.
No we would not do well to remember that. It’s not borne out at the macro level, as far as I know.
Of course there are harmful taxes that disincentivise things we want, there may also be a correlation between high tax and dirigiste economic policy, but to just say, oh high tax is harmful is belied by the global data.
I could just as easily say low tax is bad and point to the shocking fate of the worst off in the USA, or the economic piss-poverty of the UK today.
Whatever the problems of the UK, they can't fairly be said to be the result of low tax. Because that would assume we have low tax.
The UK is (still) a low tax economy by western standards.
You seem to think there's an easy answer: to tax the UK into prosperity.
That's so much bullshit, as decades of economic experience from countries that have tried to do the same will attest to.
No I didn’t say that.
I just think that it’s preposterous to say “we would do well to remember higher taxes crowd out…”
Decades of economic experience does not support you, you’ve been weaned on too much Telegraph.
I would argue the underlying economic model (market versus statist), labour flexibility, property rights, treatment of investment costs and various other things are more impactful than the raw percentage of GDP taken in tax.
High tax creates the problems it always has: it crowds out consumption, innovation, and investment in the private sector, and reduces the incentives to take risks because its the government appropriating more of the economy to spend on social programmes and they tend to misallocate resources or skew them away from where they'd most profitably be applied.
High tax countries tend to be less innovative, dynamic and creative, and struggle to sustain prosperity and growth over time.
None of these rules have changed. It's not a free lunch.
Even accepting the point, it would be interesting to consider whether the same factors would apply were the taxation to be shifted away from income, and toward wealth? An argument could be made that this would have the opposite effect, taxing capital sitting idle and encouraging people to maximise their income?
We should tax the crap out of assets and lower taxation of earned incomes - and the biggest target ought to be housing. The most straightforward way to reduce inequality, both between the rich and poor and the old and young (and there's a great deal of crossover between those groups, of course,) would be to tax housing wealth hard and transfer the money directly to the poor through higher social security payments, and indirectly to all workers by using the money raised to offset the lowering of income tax and national insurance rates.
Even though I'm a confirmed lefty I wouldn't increase social security payments across the board - the danger is that that just subsidises rentiers and low-wage employers.
I'd look for other ways to help the poor (increase minimum wage, cut VAT, free school meals, cheaper public transport, etc.) But yes tax wealth, and unearned more, whilst reducing taxes on earned income where possible.
And so we reach the usual denouement - what appears to be the economically sensible way out of our current fix is politically impossible because the elderly are numerous and vote whereas those of working age aren’t so much. Amplified by the toxic effect of our winner takes all voting system, where some votes in some places count and others in others don’t.
Nah. Labour will win and do a lot of this stuff, I reckon.
We shall only know when they get into office, of course.
There are two, and only two, things to pay real attention to in the next Labour manifesto: the balance of taxation (assets vs incomes) and the pension triple lock. If Labour won't shift the tax burden to assets and won't bin the triple lock then everything else they claim they want to do will just be tinkering around the edges, or managing the same exhausted and useless system less incompetently than the Conservatives (in which case, there's little point in even bothering to turn up and vote TBH.)
Ideally we'll get both, but one out of two would at least represent some measure of progress.
The House should adopt the plurality rule as per 1849...
"After 59 ballots without a majority choice, the House adopted a plurality rule stating that, if after three more ballots no one garnered a majority of the votes, the person receiving the highest number of votes on the next ensuing ballot would be declared to have been chosen speaker.[16] On the decisive 63rd ballot, Howell Cobb received the most votes, 102 votes out of 221, or nine less than a majority, and was elected speaker"
There's a problem there for Mr McCarthy. The result would be either a Democratic Speaker or a scramble to get behind a Republican other than McCarthy. A Democrat would be unseated almost immediately and we would be back to square one.
The block here is not the rules - the block is McCarthy. He knows that better than anyone.
Meanwhile who says there is a majority for moving to a plurality vote. The Democrats and MAGA wouldn't support it. The Republican mainstream no longer has the numbers.
Warmed over socialism, which will end up where socialism always ends up: with everyone worse off
But we have to endure this, the Tories have failed, and so we must go through the same process of experimenting with the left until it is proven that it does not work
Did Britain do something very bad to deserve all this?
I keep trying to warn about this, particularly those tempted by Starmer on the basis "things couldn't possibly be worse".
Of course, there are those who might be attracted by such a radical prospectus, but it's going to be very expensive, probably a drag on business & consumption, and thus growth, and we're all going to be paying an awful lot more tax.
I’m not sure what you are warning of here. This is a really promising policy offer, much of which is constantly demanded on here by left and right wing posters.
Shift taxes toward wealth.
Create a sovereign wealth fund and support domestic industry to reduce the balance of trade deficit.
Devolve power and second power to beefed up local government.
Improve R&D and capital investment to peer economy levels.
Maintain a balanced budget across the cycle.
Dismissing this as reheated 70s Labour or whatever is the sign of not paying attention.
Collective bargaining and action, and large extension of workers rights, is what worries me.
Also, the cost commitments they are listing there are vast, and current planned tax rises won't do it, so it will all put a huge burden on the economy.
I don’t think the cost commitments are vast and in any case nobody is now looking at the UK economy without diagnosing a chronic lack of investment.
I await the detail on collective bargaining. I would certainly welcome a modest tipping of the scales from capital to labour, though.
I think there's a huge amount buried in that with all sorts of things to come, including property and land taxes for ordinary homeowners and pension reliefs going.
What's been laid out there is probably £100bn+ pa of extra public spending.
The spending is necessary.
Britain feels highly taxed but that’s because the weight is on income rather than capital; it’s at the lower end of tax per GDP.
Housing and childcare reform to lower the costs of both would make a massive, massive impact. Tertiary fees, too.
Tax isn't a free lunch. It crowds out consumption and private investment, and we'd do well to remember that. It's also quite easy to make a long list of things that'd be solved by more spending and quite another to raise the funds.
I think we'd get high income and capital tax without the results.
I want to see government cutting back on drags like pensions and investing in things that raise productivity and grow the pie, and that includes competitive taxes. We can then afford more stuff.
No we would not do well to remember that. It’s not borne out at the macro level, as far as I know.
Of course there are harmful taxes that disincentivise things we want, there may also be a correlation between high tax and dirigiste economic policy, but to just say, oh high tax is harmful is belied by the global data.
I could just as easily say low tax is bad and point to the shocking fate of the worst off in the USA, or the economic piss-poverty of the UK today.
Whatever the problems of the UK, they can't fairly be said to be the result of low tax. Because that would assume we have low tax.
The UK is (still) a low tax economy by western standards.
You seem to think there's an easy answer: to tax the UK into prosperity.
That's so much bullshit, as decades of economic experience from countries that have tried to do the same will attest to.
No I didn’t say that.
I just think that it’s preposterous to say “we would do well to remember higher taxes crowd out…”
Decades of economic experience does not support you, you’ve been weaned on too much Telegraph.
I would argue the underlying economic model (market versus statist), labour flexibility, property rights, treatment of investment costs and various other things are more impactful than the raw percentage of GDP taken in tax.
High tax creates the problems it always has: it crowds out consumption, innovation, and investment in the private sector, and reduces the incentives to take risks because its the government appropriating more of the economy to spend on social programmes and they tend to misallocate resources or skew them away from where they'd most profitably be applied.
High tax countries tend to be less innovative, dynamic and creative, and struggle to sustain prosperity and growth over time.
None of these rules have changed. It's not a free lunch.
Even accepting the point, it would be interesting to consider whether the same factors would apply were the taxation to be shifted away from income, and toward wealth? An argument could be made that this would have the opposite effect, taxing capital sitting idle and encouraging people to maximise their income?
We should tax the crap out of assets and lower taxation of earned incomes - and the biggest target ought to be housing. The most straightforward way to reduce inequality, both between the rich and poor and the old and young (and there's a great deal of crossover between those groups, of course,) would be to tax housing wealth hard and transfer the money directly to the poor through higher social security payments, and indirectly to all workers by using the money raised to offset the lowering of income tax and national insurance rates.
Even though I'm a confirmed lefty I wouldn't increase social security payments across the board - the danger is that that just subsidises rentiers and low-wage employers.
I'd look for other ways to help the poor (increase minimum wage, cut VAT, free school meals, cheaper public transport, etc.) But yes tax wealth, and unearned more, whilst reducing taxes on earned income where possible.
And so we reach the usual denouement - what appears to be the economically sensible way out of our current fix is politically impossible because the elderly are numerous and vote whereas those of working age aren’t so much. Amplified by the toxic effect of our winner takes all voting system, where some votes in some places count and others in others don’t.
Nah. Labour will win and do a lot of this stuff, I reckon.
Your faith is greater than mine. Although it is the one argument for a massive landslide, I suppose. In the hope it might inject a bit of oomph.
Back in 1997, Blair was himself stunned by the surprise of the majority - he expected a 30-50 seat win not a 179 seat majority. His manifesto was predicated on a small win and the ability to make only limited changes to what was in effect the Thatcher Revolution.
Starmer has a similar dilemma. He can't be seen to be too radical for fear of frightening the ex-Tories back to the blue team yet there is clear anger at where the country has got to and radical solutions might get more of an audience.
Warmed over socialism, which will end up where socialism always ends up: with everyone worse off
But we have to endure this, the Tories have failed, and so we must go through the same process of experimenting with the left until it is proven that it does not work
Did Britain do something very bad to deserve all this?
I keep trying to warn about this, particularly those tempted by Starmer on the basis "things couldn't possibly be worse".
Of course, there are those who might be attracted by such a radical prospectus, but it's going to be very expensive, probably a drag on business & consumption, and thus growth, and we're all going to be paying an awful lot more tax.
I’m not sure what you are warning of here. This is a really promising policy offer, much of which is constantly demanded on here by left and right wing posters.
Shift taxes toward wealth.
Create a sovereign wealth fund and support domestic industry to reduce the balance of trade deficit.
Devolve power and second power to beefed up local government.
Improve R&D and capital investment to peer economy levels.
Maintain a balanced budget across the cycle.
Dismissing this as reheated 70s Labour or whatever is the sign of not paying attention.
Collective bargaining and action, and large extension of workers rights, is what worries me.
Also, the cost commitments they are listing there are vast, and current planned tax rises won't do it, so it will all put a huge burden on the economy.
I don’t think the cost commitments are vast and in any case nobody is now looking at the UK economy without diagnosing a chronic lack of investment.
I await the detail on collective bargaining. I would certainly welcome a modest tipping of the scales from capital to labour, though.
I think there's a huge amount buried in that with all sorts of things to come, including property and land taxes for ordinary homeowners and pension reliefs going.
What's been laid out there is probably £100bn+ pa of extra public spending.
The spending is necessary.
Britain feels highly taxed but that’s because the weight is on income rather than capital; it’s at the lower end of tax per GDP.
Housing and childcare reform to lower the costs of both would make a massive, massive impact. Tertiary fees, too.
Tax isn't a free lunch. It crowds out consumption and private investment, and we'd do well to remember that. It's also quite easy to make a long list of things that'd be solved by more spending and quite another to raise the funds.
I think we'd get high income and capital tax without the results.
I want to see government cutting back on drags like pensions and investing in things that raise productivity and grow the pie, and that includes competitive taxes. We can then afford more stuff.
No we would not do well to remember that. It’s not borne out at the macro level, as far as I know.
Of course there are harmful taxes that disincentivise things we want, there may also be a correlation between high tax and dirigiste economic policy, but to just say, oh high tax is harmful is belied by the global data.
I could just as easily say low tax is bad and point to the shocking fate of the worst off in the USA, or the economic piss-poverty of the UK today.
Whatever the problems of the UK, they can't fairly be said to be the result of low tax. Because that would assume we have low tax.
The UK is (still) a low tax economy by western standards.
You seem to think there's an easy answer: to tax the UK into prosperity.
That's so much bullshit, as decades of economic experience from countries that have tried to do the same will attest to.
No I didn’t say that.
I just think that it’s preposterous to say “we would do well to remember higher taxes crowd out…”
Decades of economic experience does not support you, you’ve been weaned on too much Telegraph.
I would argue the underlying economic model (market versus statist), labour flexibility, property rights, treatment of investment costs and various other things are more impactful than the raw percentage of GDP taken in tax.
High tax creates the problems it always has: it crowds out consumption, innovation, and investment in the private sector, and reduces the incentives to take risks because its the government appropriating more of the economy to spend on social programmes and they tend to misallocate resources or skew them away from where they'd most profitably be applied.
High tax countries tend to be less innovative, dynamic and creative, and struggle to sustain prosperity and growth over time.
None of these rules have changed. It's not a free lunch.
Even accepting the point, it would be interesting to consider whether the same factors would apply were the taxation to be shifted away from income, and toward wealth? An argument could be made that this would have the opposite effect, taxing capital sitting idle and encouraging people to maximise their income?
We should tax the crap out of assets and lower taxation of earned incomes - and the biggest target ought to be housing. The most straightforward way to reduce inequality, both between the rich and poor and the old and young (and there's a great deal of crossover between those groups, of course,) would be to tax housing wealth hard and transfer the money directly to the poor through higher social security payments, and indirectly to all workers by using the money raised to offset the lowering of income tax and national insurance rates.
Thing about assets is that somebody has to create them for financial gain, whereas people seem to enjoy the process of creating labour, without regard for the productivity of the worker 25 years later. So asset taxes discourage investment more than labour taxes discourage work. Now maybe people reckon that's a good thing for housing: homebuyers would settle for smaller dwellings and invest more in productive assets that can better carry the tax bill by producing a flow of sterling income. But it's a big shift from today where most people do eventually get to buy the big, well-furnished semi-d or detached houses that they like, assisted by low taxation.
An economy where a huge (and ever-increasing) share of national income is sunk into totally non-productive piles of bricks is a fucked economy. Which is what Britain is. Fucked.
Simply put, we screw workers over for vast sums of money to throw at our problems - in particular our colossal burden of sick and elderly people and their pensions, health and social care - whilst pussyfooting around houses as much as possible. So disposable incomes that could go into everything from consumer spending to investing in the stock market get sucked into the great NHS-Triple Lock Black Hole, whereas the full quarter of the retired population who are millionaires get to sit on their huge assets whilst getting their free healthcare for their complex medical needs and inflation-proofed pensions, and when they eventually shuffle off those assets are passed on to their heirs completely intact. The poor are, for the most part, kept poor because they're excluded from the housing market, the rich get richer simply by sitting on top of a pile of bricks doing nothing, and the incomes of productive workers are gradually whittled down to nothing by ever increasing taxation and rampant inflation, so that unproductive assets (houses) and unproductive people (the old) can be protected and enriched at all costs. This is no way to ensure long-term prosperity and socio-economic stability.
We either tax incomes less and assets more, or we means test pensions and healthcare for the aged, prioritise the poorer ones and make the richer ones put up with less generous benefits, or some combination of the two. The current system is not sustainable.
Well, yes houses are non-productive because they are investment to produce consumption of housing services. Like saying iPhones are non-productive. You can't tax it much, but people enjoy it a lot, maybe even more than they enjoy investing in the stock market.
Warmed over socialism, which will end up where socialism always ends up: with everyone worse off
But we have to endure this, the Tories have failed, and so we must go through the same process of experimenting with the left until it is proven that it does not work
Did Britain do something very bad to deserve all this?
I keep trying to warn about this, particularly those tempted by Starmer on the basis "things couldn't possibly be worse".
Of course, there are those who might be attracted by such a radical prospectus, but it's going to be very expensive, probably a drag on business & consumption, and thus growth, and we're all going to be paying an awful lot more tax.
I’m not sure what you are warning of here. This is a really promising policy offer, much of which is constantly demanded on here by left and right wing posters.
Shift taxes toward wealth.
Create a sovereign wealth fund and support domestic industry to reduce the balance of trade deficit.
Devolve power and second power to beefed up local government.
Improve R&D and capital investment to peer economy levels.
Maintain a balanced budget across the cycle.
Dismissing this as reheated 70s Labour or whatever is the sign of not paying attention.
Collective bargaining and action, and large extension of workers rights, is what worries me.
Also, the cost commitments they are listing there are vast, and current planned tax rises won't do it, so it will all put a huge burden on the economy.
I don’t think the cost commitments are vast and in any case nobody is now looking at the UK economy without diagnosing a chronic lack of investment.
I await the detail on collective bargaining. I would certainly welcome a modest tipping of the scales from capital to labour, though.
I think there's a huge amount buried in that with all sorts of things to come, including property and land taxes for ordinary homeowners and pension reliefs going.
What's been laid out there is probably £100bn+ pa of extra public spending.
The spending is necessary.
Britain feels highly taxed but that’s because the weight is on income rather than capital; it’s at the lower end of tax per GDP.
Housing and childcare reform to lower the costs of both would make a massive, massive impact. Tertiary fees, too.
Tax isn't a free lunch. It crowds out consumption and private investment, and we'd do well to remember that. It's also quite easy to make a long list of things that'd be solved by more spending and quite another to raise the funds.
I think we'd get high income and capital tax without the results.
I want to see government cutting back on drags like pensions and investing in things that raise productivity and grow the pie, and that includes competitive taxes. We can then afford more stuff.
No we would not do well to remember that. It’s not borne out at the macro level, as far as I know.
Of course there are harmful taxes that disincentivise things we want, there may also be a correlation between high tax and dirigiste economic policy, but to just say, oh high tax is harmful is belied by the global data.
I could just as easily say low tax is bad and point to the shocking fate of the worst off in the USA, or the economic piss-poverty of the UK today.
Whatever the problems of the UK, they can't fairly be said to be the result of low tax. Because that would assume we have low tax.
The UK is (still) a low tax economy by western standards.
You seem to think there's an easy answer: to tax the UK into prosperity.
That's so much bullshit, as decades of economic experience from countries that have tried to do the same will attest to.
The Scandinavian nations are prosperous
"Scandinavia" is the Godwin's law of the tax debate.
They exist though, and so does Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, etc etc etc.
Wishing them away doesn’t get you anywhere.
They did not get wealthy by having high tax high spend is the point. They got wealthy by having low tax low spend, then they could afford high tax high spend, so they did, with the requisite slowing of growth. You are pointing to the private jet of the millionaire and suggesting that we could all be millionaires if we got private jets. The opposite is true. We need to know how that millionaire got that way, not what he does now.
No. These countries have been higher tax for generations.
The House should adopt the plurality rule as per 1849...
"After 59 ballots without a majority choice, the House adopted a plurality rule stating that, if after three more ballots no one garnered a majority of the votes, the person receiving the highest number of votes on the next ensuing ballot would be declared to have been chosen speaker.[16] On the decisive 63rd ballot, Howell Cobb received the most votes, 102 votes out of 221, or nine less than a majority, and was elected speaker"
There's a problem there for Mr McCarthy. The result would be either a Democratic Speaker or a scramble to get behind a Republican other than McCarthy. A Democrat would be unseated almost immediately and we would be back to square one.
The block here is not the rules - the block is McCarthy. He knows that better than anyone.
Meanwhile who says there is a majority for moving to a plurality vote. The Democrats and MAGA wouldn't support it. The Republican mainstream no longer has the numbers.
Er, why would the Dems not support it? It would give them the Speakership.
And I get it - I'd love a world where people self-insured against old age and ill health using their own assets. But politically, it looks like almost nobody wants to move away from the universal safety net, so who'd bother investing in boring old shares instead of a house you get to live in every day?
Also worth noting you can't whack up top rate much more or it makes the UK very uncompetitive.
I think 45% is about right given our need to attract international capital and workers. I think 50% (52% with NI) would result in a net reduction to the exchequer over time.
Yes, but the whole argument on here is generally about taxing wealth higher and income either the same or even lower (correcting the Brownian anomalies as you move up from 100k).
Warmed over socialism, which will end up where socialism always ends up: with everyone worse off
But we have to endure this, the Tories have failed, and so we must go through the same process of experimenting with the left until it is proven that it does not work
Did Britain do something very bad to deserve all this?
I keep trying to warn about this, particularly those tempted by Starmer on the basis "things couldn't possibly be worse".
Of course, there are those who might be attracted by such a radical prospectus, but it's going to be very expensive, probably a drag on business & consumption, and thus growth, and we're all going to be paying an awful lot more tax.
I’m not sure what you are warning of here. This is a really promising policy offer, much of which is constantly demanded on here by left and right wing posters.
Shift taxes toward wealth.
Create a sovereign wealth fund and support domestic industry to reduce the balance of trade deficit.
Devolve power and second power to beefed up local government.
Improve R&D and capital investment to peer economy levels.
Maintain a balanced budget across the cycle.
Dismissing this as reheated 70s Labour or whatever is the sign of not paying attention.
Collective bargaining and action, and large extension of workers rights, is what worries me.
Also, the cost commitments they are listing there are vast, and current planned tax rises won't do it, so it will all put a huge burden on the economy.
I don’t think the cost commitments are vast and in any case nobody is now looking at the UK economy without diagnosing a chronic lack of investment.
I await the detail on collective bargaining. I would certainly welcome a modest tipping of the scales from capital to labour, though.
I think there's a huge amount buried in that with all sorts of things to come, including property and land taxes for ordinary homeowners and pension reliefs going.
What's been laid out there is probably £100bn+ pa of extra public spending.
The spending is necessary.
Britain feels highly taxed but that’s because the weight is on income rather than capital; it’s at the lower end of tax per GDP.
Housing and childcare reform to lower the costs of both would make a massive, massive impact. Tertiary fees, too.
Tax isn't a free lunch. It crowds out consumption and private investment, and we'd do well to remember that. It's also quite easy to make a long list of things that'd be solved by more spending and quite another to raise the funds.
I think we'd get high income and capital tax without the results.
I want to see government cutting back on drags like pensions and investing in things that raise productivity and grow the pie, and that includes competitive taxes. We can then afford more stuff.
No we would not do well to remember that. It’s not borne out at the macro level, as far as I know.
Of course there are harmful taxes that disincentivise things we want, there may also be a correlation between high tax and dirigiste economic policy, but to just say, oh high tax is harmful is belied by the global data.
I could just as easily say low tax is bad and point to the shocking fate of the worst off in the USA, or the economic piss-poverty of the UK today.
Whatever the problems of the UK, they can't fairly be said to be the result of low tax. Because that would assume we have low tax.
The UK is (still) a low tax economy by western standards.
You seem to think there's an easy answer: to tax the UK into prosperity.
That's so much bullshit, as decades of economic experience from countries that have tried to do the same will attest to.
No I didn’t say that.
I just think that it’s preposterous to say “we would do well to remember higher taxes crowd out…”
Decades of economic experience does not support you, you’ve been weaned on too much Telegraph.
I would argue the underlying economic model (market versus statist), labour flexibility, property rights, treatment of investment costs and various other things are more impactful than the raw percentage of GDP taken in tax.
High tax creates the problems it always has: it crowds out consumption, innovation, and investment in the private sector, and reduces the incentives to take risks because its the government appropriating more of the economy to spend on social programmes and they tend to misallocate resources or skew them away from where they'd most profitably be applied.
High tax countries tend to be less innovative, dynamic and creative, and struggle to sustain prosperity and growth over time.
None of these rules have changed. It's not a free lunch.
Even accepting the point, it would be interesting to consider whether the same factors would apply were the taxation to be shifted away from income, and toward wealth? An argument could be made that this would have the opposite effect, taxing capital sitting idle and encouraging people to maximise their income?
We should tax the crap out of assets and lower taxation of earned incomes - and the biggest target ought to be housing. The most straightforward way to reduce inequality, both between the rich and poor and the old and young (and there's a great deal of crossover between those groups, of course,) would be to tax housing wealth hard and transfer the money directly to the poor through higher social security payments, and indirectly to all workers by using the money raised to offset the lowering of income tax and national insurance rates.
Even though I'm a confirmed lefty I wouldn't increase social security payments across the board - the danger is that that just subsidises rentiers and low-wage employers.
I'd look for other ways to help the poor (increase minimum wage, cut VAT, free school meals, cheaper public transport, etc.) But yes tax wealth, and unearned more, whilst reducing taxes on earned income where possible.
And so we reach the usual denouement - what appears to be the economically sensible way out of our current fix is politically impossible because the elderly are numerous and vote whereas those of working age aren’t so much. Amplified by the toxic effect of our winner takes all voting system, where some votes in some places count and others in others don’t.
Nah. Labour will win and do a lot of this stuff, I reckon.
Your faith is greater than mine. Although it is the one argument for a massive landslide, I suppose. In the hope it might inject a bit of oomph.
Back in 1997, Blair was himself stunned by the surprise of the majority - he expected a 30-50 seat win not a 179 seat majority. His manifesto was predicated on a small win and the ability to make only limited changes to what was in effect the Thatcher Revolution.
Starmer has a similar dilemma. He can't be seen to be too radical for fear of frightening the ex-Tories back to the blue team yet there is clear anger at where the country has got to and radical solutions might get more of an audience.
I recall on the evening ahead of the results I and a few friends had a stake on what the size of the majority would be (we all thought Labour would win despite the memory of 1992). I won the pool as I came closest with my prediction of a 70 seat majority.
If anyone wnats to see the biggest cheat in Horse Racing watch the riding of Kraken Power in the 3.20 at Newcastle today. Paul Mulrennan should be banned for life.
As someone who has no knowledge and no interest in horse racing I decided that I should watch the video expecting to see some blatant cheating. Watched the video and from my perspective with no knowledge I couldn't see anything wrong. Read the summary and whilst I know I am reading English I do not understand it. I know understand again why I have no interest in horse racing.
It doesn't look good to me. He backs right off and then gets going again but it's too late to catch the leaders.
In my 40 years of following horse racing this is the worse I have seen, With 2 furlongs to go he was in 3rd and cantering, with 1 furlong to go he had pulled the horse back to be 2 lengths last. When all chance had gone he let the horse run and it came flying through. Its the most obvious cheat I have ever seen.
Mulrennan's mistake was to get caught behind two weakening outsiders at a key moment - the two he tracked (who finished last and last but one) fell back as the rest of the field moved forward leaving Mulrennan trapped at the back. That was poor judgement but calling it a "cheat" is a bit of a stretch.
Horse racing may not be as honest as Pro Wrestling but it's a lot cleaner than football or cricket (perhaps).
Pro wrestling has no pretensions of being an honest contest though.
But it can be great entertainment.
Is your profile name a nod to the Human Suplex Machine?
I do love pro-wrestling, a much-misunderstood form of storytelling. It’s the real working class ballet (and not a coincidence that Aronofsky’s Black Swan and The Wrestler make for a great double bill).
My username certainly is a nod to him. Yes.
Pro wrestling is great. Don’t watch it nearly as much as I used to in the old WWF v WCW days but I still like to watch it when I can. I especially love all the shoot videos on YouTube.
Jim Cornette is really entertaining.
The legitimate tough guys were usually the ones who made mid card at best. Haku, Paul Orndorff, Bob Holly etc etc.
Haku/Meng genuinely sounds like one of the most terrifying men to have ever lived.
Cornette is entertaining (and as far as shoot videos go, is up there with New Jack in candid recollection). His memory is extraordinary. He could probably do with lightening up on the dafter stuff though; silliness also has its place in the squared circle.
They love the sound of their own voices don't they.
It is pretty silly to say anything at this point - in the absence of a breakthrough in wheeling and dealing behind the scenes there's little reason for the situation to change unless the rebels get bored, so no one need say anything even in nomination.
Warmed over socialism, which will end up where socialism always ends up: with everyone worse off
But we have to endure this, the Tories have failed, and so we must go through the same process of experimenting with the left until it is proven that it does not work
Did Britain do something very bad to deserve all this?
I keep trying to warn about this, particularly those tempted by Starmer on the basis "things couldn't possibly be worse".
Of course, there are those who might be attracted by such a radical prospectus, but it's going to be very expensive, probably a drag on business & consumption, and thus growth, and we're all going to be paying an awful lot more tax.
I’m not sure what you are warning of here. This is a really promising policy offer, much of which is constantly demanded on here by left and right wing posters.
Shift taxes toward wealth.
Create a sovereign wealth fund and support domestic industry to reduce the balance of trade deficit.
Devolve power and second power to beefed up local government.
Improve R&D and capital investment to peer economy levels.
Maintain a balanced budget across the cycle.
Dismissing this as reheated 70s Labour or whatever is the sign of not paying attention.
Collective bargaining and action, and large extension of workers rights, is what worries me.
Also, the cost commitments they are listing there are vast, and current planned tax rises won't do it, so it will all put a huge burden on the economy.
I don’t think the cost commitments are vast and in any case nobody is now looking at the UK economy without diagnosing a chronic lack of investment.
I await the detail on collective bargaining. I would certainly welcome a modest tipping of the scales from capital to labour, though.
I think there's a huge amount buried in that with all sorts of things to come, including property and land taxes for ordinary homeowners and pension reliefs going.
What's been laid out there is probably £100bn+ pa of extra public spending.
The spending is necessary.
Britain feels highly taxed but that’s because the weight is on income rather than capital; it’s at the lower end of tax per GDP.
Housing and childcare reform to lower the costs of both would make a massive, massive impact. Tertiary fees, too.
Tax isn't a free lunch. It crowds out consumption and private investment, and we'd do well to remember that. It's also quite easy to make a long list of things that'd be solved by more spending and quite another to raise the funds.
I think we'd get high income and capital tax without the results.
I want to see government cutting back on drags like pensions and investing in things that raise productivity and grow the pie, and that includes competitive taxes. We can then afford more stuff.
No we would not do well to remember that. It’s not borne out at the macro level, as far as I know.
Of course there are harmful taxes that disincentivise things we want, there may also be a correlation between high tax and dirigiste economic policy, but to just say, oh high tax is harmful is belied by the global data.
I could just as easily say low tax is bad and point to the shocking fate of the worst off in the USA, or the economic piss-poverty of the UK today.
Whatever the problems of the UK, they can't fairly be said to be the result of low tax. Because that would assume we have low tax.
The UK is (still) a low tax economy by western standards.
You seem to think there's an easy answer: to tax the UK into prosperity.
That's so much bullshit, as decades of economic experience from countries that have tried to do the same will attest to.
The Scandinavian nations are prosperous
"Scandinavia" is the Godwin's law of the tax debate.
They exist though, and so does Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, etc etc etc.
Wishing them away doesn’t get you anywhere.
They did not get wealthy by having high tax high spend is the point. They got wealthy by having low tax low spend, then they could afford high tax high spend, so they did, with the requisite slowing of growth. You are pointing to the private jet of the millionaire and suggesting that we could all be millionaires if we got private jets. The opposite is true. We need to know how that millionaire got that way, not what he does now.
No. These countries have been higher tax for generations.
Back in 1997, Blair was himself stunned by the surprise of the majority - he expected a 30-50 seat win not a 179 seat majority. His manifesto was predicated on a small win and the ability to make only limited changes to what was in effect the Thatcher Revolution.
Starmer has a similar dilemma. He can't be seen to be too radical for fear of frightening the ex-Tories back to the blue team yet there is clear anger at where the country has got to and radical solutions might get more of an audience.
I recall on the evening ahead of the results I and a few friends had a stake on what the size of the majority would be (we all thought Labour would win despite the memory of 1992). I won the pool as I came closest with my prediction of a 70 seat majority.
I was working in a Con-LD marginal and was surprised by the strength of the Labour vote which I feared would allow the Conservatives to hold the seat.
It didn't happen. The Conservative vote collapsed by a third but the Labour vote rose nearly as much as the LD vote and I'm sure that cost the LD seats and saved some Conservatives elsewhere.
Warmed over socialism, which will end up where socialism always ends up: with everyone worse off
But we have to endure this, the Tories have failed, and so we must go through the same process of experimenting with the left until it is proven that it does not work
Did Britain do something very bad to deserve all this?
I keep trying to warn about this, particularly those tempted by Starmer on the basis "things couldn't possibly be worse".
Of course, there are those who might be attracted by such a radical prospectus, but it's going to be very expensive, probably a drag on business & consumption, and thus growth, and we're all going to be paying an awful lot more tax.
I’m not sure what you are warning of here. This is a really promising policy offer, much of which is constantly demanded on here by left and right wing posters.
Shift taxes toward wealth.
Create a sovereign wealth fund and support domestic industry to reduce the balance of trade deficit.
Devolve power and second power to beefed up local government.
Improve R&D and capital investment to peer economy levels.
Maintain a balanced budget across the cycle.
Dismissing this as reheated 70s Labour or whatever is the sign of not paying attention.
Collective bargaining and action, and large extension of workers rights, is what worries me.
Also, the cost commitments they are listing there are vast, and current planned tax rises won't do it, so it will all put a huge burden on the economy.
I don’t think the cost commitments are vast and in any case nobody is now looking at the UK economy without diagnosing a chronic lack of investment.
I await the detail on collective bargaining. I would certainly welcome a modest tipping of the scales from capital to labour, though.
I think there's a huge amount buried in that with all sorts of things to come, including property and land taxes for ordinary homeowners and pension reliefs going.
What's been laid out there is probably £100bn+ pa of extra public spending.
The spending is necessary.
Britain feels highly taxed but that’s because the weight is on income rather than capital; it’s at the lower end of tax per GDP.
Housing and childcare reform to lower the costs of both would make a massive, massive impact. Tertiary fees, too.
Tax isn't a free lunch. It crowds out consumption and private investment, and we'd do well to remember that. It's also quite easy to make a long list of things that'd be solved by more spending and quite another to raise the funds.
I think we'd get high income and capital tax without the results.
I want to see government cutting back on drags like pensions and investing in things that raise productivity and grow the pie, and that includes competitive taxes. We can then afford more stuff.
No we would not do well to remember that. It’s not borne out at the macro level, as far as I know.
Of course there are harmful taxes that disincentivise things we want, there may also be a correlation between high tax and dirigiste economic policy, but to just say, oh high tax is harmful is belied by the global data.
I could just as easily say low tax is bad and point to the shocking fate of the worst off in the USA, or the economic piss-poverty of the UK today.
Whatever the problems of the UK, they can't fairly be said to be the result of low tax. Because that would assume we have low tax.
The UK is (still) a low tax economy by western standards.
You seem to think there's an easy answer: to tax the UK into prosperity.
That's so much bullshit, as decades of economic experience from countries that have tried to do the same will attest to.
No I didn’t say that.
I just think that it’s preposterous to say “we would do well to remember higher taxes crowd out…”
Decades of economic experience does not support you, you’ve been weaned on too much Telegraph.
I would argue the underlying economic model (market versus statist), labour flexibility, property rights, treatment of investment costs and various other things are more impactful than the raw percentage of GDP taken in tax.
High tax creates the problems it always has: it crowds out consumption, innovation, and investment in the private sector, and reduces the incentives to take risks because its the government appropriating more of the economy to spend on social programmes and they tend to misallocate resources or skew them away from where they'd most profitably be applied.
High tax countries tend to be less innovative, dynamic and creative, and struggle to sustain prosperity and growth over time.
None of these rules have changed. It's not a free lunch.
Even accepting the point, it would be interesting to consider whether the same factors would apply were the taxation to be shifted away from income, and toward wealth? An argument could be made that this would have the opposite effect, taxing capital sitting idle and encouraging people to maximise their income?
We should tax the crap out of assets and lower taxation of earned incomes - and the biggest target ought to be housing. The most straightforward way to reduce inequality, both between the rich and poor and the old and young (and there's a great deal of crossover between those groups, of course,) would be to tax housing wealth hard and transfer the money directly to the poor through higher social security payments, and indirectly to all workers by using the money raised to offset the lowering of income tax and national insurance rates.
Even though I'm a confirmed lefty I wouldn't increase social security payments across the board - the danger is that that just subsidises rentiers and low-wage employers.
I'd look for other ways to help the poor (increase minimum wage, cut VAT, free school meals, cheaper public transport, etc.) But yes tax wealth, and unearned more, whilst reducing taxes on earned income where possible.
And so we reach the usual denouement - what appears to be the economically sensible way out of our current fix is politically impossible because the elderly are numerous and vote whereas those of working age aren’t so much. Amplified by the toxic effect of our winner takes all voting system, where some votes in some places count and others in others don’t.
Nah. Labour will win and do a lot of this stuff, I reckon.
We shall only know when they get into office, of course.
There are two, and only two, things to pay real attention to in the next Labour manifesto: the balance of taxation (assets vs incomes) and the pension triple lock. If Labour won't shift the tax burden to assets and won't bin the triple lock then everything else they claim they want to do will just be tinkering around the edges, or managing the same exhausted and useless system less incompetently than the Conservatives (in which case, there's little point in even bothering to turn up and vote TBH.)
Ideally we'll get both, but one out of two would at least represent some measure of progress.
That is an interesting observation.
My guess is that the Labour manifesto will contain neither of those two things.
Labour could add higher Council Tax bands for more expensive properties.
Some of the taxing of assets is devolved (eg Council Tax). So, Labour could do that in Wales right now -- or could have done it anytime since 1999 (as they have continuously controlled Wales since then).
(Tbf, they are consulting on this now, but they have already said no changes before 2025 -- and I expect they will bottle it, in the end).
Labour/Plaid Cymru have acted against second homes, but that is politically easier as most second home owners don't actually vote in Wales.
Comments
The next (Labour) government faces some very painful decisions, and putting up taxes is no free lunch. On the other hand, as I maintain, putting up taxes is not automatically and necessarily harmful to the economy as your own charts there surely confirm.
Economies we’d want to compare ourselves with (ie not Romania) take a greater percentage of tax than we do.
Switzerland is the very interesting outlier.
It’s possible though that they have such high incomes that a lower percentage tax take delivers what they need in terms of real public spend.
I’ve seen a related argument made on healthcare spend, ie even though the UK now spends close to OECD averages as a percentage of GDP on healthcare it’s still not getting bang for buck because UK GDP is just lower. I don’t really buy it I think, but I’m not dismissing it either.
You’d think that the US House of all places would have some sort of push button electronic voting? Even ordinary local authorities in the UK have progressed away from calling the names one by one, nowadays.
Edit/ Donald gains a twentieth from the roll call of apparent abstainers.
The same result as before including the wilful abstention
In November.
https://english.nv.ua/nation/eu-estimates-russian-casualties-in-ukraine-at-250-000-killed-and-wounded-news-50295468.html
But it can be great entertainment.
Sure, Rishi.
High tax countries tend to be less innovative, dynamic and creative, and struggle to sustain prosperity and growth over time.
None of these rules have changed. It's not a free lunch.
https://twitter.com/GSqueri/status/1610718536393187328
Donalds still = 20, McCarthy = 201, Jeffries = 212, Present = 1
BTW, this just posted on NYT live blog:
Byron Donalds called Wednesday an "invigorating" day for America because it illustrated that tough conversations can happen on Capitol Hill and lawmakers can "do things for the betterment of their constituents."
Addendum - note that increasing number of members are NOT in chamber when their name is called the first time through the alphabet. However, the clerk then goes back and re-reads names of the missing.
The big change is or are the demographics and that hasn't happened overnight though it seems to have been a surprise to several Governments, both Conservative and Labour.
My thesis is just different to yours: I think we need to earn the growth and grow the pie through higher investment and better productivity first, and then spend the fruits on public services; not the other way round and hope the growth follows- because I don't think it will.
Britain tax level, interestingly, is on a par with Australia, NZ and I think Canada. Seems the Anglosphere like it in the mid to late 30s.
He fights on. He fights to win!
Kieren
Confusing, innit?
KF never likely to get a K if that helps.
If one accepts we have a significant infrastructure deficit and an ageing society, we probably have to accept a slowly growing tax rate for a while. Maybe half to three quarters of a percent per year as a percentage of GDP for a decade.
(A similar logic, I think, applies to national debt, though this needs to be framed within a fiscal rule which I do see Reeves is signing up to).
But within that (very modestly growing) tax take, I’d like to see a shift toward wealth and away from income, and I’d like to see relief one way or another on the costs of housing, childcare, and tertiary education.
Finally, how you manage the spend is critical. A semi-competitive stateco is better than a fully state owned monopoly, surely we know that.
"Absentions" isn't the right word, really.
They simply weren't in the chamber when their names were called first time, in some cases involved in negotiations with whomever they're negotiating with. No big deal, because the vote is still open until the clerk (in this case) closes it.
Pretty standard operating procedure for voice votes in legislative chambers across US, including the US Senate.
With one being, he can NOT move to adjourn and NOT have it look like (further) crumbling of his "support".
On the other hand, not many options for his to GAIN votes in next several roll calls, but rather the opposite.
Here's an example from Eddington:
https://goo.gl/maps/anFu2BC4UKBAVEJA7
And another from the same development, where they do actually try for some different angles. But the same blooming dreary colours everywhere...
https://goo.gl/maps/u6REiH6GcqHSkzQV6
Suggestions some of McCarthy’s support might now be flaky?
I would hope to see greater attention to local vernacular, too.
Think about it. Red Wall voter turn out and don't vote for Corbyn. Despite him winning the argument. So simply run the election again and keep running it until victory.
Plus think most of those skipped in first round last vote, were largely leadership (or what passes for it these days) types, involved in scheme-plotting and/or sound-biting.
Addendum - Also keep in mind, that since roll is alphabetical, members have a pretty good idea when their name is gonna come up; Nancy Pelosi does NOT need to be in the Chamber for the first half hour or more.
Further Addendum - Though as to rest room facilities, this WAS a problem for women members of both House and Senate for decades after passage of 19th Amendment.
Which is an investment of sorts, I suppose.
I do love pro-wrestling, a much-misunderstood form of storytelling. It’s the real working class ballet (and not a coincidence that Aronofsky’s Black Swan and The Wrestler make for a great double bill).
I'd look for other ways to help the poor (increase minimum wage, cut VAT, free school meals, cheaper public transport, etc.) But yes tax wealth, and unearned more, whilst reducing taxes on earned income where possible.
For comparison, this is just up the road from me, on the main road through the village, built in the early 2000s:
https://goo.gl/maps/PiWxMquf6SxLvgzN7
And the latest-built part (finished two of three years ago):
https://goo.gl/maps/5vTo4KcxDC9cnkSA9
A nie variety of colours, roof pitches, styles and winding roads.
Eddington himself lived with his mother & his sister (who both doted on him) in rooms in his University department.
However, you'd have to pluck the goose fairly lightly as people would simply stop investing and sell up if it got too severe, and the asset base would just shrink.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Speaker_of_the_United_States_House_of_Representatives_election
People jave protest voted before, but it didn't matter
Pro wrestling is great. Don’t watch it nearly as much as I used to in the old WWF v WCW days but I still like to watch it when I can. I especially love all the shoot videos on YouTube.
Jim Cornette is really entertaining.
The legitimate tough guys were usually the ones who made mid card at best. Haku, Paul Orndorff, Bob Holly etc etc.
Simply put, we screw workers over for vast sums of money to throw at our problems - in particular our colossal burden of sick and elderly people and their pensions, health and social care - whilst pussyfooting around houses as much as possible. So disposable incomes that could go into everything from consumer spending to investing in the stock market get sucked into the great NHS-Triple Lock Black Hole, whereas the full quarter of the retired population who are millionaires get to sit on their huge assets whilst getting their free healthcare for their complex medical needs and inflation-proofed pensions, and when they eventually shuffle off those assets are passed on to their heirs completely intact. The poor are, for the most part, kept poor because they're excluded from the housing market, the rich get richer simply by sitting on top of a pile of bricks doing nothing, and the incomes of productive workers are gradually whittled down to nothing by ever increasing taxation and rampant inflation, so that unproductive assets (houses) and unproductive people (the old) can be protected and enriched at all costs. This is no way to ensure long-term prosperity and socio-economic stability.
We either tax incomes less and assets more, or we means test pensions and healthcare for the aged, prioritise the poorer ones and make the richer ones put up with less generous benefits, or some combination of the two. The current system is not sustainable.
I think 45% is about right given our need to attract international capital and workers. I think 50% (52% with NI) would result in a net reduction to the exchequer over time.
"After 59 ballots without a majority choice, the House adopted a plurality rule stating that, if after three more ballots no one garnered a majority of the votes, the person receiving the highest number of votes on the next ensuing ballot would be declared to have been chosen speaker.[16] On the decisive 63rd ballot, Howell Cobb received the most votes, 102 votes out of 221, or nine less than a majority, and was elected speaker"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Speaker_of_the_United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections#December_1849
Just a shame you only need half actively present, so this could end if some Dems just decided to go home.
https://www.passivhaustrust.org.uk/projects/detail/?cId=101
There are two, and only two, things to pay real attention to in the next Labour manifesto: the balance of taxation (assets vs incomes) and the pension triple lock. If Labour won't shift the tax burden to assets and won't bin the triple lock then everything else they claim they want to do will just be tinkering around the edges, or managing the same exhausted and useless system less incompetently than the Conservatives (in which case, there's little point in even bothering to turn up and vote TBH.)
Ideally we'll get both, but one out of two would at least represent some measure of progress.
The block here is not the rules - the block is McCarthy. He knows that better than anyone.
Meanwhile who says there is a majority for moving to a plurality vote. The Democrats and MAGA wouldn't support it. The Republican mainstream no longer has the numbers.
Starmer has a similar dilemma. He can't be seen to be too radical for fear of frightening the ex-Tories back to the blue team yet there is clear anger at where the country has got to and radical solutions might get more of an audience.
Really?
Btw, 2nd nominator for KMcC who cites "lack of trust" of Republican members in . . . KMcC . . .
I agree with @pigeon’s analysis above.
Cornette is entertaining (and as far as shoot videos go, is up there with New Jack in candid recollection). His memory is extraordinary. He could probably do with lightening up on the dafter stuff though; silliness also has its place in the squared circle.
So far the biggest impact of the deadlock over Speaker, is that
> members NOT sworn in, so they have NOT gotten their pictures taken with their families
> many partisan staff are NOT on the payroll until Speaker is elected and committees fully established.
Note that the US Senate is next scheduled to meet on January 23.
But without any suggested remedy to the impasse
Cheers - Tip O'Neill
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_96Wf-DZKHg
It didn't happen. The Conservative vote collapsed by a third but the Labour vote rose nearly as much as the LD vote and I'm sure that cost the LD seats and saved some Conservatives elsewhere.
My guess is that the Labour manifesto will contain neither of those two things.
Labour could add higher Council Tax bands for more expensive properties.
Some of the taxing of assets is devolved (eg Council Tax). So, Labour could do that in Wales right now -- or could have done it anytime since 1999 (as they have continuously controlled Wales since then).
(Tbf, they are consulting on this now, but they have already said no changes before 2025 -- and I expect they will bottle it, in the end).
Labour/Plaid Cymru have acted against second homes, but that is politically easier as most second home owners don't actually vote in Wales.