For those betting on Biden's nomination and / or the 2024 race, take a look at what has happened over the past 96 hours in the US.
The questions around whether Joe Biden took illicit payments are starting to multiply (text of the WhatsApp message is at the end of this e-mail). Maybe more importantly, the story seems to be breaking out of the right-wing press into other news sources. CBS has been interviewing the IRS Whistleblower who claims the case was obstructed and asking for answers. The New York Times - of all places - asked the WH Press Secretary about the allegations at the Friday press conference (“It’s a reasonable question to ask. The president of the United States is involved, as this message seems to suggest, in some sort of a coercive conversation for business dealings by his son. Is that something that, if he wasn’t, then maybe you should tell us?").
It does not look as though this story is going away and, if anything, it seems to be gaining strength, and the Administration's blocking answers do not seem to be doing the job. Given there is still well over a year to the election, there is a case for arguing the Democrats decide JB is becoming too damaged when it comes to 2024.
If that is the case, there are two options. Persuade him to step down soon and let Harris have 12 months as President in the hope she can establish some gravitas and win 2024. That is a tall bet.
The other is to look at some of the other, mainly Governors establishing their credentials. Newsom, Whitmer and Pritzker spring to mind. Of the three, I would be putting money on Whitmer for the 2024 nomination - she is female (ties into Roe v Wade), comes from a swing state and does not come from an ultra-liberal state which the other two do and which is likely to put off swing voters.
As for the 2017 Hunter Biden text to Henry Zhao of Harvest Fund Management, here it is:
""I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight,
And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction," he continued. "I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father."
For those betting on Biden's nomination and / or the 2024 race, take a look at what has happened over the past 96 hours in the US.
The questions around whether Joe Biden took illicit payments are starting to multiply (text of the WhatsApp message is at the end of this e-mail). Maybe more importantly, the story seems to be breaking out of the right-wing press into other news sources. CBS has been interviewing the IRS Whistleblower who claims the case was obstructed and asking for answers. The New York Times - of all places - asked the WH Press Secretary about the allegations at the Friday press conference (“It’s a reasonable question to ask. The president of the United States is involved, as this message seems to suggest, in some sort of a coercive conversation for business dealings by his son. Is that something that, if he wasn’t, then maybe you should tell us?").
It does not look as though this story is going away and, if anything, it seems to be gaining strength, and the Administration's blocking answers do not seem to be doing the job. Given there is still well over a year to the election, there is a case for arguing the Democrats decide JB is becoming too damaged when it comes to 2024.
If that is the case, there are two options. Persuade him to step down soon and let Harris have 12 months as President in the hope she can establish some gravitas and win 2024. That is a tall bet.
The other is to look at some of the other, mainly Governors establishing their credentials. Newsom, Whitmer and Pritzker spring to mind. Of the three, I would be putting money on Whitmer for the 2024 nomination - she is female (ties into Roe v Wade), comes from a swing state and does not come from an ultra-liberal state which the other two do and which is likely to put off swing voters.
As for the 2017 Hunter Biden text to Henry Zhao of Harvest Fund Management, here it is:
""I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight,
And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction," he continued. "I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father."
It feels like Hunter Biden is absolutely trading on his father's name. There is zero evidence his father has done anything wrong. Also, this is the smallest of smallest fry. Kuchner got two billion dollars from the Saudis after being in the White House!
They're [the government] in a complete bind. They'll trot out the wage-price spiral excuse to justify bearing down on public sector pay, but the plain fact is that they're struggling to find politically acceptable cuts to fund extra spending in this area, borrowing is enormous and becoming ever more expensive, and so they're left with either digging their heels in and offering workers peanuts, or raising taxes on their core supporters to pay for more generous rises. There's no violin small enough.
The reality we are reaching the end game for the Blairite/Thatcher-lite model
It used to be chunky public spending and low taxes with the difference funded by clever balance sheet tricks (PFI/securitisation) or straight up borrowing. Wages were kept down by relaxed views on immigration
Cost of borrowing is going up and the markets are twitchy after all that QE
Asset price bubbles have driven a reasonable standard of living beyond the reach of many
Effectively unlimited immigration has resulted in underinvestment in business (low wages partly due to immigration and partly due to tax credits) drove down returns (cost saving) on investment and increased the strain on public services (governments didn’t invest in capacity).
The electorate has been trained to believe the government will always bail them out
We need a grown up conversation. Either taxes have to go up massively or public services need to be completely rethought.
But neither politicians or the electorate are ready to have that conversation.
The Tories won’t do themselves any favours overruling independent pay bodies on public sector pay.
We are just likely to see more and more strikes and disruption and not just from the likes of the RMT who are politically motivated.
They're in a complete bind. They'll trot out the wage-price spiral excuse to justify bearing down on public sector pay, but the plain fact is that they're struggling to find politically acceptable cuts to fund extra spending in this area, borrowing is enormous and becoming ever more expensive, and so they're left with either digging their heels in and offering workers peanuts, or raising taxes on their core supporters to pay for more generous rises. There's no violin small enough.
The reality we are reaching the end game for the Blairite/Thatcher-lite model
It used to be chunky public spending and low taxes with the difference funded by clever balance sheet tricks (PFI/securitisation) or straight up borrowing. Wages were kept down by relaxed views on immigration
Cost of borrowing is going up and the markets are twitchy after all that QE
Asset price bubbles have driven a reasonable standard of living beyond the reach of many
Effectively unlimited immigration has resulted in underinvestment in business (low wages partly due to immigration and partly due to tax credits) drove down returns (cost saving) on investment and increased the strain on public services (governments didn’t invest in capacity).
The electorate has been trained to believe the government will always bail them out
We need a grown up conversation. Either taxes have to go up massively or public services need to be completely rethought.
But neither politicians or the electorate are ready to have that conversation.
I have been saying the same for ages. Instead everyone here wants the status quo and their particular bug bear fully funded. What the state does I agree should be full funded. That means however saying this is how much we have to spend. This is the cost of fully funding all these things. What do you want because we have to drop the rest.
For those betting on Biden's nomination and / or the 2024 race, take a look at what has happened over the past 96 hours in the US.
The questions around whether Joe Biden took illicit payments are starting to multiply (text of the WhatsApp message is at the end of this e-mail). Maybe more importantly, the story seems to be breaking out of the right-wing press into other news sources. CBS has been interviewing the IRS Whistleblower who claims the case was obstructed and asking for answers. The New York Times - of all places - asked the WH Press Secretary about the allegations at the Friday press conference (“It’s a reasonable question to ask. The president of the United States is involved, as this message seems to suggest, in some sort of a coercive conversation for business dealings by his son. Is that something that, if he wasn’t, then maybe you should tell us?").
It does not look as though this story is going away and, if anything, it seems to be gaining strength, and the Administration's blocking answers do not seem to be doing the job. Given there is still well over a year to the election, there is a case for arguing the Democrats decide JB is becoming too damaged when it comes to 2024.
If that is the case, there are two options. Persuade him to step down soon and let Harris have 12 months as President in the hope she can establish some gravitas and win 2024. That is a tall bet.
The other is to look at some of the other, mainly Governors establishing their credentials. Newsom, Whitmer and Pritzker spring to mind. Of the three, I would be putting money on Whitmer for the 2024 nomination - she is female (ties into Roe v Wade), comes from a swing state and does not come from an ultra-liberal state which the other two do and which is likely to put off swing voters.
As for the 2017 Hunter Biden text to Henry Zhao of Harvest Fund Management, here it is:
""I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight,
And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction," he continued. "I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father."
It feels like Hunter Biden is absolutely trading on his father's name. There is zero evidence his father has done anything Lwrong. Also, this is the smallest of smallest fry. Kuchner got two billion dollars from the Saudis after being in the White House!
If Biden had been VP or POTUS at the time those texts were sent he would have been guilty.
But in 2017 he was just an ex-VP and failed presidential candidate
But unrelated I happen to think that laying all the top 3 in the WH race at current prices (Biden, Trump, DeSantis) is quite a good play. Esp Trump obvs.
I've had the women's Ashes on the radio since it came on today. I wasn't expecting to enjoy this match as much as I have, and it's set up really nicely. What a shame it's a one off game; I'd like it to be three Tests at least
But unrelated I happen to think that laying all the top 3 in the WH race at current prices (Biden, Trump, DeSantis) is quite a good play. Esp Trump obvs.
I have sympathy with Joe here, hunter would certainly not the first kid to play the "you know who my parent is?" card without the knowledge of that parent. Not saying thats what happened just saying it is plausible
For those betting on Biden's nomination and / or the 2024 race, take a look at what has happened over the past 96 hours in the US.
The questions around whether Joe Biden took illicit payments are starting to multiply (text of the WhatsApp message is at the end of this e-mail). Maybe more importantly, the story seems to be breaking out of the right-wing press into other news sources. CBS has been interviewing the IRS Whistleblower who claims the case was obstructed and asking for answers. The New York Times - of all places - asked the WH Press Secretary about the allegations at the Friday press conference (“It’s a reasonable question to ask. The president of the United States is involved, as this message seems to suggest, in some sort of a coercive conversation for business dealings by his son. Is that something that, if he wasn’t, then maybe you should tell us?").
It does not look as though this story is going away and, if anything, it seems to be gaining strength, and the Administration's blocking answers do not seem to be doing the job. Given there is still well over a year to the election, there is a case for arguing the Democrats decide JB is becoming too damaged when it comes to 2024.
If that is the case, there are two options. Persuade him to step down soon and let Harris have 12 months as President in the hope she can establish some gravitas and win 2024. That is a tall bet.
The other is to look at some of the other, mainly Governors establishing their credentials. Newsom, Whitmer and Pritzker spring to mind. Of the three, I would be putting money on Whitmer for the 2024 nomination - she is female (ties into Roe v Wade), comes from a swing state and does not come from an ultra-liberal state which the other two do and which is likely to put off swing voters.
As for the 2017 Hunter Biden text to Henry Zhao of Harvest Fund Management, here it is:
""I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight,
And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction," he continued. "I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father."
The third option is a whole load of Republicans getting exited over nothing very much.
As an October surprise, it’s seriously premature. As an attempt to unseat Biden, risible.
But unrelated I happen to think that laying all the top 3 in the WH race at current prices (Biden, Trump, DeSantis) is quite a good play. Esp Trump obvs.
I have sympathy with Joe here, hunter would certainly not the first kid to play the "you know who my parent is?" card without the knowledge of that parent. Not saying thats what happened just saying it is plausible
The wording is odd. That is a text call, not a voice one. Dad could be watching the Superbowl for all the reader knows. Or in his study or the sailboat.
The Tories won’t do themselves any favours overruling independent pay bodies on public sector pay.
We are just likely to see more and more strikes and disruption and not just from the likes of the RMT who are politically motivated.
They're in a complete bind. They'll trot out the wage-price spiral excuse to justify bearing down on public sector pay, but the plain fact is that they're struggling to find politically acceptable cuts to fund extra spending in this area, borrowing is enormous and becoming ever more expensive, and so they're left with either digging their heels in and offering workers peanuts, or raising taxes on their core supporters to pay for more generous rises. There's no violin small enough.
The reality we are reaching the end game for the Blairite/Thatcher-lite model
It used to be chunky public spending and low taxes with the difference funded by clever balance sheet tricks (PFI/securitisation) or straight up borrowing. Wages were kept down by relaxed views on immigration
Cost of borrowing is going up and the markets are twitchy after all that QE
Asset price bubbles have driven a reasonable standard of living beyond the reach of many
Effectively unlimited immigration has resulted in underinvestment in business (low wages partly due to immigration and partly due to tax credits) drove down returns (cost saving) on investment and increased the strain on public services (governments didn’t invest in capacity).
The electorate has been trained to believe the government will always bail them out
We need a grown up conversation. Either taxes have to go up massively or public services need to be completely rethought.
But neither politicians or the electorate are ready to have that conversation.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
But unrelated I happen to think that laying all the top 3 in the WH race at current prices (Biden, Trump, DeSantis) is quite a good play. Esp Trump obvs.
I have sympathy with Joe here, hunter would certainly not the first kid to play the "you know who my parent is?" card without the knowledge of that parent. Not saying thats what happened just saying it is plausible
The wording is odd. That is a text call, not a voice one. Dad could be watching the Superbowl for all the reader knows. Or in his study or the sailboat.
Their is saying children should not be held to account for the sins of their parents, I think that cuts both ways however once you children are adults parents should not be automatically be responsible for the sins of their children. For example I never raised my son to be anything other than respectful to women....if he turned out to be a serial rapist or met police officer later in life that did not come from me
But unrelated I happen to think that laying all the top 3 in the WH race at current prices (Biden, Trump, DeSantis) is quite a good play. Esp Trump obvs.
I have sympathy with Joe here, hunter would certainly not the first kid to play the "you know who my parent is?" card without the knowledge of that parent. Not saying thats what happened just saying it is plausible
Very plausible. Unless there's evidence otherwise rather stronger than that text.
For those betting on Biden's nomination and / or the 2024 race, take a look at what has happened over the past 96 hours in the US.
The questions around whether Joe Biden took illicit payments are starting to multiply (text of the WhatsApp message is at the end of this e-mail). Maybe more importantly, the story seems to be breaking out of the right-wing press into other news sources. CBS has been interviewing the IRS Whistleblower who claims the case was obstructed and asking for answers. The New York Times - of all places - asked the WH Press Secretary about the allegations at the Friday press conference (“It’s a reasonable question to ask. The president of the United States is involved, as this message seems to suggest, in some sort of a coercive conversation for business dealings by his son. Is that something that, if he wasn’t, then maybe you should tell us?").
It does not look as though this story is going away and, if anything, it seems to be gaining strength, and the Administration's blocking answers do not seem to be doing the job. Given there is still well over a year to the election, there is a case for arguing the Democrats decide JB is becoming too damaged when it comes to 2024.
If that is the case, there are two options. Persuade him to step down soon and let Harris have 12 months as President in the hope she can establish some gravitas and win 2024. That is a tall bet.
The other is to look at some of the other, mainly Governors establishing their credentials. Newsom, Whitmer and Pritzker spring to mind. Of the three, I would be putting money on Whitmer for the 2024 nomination - she is female (ties into Roe v Wade), comes from a swing state and does not come from an ultra-liberal state which the other two do and which is likely to put off swing voters.
As for the 2017 Hunter Biden text to Henry Zhao of Harvest Fund Management, here it is:
""I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight,
And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction," he continued. "I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father."
Could Trump be Republican Party nominee in jail if convicted in his current court case, while President Biden faces criminal charges over illicit payments if proved?
For those betting on Biden's nomination and / or the 2024 race, take a look at what has happened over the past 96 hours in the US.
The questions around whether Joe Biden took illicit payments are starting to multiply (text of the WhatsApp message is at the end of this e-mail). Maybe more importantly, the story seems to be breaking out of the right-wing press into other news sources. CBS has been interviewing the IRS Whistleblower who claims the case was obstructed and asking for answers. The New York Times - of all places - asked the WH Press Secretary about the allegations at the Friday press conference (“It’s a reasonable question to ask. The president of the United States is involved, as this message seems to suggest, in some sort of a coercive conversation for business dealings by his son. Is that something that, if he wasn’t, then maybe you should tell us?").
It does not look as though this story is going away and, if anything, it seems to be gaining strength, and the Administration's blocking answers do not seem to be doing the job. Given there is still well over a year to the election, there is a case for arguing the Democrats decide JB is becoming too damaged when it comes to 2024.
If that is the case, there are two options. Persuade him to step down soon and let Harris have 12 months as President in the hope she can establish some gravitas and win 2024. That is a tall bet.
The other is to look at some of the other, mainly Governors establishing their credentials. Newsom, Whitmer and Pritzker spring to mind. Of the three, I would be putting money on Whitmer for the 2024 nomination - she is female (ties into Roe v Wade), comes from a swing state and does not come from an ultra-liberal state which the other two do and which is likely to put off swing voters.
As for the 2017 Hunter Biden text to Henry Zhao of Harvest Fund Management, here it is:
""I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight,
And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction," he continued. "I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father."
It feels like Hunter Biden is absolutely trading on his father's name. There is zero evidence his father has done anything Lwrong. Also, this is the smallest of smallest fry. Kuchner got two billion dollars from the Saudis after being in the White House!
If Biden had been VP or POTUS at the time those texts were sent he would have been guilty.
But in 2017 he was just an ex-VP and failed presidential candidate
But unrelated I happen to think that laying all the top 3 in the WH race at current prices (Biden, Trump, DeSantis) is quite a good play. Esp Trump obvs.
I have sympathy with Joe here, hunter would certainly not the first kid to play the "you know who my parent is?" card without the knowledge of that parent. Not saying thats what happened just saying it is plausible
Very plausible. Unless there's evidence otherwise rather stronger than that text.
Is there stronger evidence? I dont know because havent really be following it
The lack of knowledge of how education works is just astounding. Just heard the commentator say tickets for Trent Bridge are free tomorrow. "So. If you're a PE teacher just say to the Head, "I'm taking all the kids to the Test today!"" OK. Permission slips. Risk assessment. Staffing numbers. All other classes abandoned. Not delivering the core curriculum in breach of Statute. Transport? Arrangements for the kids to be collected? Every single parent to be phoned? Those who don't want to go? Exams. Schemes of work. Food. Honestly.
For those betting on Biden's nomination and / or the 2024 race, take a look at what has happened over the past 96 hours in the US.
The questions around whether Joe Biden took illicit payments are starting to multiply (text of the WhatsApp message is at the end of this e-mail). Maybe more importantly, the story seems to be breaking out of the right-wing press into other news sources. CBS has been interviewing the IRS Whistleblower who claims the case was obstructed and asking for answers. The New York Times - of all places - asked the WH Press Secretary about the allegations at the Friday press conference (“It’s a reasonable question to ask. The president of the United States is involved, as this message seems to suggest, in some sort of a coercive conversation for business dealings by his son. Is that something that, if he wasn’t, then maybe you should tell us?").
It does not look as though this story is going away and, if anything, it seems to be gaining strength, and the Administration's blocking answers do not seem to be doing the job. Given there is still well over a year to the election, there is a case for arguing the Democrats decide JB is becoming too damaged when it comes to 2024.
If that is the case, there are two options. Persuade him to step down soon and let Harris have 12 months as President in the hope she can establish some gravitas and win 2024. That is a tall bet.
The other is to look at some of the other, mainly Governors establishing their credentials. Newsom, Whitmer and Pritzker spring to mind. Of the three, I would be putting money on Whitmer for the 2024 nomination - she is female (ties into Roe v Wade), comes from a swing state and does not come from an ultra-liberal state which the other two do and which is likely to put off swing voters.
As for the 2017 Hunter Biden text to Henry Zhao of Harvest Fund Management, here it is:
""I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight,
And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction," he continued. "I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father."
Could Trump be Republican Party nominee in jail if convicted in his current court case, while President Biden faces criminal charges over illicit payments if proved?
Only after he had left office and only if they can find evidence aginst him. The above is way off passing muster
But unrelated I happen to think that laying all the top 3 in the WH race at current prices (Biden, Trump, DeSantis) is quite a good play. Esp Trump obvs.
I have sympathy with Joe here, hunter would certainly not the first kid to play the "you know who my parent is?" card without the knowledge of that parent. Not saying thats what happened just saying it is plausible
Very plausible. Unless there's evidence otherwise rather stronger than that text.
Some of us seem to be confusing texts with conference voice telephone calls.
The lack of knowledge of how education works is just astounding. Just heard the commentator say tickets for Trent Bridge are free tomorrow. "So. If you're a PE teacher just say to the Head, "I'm taking all the kids to the Test today!"" OK. Permission slips. Risk assessment. Staffing numbers. All other classes abandoned. Not delivering the core curriculum in breach of Statute. Transport? Arrangements for the kids to be collected? Every single parent to be phoned? Honestly.
Why do you think a cricket commentator should know about schools, his expertise is on recognisizing species of bird that landed on the pitch surely?
The Tories won’t do themselves any favours overruling independent pay bodies on public sector pay.
We are just likely to see more and more strikes and disruption and not just from the likes of the RMT who are politically motivated.
They're in a complete bind. They'll trot out the wage-price spiral excuse to justify bearing down on public sector pay, but the plain fact is that they're struggling to find politically acceptable cuts to fund extra spending in this area, borrowing is enormous and becoming ever more expensive, and so they're left with either digging their heels in and offering workers peanuts, or raising taxes on their core supporters to pay for more generous rises. There's no violin small enough.
The reality we are reaching the end game for the Blairite/Thatcher-lite model
It used to be chunky public spending and low taxes with the difference funded by clever balance sheet tricks (PFI/securitisation) or straight up borrowing. Wages were kept down by relaxed views on immigration
Cost of borrowing is going up and the markets are twitchy after all that QE
Asset price bubbles have driven a reasonable standard of living beyond the reach of many
Effectively unlimited immigration has resulted in underinvestment in business (low wages partly due to immigration and partly due to tax credits) drove down returns (cost saving) on investment and increased the strain on public services (governments didn’t invest in capacity).
The electorate has been trained to believe the government will always bail them out
We need a grown up conversation. Either taxes have to go up massively or public services need to be completely rethought.
But neither politicians or the electorate are ready to have that conversation.
I have been saying the same for ages. Instead everyone here wants the status quo and their particular bug bear fully funded. What the state does I agree should be full funded. That means however saying this is how much we have to spend. This is the cost of fully funding all these things. What do you want because we have to drop the rest.
Tbf I think most on here do support either higher taxes to maintain public services or lower taxes funded by spending cuts.
But unrelated I happen to think that laying all the top 3 in the WH race at current prices (Biden, Trump, DeSantis) is quite a good play. Esp Trump obvs.
I have sympathy with Joe here, hunter would certainly not the first kid to play the "you know who my parent is?" card without the knowledge of that parent. Not saying thats what happened just saying it is plausible
Very plausible. Unless there's evidence otherwise rather stronger than that text.
The evidence is that there isn’t. Republican appointed prosecutors have spent years investigating this, and turned up nothing. Hunter Biden’s guilty plea total offences effectively ends the matter … but no doubt they’ll spend the next year and a half rehashing what they they already know.
The Tories won’t do themselves any favours overruling independent pay bodies on public sector pay.
We are just likely to see more and more strikes and disruption and not just from the likes of the RMT who are politically motivated.
They're in a complete bind. They'll trot out the wage-price spiral excuse to justify bearing down on public sector pay, but the plain fact is that they're struggling to find politically acceptable cuts to fund extra spending in this area, borrowing is enormous and becoming ever more expensive, and so they're left with either digging their heels in and offering workers peanuts, or raising taxes on their core supporters to pay for more generous rises. There's no violin small enough.
The reality we are reaching the end game for the Blairite/Thatcher-lite model
It used to be chunky public spending and low taxes with the difference funded by clever balance sheet tricks (PFI/securitisation) or straight up borrowing. Wages were kept down by relaxed views on immigration
Cost of borrowing is going up and the markets are twitchy after all that QE
Asset price bubbles have driven a reasonable standard of living beyond the reach of many
Effectively unlimited immigration has resulted in underinvestment in business (low wages partly due to immigration and partly due to tax credits) drove down returns (cost saving) on investment and increased the strain on public services (governments didn’t invest in capacity).
The electorate has been trained to believe the government will always bail them out
We need a grown up conversation. Either taxes have to go up massively or public services need to be completely rethought.
But neither politicians or the electorate are ready to have that conversation.
I have been saying the same for ages. Instead everyone here wants the status quo and their particular bug bear fully funded. What the state does I agree should be full funded. That means however saying this is how much we have to spend. This is the cost of fully funding all these things. What do you want because we have to drop the rest.
The status quo is the current Tory government and it’s clear that very few want that, here or in the electorate at large! I think the support for Labour is a tacit agreement for at least somewhat more tax. I’m happy with much more tax and a shift to a tax take more like Germany’s.
The lack of knowledge of how education works is just astounding. Just heard the commentator say tickets for Trent Bridge are free tomorrow. "So. If you're a PE teacher just say to the Head, "I'm taking all the kids to the Test today!"" OK. Permission slips. Risk assessment. Staffing numbers. All other classes abandoned. Not delivering the core curriculum in breach of Statute. Transport? Arrangements for the kids to be collected? Every single parent to be phoned? Those who don't want to go? Exams. Schemes of work. Food. Honestly.
Lesson in advance to explain what "cricket" is and what to look out for at Trent Bridge.
But unrelated I happen to think that laying all the top 3 in the WH race at current prices (Biden, Trump, DeSantis) is quite a good play. Esp Trump obvs.
I have sympathy with Joe here, hunter would certainly not the first kid to play the "you know who my parent is?" card without the knowledge of that parent. Not saying thats what happened just saying it is plausible
Very plausible. Unless there's evidence otherwise rather stronger than that text.
Is there stronger evidence? I dont know because havent really be following it
There isn’t. This all comes from the same people who insist Trump won the least election, the Wagner rebellion was a Biden plot, etc. etc.
The lack of knowledge of how education works is just astounding. Just heard the commentator say tickets for Trent Bridge are free tomorrow. "So. If you're a PE teacher just say to the Head, "I'm taking all the kids to the Test today!"" OK. Permission slips. Risk assessment. Staffing numbers. All other classes abandoned. Not delivering the core curriculum in breach of Statute. Transport? Arrangements for the kids to be collected? Every single parent to be phoned? Those who don't want to go? Exams. Schemes of work. Food. Honestly.
Yes but at least detention would be sorted.
(That's a joke, I actually find cricket adequate entertainment, sometimes.)
For those betting on Biden's nomination and / or the 2024 race, take a look at what has happened over the past 96 hours in the US.
The questions around whether Joe Biden took illicit payments are starting to multiply (text of the WhatsApp message is at the end of this e-mail). Maybe more importantly, the story seems to be breaking out of the right-wing press into other news sources. CBS has been interviewing the IRS Whistleblower who claims the case was obstructed and asking for answers. The New York Times - of all places - asked the WH Press Secretary about the allegations at the Friday press conference (“It’s a reasonable question to ask. The president of the United States is involved, as this message seems to suggest, in some sort of a coercive conversation for business dealings by his son. Is that something that, if he wasn’t, then maybe you should tell us?").
It does not look as though this story is going away and, if anything, it seems to be gaining strength, and the Administration's blocking answers do not seem to be doing the job. Given there is still well over a year to the election, there is a case for arguing the Democrats decide JB is becoming too damaged when it comes to 2024.
If that is the case, there are two options. Persuade him to step down soon and let Harris have 12 months as President in the hope she can establish some gravitas and win 2024. That is a tall bet.
The other is to look at some of the other, mainly Governors establishing their credentials. Newsom, Whitmer and Pritzker spring to mind. Of the three, I would be putting money on Whitmer for the 2024 nomination - she is female (ties into Roe v Wade), comes from a swing state and does not come from an ultra-liberal state which the other two do and which is likely to put off swing voters.
As for the 2017 Hunter Biden text to Henry Zhao of Harvest Fund Management, here it is:
""I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight,
And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction," he continued. "I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father."
It feels like Hunter Biden is absolutely trading on his father's name. There is zero evidence his father has done anything Lwrong. Also, this is the smallest of smallest fry. Kuchner got two billion dollars from the Saudis after being in the White House!
If Biden had been VP or POTUS at the time those texts were sent he would have been guilty.
But in 2017 he was just an ex-VP and failed presidential candidate
Except Hunter sent the text, not Joe. This is basic logic. I don't believe for a moment Biden knew about it, given he has been in public office for decades and there's no evidence of dodgy dealing. The Republican congressman investigating all this held a big press conference and it was all a damp squib.
This is all Trump sympathetics desperately trying to detract from the fact their man is currently being prosecuted over three separate crimes. And that is before we get the dodgy stuff the rest of family members got up to. Two BILLION from the Saudis! Jared is as corrupt as his father.
The Tories won’t do themselves any favours overruling independent pay bodies on public sector pay.
We are just likely to see more and more strikes and disruption and not just from the likes of the RMT who are politically motivated.
They're in a complete bind. They'll trot out the wage-price spiral excuse to justify bearing down on public sector pay, but the plain fact is that they're struggling to find politically acceptable cuts to fund extra spending in this area, borrowing is enormous and becoming ever more expensive, and so they're left with either digging their heels in and offering workers peanuts, or raising taxes on their core supporters to pay for more generous rises. There's no violin small enough.
The reality we are reaching the end game for the Blairite/Thatcher-lite model
It used to be chunky public spending and low taxes with the difference funded by clever balance sheet tricks (PFI/securitisation) or straight up borrowing. Wages were kept down by relaxed views on immigration
Cost of borrowing is going up and the markets are twitchy after all that QE
Asset price bubbles have driven a reasonable standard of living beyond the reach of many
Effectively unlimited immigration has resulted in underinvestment in business (low wages partly due to immigration and partly due to tax credits) drove down returns (cost saving) on investment and increased the strain on public services (governments didn’t invest in capacity).
The electorate has been trained to believe the government will always bail them out
We need a grown up conversation. Either taxes have to go up massively or public services need to be completely rethought.
But neither politicians or the electorate are ready to have that conversation.
I have been saying the same for ages. Instead everyone here wants the status quo and their particular bug bear fully funded. What the state does I agree should be full funded. That means however saying this is how much we have to spend. This is the cost of fully funding all these things. What do you want because we have to drop the rest.
Tbf I think most on here do support either higher taxes to maintain public services or lower taxes funded by spending cuts.
I am not even advocating tax cuts here, just saying we need to have a conversation as an electorate saying this is what fully funding things cost. If they want more things to be fully funded than our current tax base then say ok we will raise taxes.
The thing is the state does a myriad of things everyone is always saying all of these are underfunded and they argue they should be fully funded. A good argument and one I agree with. If we are going to do it properly let us fund it properly.
The simple fact though is that if we fully fund everything the state does then the amount of tax take would be likely equivalent to total gdp or 100% tax and I doubt even you want that
So my argument is merely right now. let us as a country decide what we want the state to do and fully fund it. If tax goes up to pay for it ok....not my favourite choice but democratic.
Instead the cons and sks lab party and the ld's whose leader I cant even remember want to go on pretending the state can do everything. The state however does it all badly because they all get underfunded
For those betting on Biden's nomination and / or the 2024 race, take a look at what has happened over the past 96 hours in the US.
The questions around whether Joe Biden took illicit payments are starting to multiply (text of the WhatsApp message is at the end of this e-mail). Maybe more importantly, the story seems to be breaking out of the right-wing press into other news sources. CBS has been interviewing the IRS Whistleblower who claims the case was obstructed and asking for answers. The New York Times - of all places - asked the WH Press Secretary about the allegations at the Friday press conference (“It’s a reasonable question to ask. The president of the United States is involved, as this message seems to suggest, in some sort of a coercive conversation for business dealings by his son. Is that something that, if he wasn’t, then maybe you should tell us?").
It does not look as though this story is going away and, if anything, it seems to be gaining strength, and the Administration's blocking answers do not seem to be doing the job. Given there is still well over a year to the election, there is a case for arguing the Democrats decide JB is becoming too damaged when it comes to 2024.
If that is the case, there are two options. Persuade him to step down soon and let Harris have 12 months as President in the hope she can establish some gravitas and win 2024. That is a tall bet.
The other is to look at some of the other, mainly Governors establishing their credentials. Newsom, Whitmer and Pritzker spring to mind. Of the three, I would be putting money on Whitmer for the 2024 nomination - she is female (ties into Roe v Wade), comes from a swing state and does not come from an ultra-liberal state which the other two do and which is likely to put off swing voters.
As for the 2017 Hunter Biden text to Henry Zhao of Harvest Fund Management, here it is:
""I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight,
And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction," he continued. "I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father."
It feels like Hunter Biden is absolutely trading on his father's name. There is zero evidence his father has done anything Lwrong. Also, this is the smallest of smallest fry. Kuchner got two billion dollars from the Saudis after being in the White House!
If Biden had been VP or POTUS at the time those texts were sent he would have been guilty.
But in 2017 he was just an ex-VP and failed presidential candidate
Except Hunter sent the text, not Joe. This is basic logic. I don't believe for a moment Biden knew about it, given he has been in public office for decades and there's no evidence of dodgy dealing. The Republican congressman investigating all this held a big press conference and it was all a damp squib.
This is all Trump sympathetics desperately trying to detract from the fact their man is currently being prosecuted over three separate crimes. And that is before we get the dodgy stuff the rest of family members got up to. Two BILLION from the Saudis! Jared is as corrupt as his father.
Meghan McCain called Hunter a “nepo-baby”. Meghan *McCain*…
They're [the government] in a complete bind. They'll trot out the wage-price spiral excuse to justify bearing down on public sector pay, but the plain fact is that they're struggling to find politically acceptable cuts to fund extra spending in this area, borrowing is enormous and becoming ever more expensive, and so they're left with either digging their heels in and offering workers peanuts, or raising taxes on their core supporters to pay for more generous rises. There's no violin small enough.
The reality we are reaching the end game for the Blairite/Thatcher-lite model
It used to be chunky public spending and low taxes with the difference funded by clever balance sheet tricks (PFI/securitisation) or straight up borrowing. Wages were kept down by relaxed views on immigration
Cost of borrowing is going up and the markets are twitchy after all that QE
Asset price bubbles have driven a reasonable standard of living beyond the reach of many
Effectively unlimited immigration has resulted in underinvestment in business (low wages partly due to immigration and partly due to tax credits) drove down returns (cost saving) on investment and increased the strain on public services (governments didn’t invest in capacity).
The electorate has been trained to believe the government will always bail them out
We need a grown up conversation. Either taxes have to go up massively or public services need to be completely rethought.
But neither politicians or the electorate are ready to have that conversation.
I agree in essence. But like sandpit on PT you are skewing the language towards your favoured option.
Public services would need to be 'cut'. Just saying 'rethought' is already finessing and spinning things.
If we want that honest 'grown up' conversation (which we do) it has to feature the unvarnished truth.
The Tories won’t do themselves any favours overruling independent pay bodies on public sector pay.
We are just likely to see more and more strikes and disruption and not just from the likes of the RMT who are politically motivated.
They're in a complete bind. They'll trot out the wage-price spiral excuse to justify bearing down on public sector pay, but the plain fact is that they're struggling to find politically acceptable cuts to fund extra spending in this area, borrowing is enormous and becoming ever more expensive, and so they're left with either digging their heels in and offering workers peanuts, or raising taxes on their core supporters to pay for more generous rises. There's no violin small enough.
The reality we are reaching the end game for the Blairite/Thatcher-lite model
It used to be chunky public spending and low taxes with the difference funded by clever balance sheet tricks (PFI/securitisation) or straight up borrowing. Wages were kept down by relaxed views on immigration
Cost of borrowing is going up and the markets are twitchy after all that QE
Asset price bubbles have driven a reasonable standard of living beyond the reach of many
Effectively unlimited immigration has resulted in underinvestment in business (low wages partly due to immigration and partly due to tax credits) drove down returns (cost saving) on investment and increased the strain on public services (governments didn’t invest in capacity).
The electorate has been trained to believe the government will always bail them out
We need a grown up conversation. Either taxes have to go up massively or public services need to be completely rethought.
But neither politicians or the electorate are ready to have that conversation.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
They're [the government] in a complete bind. They'll trot out the wage-price spiral excuse to justify bearing down on public sector pay, but the plain fact is that they're struggling to find politically acceptable cuts to fund extra spending in this area, borrowing is enormous and becoming ever more expensive, and so they're left with either digging their heels in and offering workers peanuts, or raising taxes on their core supporters to pay for more generous rises. There's no violin small enough.
The reality we are reaching the end game for the Blairite/Thatcher-lite model
It used to be chunky public spending and low taxes with the difference funded by clever balance sheet tricks (PFI/securitisation) or straight up borrowing. Wages were kept down by relaxed views on immigration
Cost of borrowing is going up and the markets are twitchy after all that QE
Asset price bubbles have driven a reasonable standard of living beyond the reach of many
Effectively unlimited immigration has resulted in underinvestment in business (low wages partly due to immigration and partly due to tax credits) drove down returns (cost saving) on investment and increased the strain on public services (governments didn’t invest in capacity).
The electorate has been trained to believe the government will always bail them out
We need a grown up conversation. Either taxes have to go up massively or public services need to be completely rethought.
But neither politicians or the electorate are ready to have that conversation.
I agree in essence. But like sandpit on PT you are skewing the language towards your favoured option.
Public services would need to be 'cut'. Just saying 'rethought' is already finessing and spinning things.
If we want that honest 'grown up' conversation (which we do) it has to feature the unvarnished truth.
I am interested in your response to my post as i didnt advocate for tax cuts I tried to stay neutral
The Tories won’t do themselves any favours overruling independent pay bodies on public sector pay.
We are just likely to see more and more strikes and disruption and not just from the likes of the RMT who are politically motivated.
They're in a complete bind. They'll trot out the wage-price spiral excuse to justify bearing down on public sector pay, but the plain fact is that they're struggling to find politically acceptable cuts to fund extra spending in this area, borrowing is enormous and becoming ever more expensive, and so they're left with either digging their heels in and offering workers peanuts, or raising taxes on their core supporters to pay for more generous rises. There's no violin small enough.
The reality we are reaching the end game for the Blairite/Thatcher-lite model
It used to be chunky public spending and low taxes with the difference funded by clever balance sheet tricks (PFI/securitisation) or straight up borrowing. Wages were kept down by relaxed views on immigration
Cost of borrowing is going up and the markets are twitchy after all that QE
Asset price bubbles have driven a reasonable standard of living beyond the reach of many
Effectively unlimited immigration has resulted in underinvestment in business (low wages partly due to immigration and partly due to tax credits) drove down returns (cost saving) on investment and increased the strain on public services (governments didn’t invest in capacity).
The electorate has been trained to believe the government will always bail them out
We need a grown up conversation. Either taxes have to go up massively or public services need to be completely rethought.
But neither politicians or the electorate are ready to have that conversation.
I have been saying the same for ages. Instead everyone here wants the status quo and their particular bug bear fully funded. What the state does I agree should be full funded. That means however saying this is how much we have to spend. This is the cost of fully funding all these things. What do you want because we have to drop the rest.
Tbf I think most on here do support either higher taxes to maintain public services or lower taxes funded by spending cuts.
I am not even advocating tax cuts here, just saying we need to have a conversation as an electorate saying this is what fully funding things cost. If they want more things to be fully funded than our current tax base then say ok we will raise taxes.
The thing is the state does a myriad of things everyone is always saying all of these are underfunded and they argue they should be fully funded. A good argument and one I agree with. If we are going to do it properly let us fund it properly.
The simple fact though is that if we fully fund everything the state does then the amount of tax take would be likely equivalent to total gdp or 100% tax and I doubt even you want that
So my argument is merely right now. let us as a country decide what we want the state to do and fully fund it. If tax goes up to pay for it ok....not my favourite choice but democratic.
Instead the cons and sks lab party and the ld's whose leader I cant even remember want to go on pretending the state can do everything. The state however does it all badly because they all get underfunded
For those betting on Biden's nomination and / or the 2024 race, take a look at what has happened over the past 96 hours in the US.
The questions around whether Joe Biden took illicit payments are starting to multiply (text of the WhatsApp message is at the end of this e-mail). Maybe more importantly, the story seems to be breaking out of the right-wing press into other news sources. CBS has been interviewing the IRS Whistleblower who claims the case was obstructed and asking for answers. The New York Times - of all places - asked the WH Press Secretary about the allegations at the Friday press conference (“It’s a reasonable question to ask. The president of the United States is involved, as this message seems to suggest, in some sort of a coercive conversation for business dealings by his son. Is that something that, if he wasn’t, then maybe you should tell us?").
It does not look as though this story is going away and, if anything, it seems to be gaining strength, and the Administration's blocking answers do not seem to be doing the job. Given there is still well over a year to the election, there is a case for arguing the Democrats decide JB is becoming too damaged when it comes to 2024.
If that is the case, there are two options. Persuade him to step down soon and let Harris have 12 months as President in the hope she can establish some gravitas and win 2024. That is a tall bet.
The other is to look at some of the other, mainly Governors establishing their credentials. Newsom, Whitmer and Pritzker spring to mind. Of the three, I would be putting money on Whitmer for the 2024 nomination - she is female (ties into Roe v Wade), comes from a swing state and does not come from an ultra-liberal state which the other two do and which is likely to put off swing voters.
As for the 2017 Hunter Biden text to Henry Zhao of Harvest Fund Management, here it is:
""I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight,
And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction," he continued. "I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father."
It feels like Hunter Biden is absolutely trading on his father's name. There is zero evidence his father has done anything Lwrong. Also, this is the smallest of smallest fry. Kuchner got two billion dollars from the Saudis after being in the White House!
If Biden had been VP or POTUS at the time those texts were sent he would have been guilty.
But in 2017 he was just an ex-VP and failed presidential candidate
Except Hunter sent the text, not Joe. This is basic logic. I don't believe for a moment Biden knew about it, given he has been in public office for decades and there's no evidence of dodgy dealing. The Republican congressman investigating all this held a big press conference and it was all a damp squib.
This is all Trump sympathetics desperately trying to detract from the fact their man is currently being prosecuted over three separate crimes. And that is before we get the dodgy stuff the rest of family members got up to. Two BILLION from the Saudis! Jared is as corrupt as his father.
Jared, of course, had a post in the administration. Hunter is just an embarrassing child.
The Tories won’t do themselves any favours overruling independent pay bodies on public sector pay.
We are just likely to see more and more strikes and disruption and not just from the likes of the RMT who are politically motivated.
They're in a complete bind. They'll trot out the wage-price spiral excuse to justify bearing down on public sector pay, but the plain fact is that they're struggling to find politically acceptable cuts to fund extra spending in this area, borrowing is enormous and becoming ever more expensive, and so they're left with either digging their heels in and offering workers peanuts, or raising taxes on their core supporters to pay for more generous rises. There's no violin small enough.
The reality we are reaching the end game for the Blairite/Thatcher-lite model
It used to be chunky public spending and low taxes with the difference funded by clever balance sheet tricks (PFI/securitisation) or straight up borrowing. Wages were kept down by relaxed views on immigration
Cost of borrowing is going up and the markets are twitchy after all that QE
Asset price bubbles have driven a reasonable standard of living beyond the reach of many
Effectively unlimited immigration has resulted in underinvestment in business (low wages partly due to immigration and partly due to tax credits) drove down returns (cost saving) on investment and increased the strain on public services (governments didn’t invest in capacity).
The electorate has been trained to believe the government will always bail them out
We need a grown up conversation. Either taxes have to go up massively or public services need to be completely rethought.
But neither politicians or the electorate are ready to have that conversation.
I have been saying the same for ages. Instead everyone here wants the status quo and their particular bug bear fully funded. What the state does I agree should be full funded. That means however saying this is how much we have to spend. This is the cost of fully funding all these things. What do you want because we have to drop the rest.
Tbf I think most on here do support either higher taxes to maintain public services or lower taxes funded by spending cuts.
I am not even advocating tax cuts here, just saying we need to have a conversation as an electorate saying this is what fully funding things cost. If they want more things to be fully funded than our current tax base then say ok we will raise taxes.
The thing is the state does a myriad of things everyone is always saying all of these are underfunded and they argue they should be fully funded. A good argument and one I agree with. If we are going to do it properly let us fund it properly.
The simple fact though is that if we fully fund everything the state does then the amount of tax take would be likely equivalent to total gdp or 100% tax and I doubt even you want that
So my argument is merely right now. let us as a country decide what we want the state to do and fully fund it. If tax goes up to pay for it ok....not my favourite choice but democratic.
Instead the cons and sks lab party and the ld's whose leader I cant even remember want to go on pretending the state can do everything. The state however does it all badly because they all get underfunded
Ed Davey.
I was hoping for a reaction above informing me of the LD leader tbh. As I said I didnt ask for tax cuts I like to hope I put out a neutral argument and would be interested in your opinion
But unrelated I happen to think that laying all the top 3 in the WH race at current prices (Biden, Trump, DeSantis) is quite a good play. Esp Trump obvs.
I have sympathy with Joe here, hunter would certainly not the first kid to play the "you know who my parent is?" card without the knowledge of that parent. Not saying thats what happened just saying it is plausible
Very plausible. Unless there's evidence otherwise rather stronger than that text.
Is there stronger evidence? I dont know because havent really be following it
Not really. It's as Will and Nigel and bondegezou have posted, I believe. Biden has his flaws but he's not corrupt.
The Tories won’t do themselves any favours overruling independent pay bodies on public sector pay.
We are just likely to see more and more strikes and disruption and not just from the likes of the RMT who are politically motivated.
They're in a complete bind. They'll trot out the wage-price spiral excuse to justify bearing down on public sector pay, but the plain fact is that they're struggling to find politically acceptable cuts to fund extra spending in this area, borrowing is enormous and becoming ever more expensive, and so they're left with either digging their heels in and offering workers peanuts, or raising taxes on their core supporters to pay for more generous rises. There's no violin small enough.
The reality we are reaching the end game for the Blairite/Thatcher-lite model
It used to be chunky public spending and low taxes with the difference funded by clever balance sheet tricks (PFI/securitisation) or straight up borrowing. Wages were kept down by relaxed views on immigration
Cost of borrowing is going up and the markets are twitchy after all that QE
Asset price bubbles have driven a reasonable standard of living beyond the reach of many
Effectively unlimited immigration has resulted in underinvestment in business (low wages partly due to immigration and partly due to tax credits) drove down returns (cost saving) on investment and increased the strain on public services (governments didn’t invest in capacity).
The electorate has been trained to believe the government will always bail them out
We need a grown up conversation. Either taxes have to go up massively or public services need to be completely rethought.
But neither politicians or the electorate are ready to have that conversation.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Hence Labour’s housing policy.
I think they might even be serious about it - one of the shadow cabinet referred to it as the “biggest transfer of power from central to local government in more than a generation” in a radio interview today.
1. In 2017, a text Hunter Biden sent implied he had the protection of his dad 2. At that time, his dad was just a private citizen
Hunter Biden is a junkie. And like the vast majority of junkies, he will have told many lies along the way.
Hunter Biden was also the son of a former VP.
That will, no doubt, have given him ample opportunity to turn his status and his lies into drugs, and to protect him to some extent, even if his father was completely unaware of it.
But I'm struggling to see what crime, or even impropriety, Joe Biden committed.
But unrelated I happen to think that laying all the top 3 in the WH race at current prices (Biden, Trump, DeSantis) is quite a good play. Esp Trump obvs.
I have sympathy with Joe here, hunter would certainly not the first kid to play the "you know who my parent is?" card without the knowledge of that parent. Not saying thats what happened just saying it is plausible
Very plausible. Unless there's evidence otherwise rather stronger than that text.
Is there stronger evidence? I dont know because havent really be following it
Not really. It's as Will and Nigel and bondegezou have posted, I believe. Biden has his flaws but he's not corrupt.
Shrugs then I will choose to believe joe is innocent to a smoking gun points at him because he knew what his offspring was up to
1. In 2017, a text Hunter Biden sent implied he had the protection of his dad 2. At that time, his dad was just a private citizen
Hunter Biden is a junkie. And like the vast majority of junkies, he will have told many lies along the way.
Hunter Biden was also the son of a former VP.
That will, no doubt, have given him ample opportunity to turn his status and his lies into drugs, and to protect him to some extent, even if his father was completely unaware of it.
But I'm struggling to see what crime, or even impropriety, Joe Biden committed.
You forget that Biden, as with Hillary, are the Devil incarnate and guilty of any crime Trump can imagine...
1. In 2017, a text Hunter Biden sent implied he had the protection of his dad 2. At that time, his dad was just a private citizen
Hunter Biden is a junkie. And like the vast majority of junkies, he will have told many lies along the way.
Hunter Biden was also the son of a former VP.
That will, no doubt, have given him ample opportunity to turn his status and his lies into drugs, and to protect him to some extent, even if his father was completely unaware of it.
But I'm struggling to see what crime, or even impropriety, Joe Biden committed.
I agree until there is any evidence joe participated rather than "You know who my father is" from hunter then no crime
The Tories won’t do themselves any favours overruling independent pay bodies on public sector pay.
We are just likely to see more and more strikes and disruption and not just from the likes of the RMT who are politically motivated.
They're in a complete bind. They'll trot out the wage-price spiral excuse to justify bearing down on public sector pay, but the plain fact is that they're struggling to find politically acceptable cuts to fund extra spending in this area, borrowing is enormous and becoming ever more expensive, and so they're left with either digging their heels in and offering workers peanuts, or raising taxes on their core supporters to pay for more generous rises. There's no violin small enough.
The reality we are reaching the end game for the Blairite/Thatcher-lite model
It used to be chunky public spending and low taxes with the difference funded by clever balance sheet tricks (PFI/securitisation) or straight up borrowing. Wages were kept down by relaxed views on immigration
Cost of borrowing is going up and the markets are twitchy after all that QE
Asset price bubbles have driven a reasonable standard of living beyond the reach of many
Effectively unlimited immigration has resulted in underinvestment in business (low wages partly due to immigration and partly due to tax credits) drove down returns (cost saving) on investment and increased the strain on public services (governments didn’t invest in capacity).
The electorate has been trained to believe the government will always bail them out
We need a grown up conversation. Either taxes have to go up massively or public services need to be completely rethought.
But neither politicians or the electorate are ready to have that conversation.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
While I'm wary about "silver bullets", I completely agree that reform of the planning system is utterly essential if people are to be able to afford homes, and if the UK is to achieve its potential.
It is an area where, sadly, the Conservative Party is in hoc to its retiree voters.
1. In 2017, a text Hunter Biden sent implied he had the protection of his dad 2. At that time, his dad was just a private citizen
Hunter Biden is a junkie. And like the vast majority of junkies, he will have told many lies along the way.
Hunter Biden was also the son of a former VP.
That will, no doubt, have given him ample opportunity to turn his status and his lies into drugs, and to protect him to some extent, even if his father was completely unaware of it.
But I'm struggling to see what crime, or even impropriety, Joe Biden committed.
You forget that Biden, as with Hillary, are the Devil incarnate and guilty of any crime Trump can imagine...
Well hilary was guilty sorry, she got a friend of mine killed
For those betting on Biden's nomination and / or the 2024 race, take a look at what has happened over the past 96 hours in the US.
The questions around whether Joe Biden took illicit payments are starting to multiply (text of the WhatsApp message is at the end of this e-mail). Maybe more importantly, the story seems to be breaking out of the right-wing press into other news sources. CBS has been interviewing the IRS Whistleblower who claims the case was obstructed and asking for answers. The New York Times - of all places - asked the WH Press Secretary about the allegations at the Friday press conference (“It’s a reasonable question to ask. The president of the United States is involved, as this message seems to suggest, in some sort of a coercive conversation for business dealings by his son. Is that something that, if he wasn’t, then maybe you should tell us?").
It does not look as though this story is going away and, if anything, it seems to be gaining strength, and the Administration's blocking answers do not seem to be doing the job. Given there is still well over a year to the election, there is a case for arguing the Democrats decide JB is becoming too damaged when it comes to 2024.
If that is the case, there are two options. Persuade him to step down soon and let Harris have 12 months as President in the hope she can establish some gravitas and win 2024. That is a tall bet.
The other is to look at some of the other, mainly Governors establishing their credentials. Newsom, Whitmer and Pritzker spring to mind. Of the three, I would be putting money on Whitmer for the 2024 nomination - she is female (ties into Roe v Wade), comes from a swing state and does not come from an ultra-liberal state which the other two do and which is likely to put off swing voters.
As for the 2017 Hunter Biden text to Henry Zhao of Harvest Fund Management, here it is:
""I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight,
And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction," he continued. "I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father."
It feels like Hunter Biden is absolutely trading on his father's name. There is zero evidence his father has done anything Lwrong. Also, this is the smallest of smallest fry. Kuchner got two billion dollars from the Saudis after being in the White House!
If Biden had been VP or POTUS at the time those texts were sent he would have been guilty.
But in 2017 he was just an ex-VP and failed presidential candidate
Except Hunter sent the text, not Joe. This is basic logic. I don't believe for a moment Biden knew about it, given he has been in public office for decades and there's no evidence of dodgy dealing. The Republican congressman investigating all this held a big press conference and it was all a damp squib.
This is all Trump sympathetics desperately trying to detract from the fact their man is currently being prosecuted over three separate crimes. And that is before we get the dodgy stuff the rest of family members got up to. Two BILLION from the Saudis! Jared is as corrupt as his father.
Jared, of course, had a post in the administration. Hunter is just an embarrassing child.
I am not sure that you quite grasp the seriousness of the allegations. Being in the pay of a foreign power (if it is shown that Biden was) is a far, far graver offence than anything Trump has been accused of doing.
The Tories won’t do themselves any favours overruling independent pay bodies on public sector pay.
We are just likely to see more and more strikes and disruption and not just from the likes of the RMT who are politically motivated.
They're in a complete bind. They'll trot out the wage-price spiral excuse to justify bearing down on public sector pay, but the plain fact is that they're struggling to find politically acceptable cuts to fund extra spending in this area, borrowing is enormous and becoming ever more expensive, and so they're left with either digging their heels in and offering workers peanuts, or raising taxes on their core supporters to pay for more generous rises. There's no violin small enough.
The reality we are reaching the end game for the Blairite/Thatcher-lite model
It used to be chunky public spending and low taxes with the difference funded by clever balance sheet tricks (PFI/securitisation) or straight up borrowing. Wages were kept down by relaxed views on immigration
Cost of borrowing is going up and the markets are twitchy after all that QE
Asset price bubbles have driven a reasonable standard of living beyond the reach of many
Effectively unlimited immigration has resulted in underinvestment in business (low wages partly due to immigration and partly due to tax credits) drove down returns (cost saving) on investment and increased the strain on public services (governments didn’t invest in capacity).
The electorate has been trained to believe the government will always bail them out
We need a grown up conversation. Either taxes have to go up massively or public services need to be completely rethought.
But neither politicians or the electorate are ready to have that conversation.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Indeed. Fundamentally, the cost of accommodation is a total rip-off - and it's even worse for renters than mortgage payers. Myself, if I was a renter - even living as I do in a modest one-bed flat - rather than owning outright then I'd be paying about as much for housing as all my other basic bills put together, including a healthy food budget as well as energy, TV/broadband and water.
This is why there's been such a mass pile-in into the BTL landlord business by small investors. It was money for old rope for anybody who could get hold of a BTL mortgage on an interest-only basis, and it's still money for old rope for any landlord who owns the rental outright or has a decent equity share. Just set up a little flat, install a renter and improve your own standard of living immensely by extracting a large chunk of their earned income for yourself. It's actually quite surprising that more people haven't done it when you think about it.
For those betting on Biden's nomination and / or the 2024 race, take a look at what has happened over the past 96 hours in the US.
The questions around whether Joe Biden took illicit payments are starting to multiply (text of the WhatsApp message is at the end of this e-mail). Maybe more importantly, the story seems to be breaking out of the right-wing press into other news sources. CBS has been interviewing the IRS Whistleblower who claims the case was obstructed and asking for answers. The New York Times - of all places - asked the WH Press Secretary about the allegations at the Friday press conference (“It’s a reasonable question to ask. The president of the United States is involved, as this message seems to suggest, in some sort of a coercive conversation for business dealings by his son. Is that something that, if he wasn’t, then maybe you should tell us?").
It does not look as though this story is going away and, if anything, it seems to be gaining strength, and the Administration's blocking answers do not seem to be doing the job. Given there is still well over a year to the election, there is a case for arguing the Democrats decide JB is becoming too damaged when it comes to 2024.
If that is the case, there are two options. Persuade him to step down soon and let Harris have 12 months as President in the hope she can establish some gravitas and win 2024. That is a tall bet.
The other is to look at some of the other, mainly Governors establishing their credentials. Newsom, Whitmer and Pritzker spring to mind. Of the three, I would be putting money on Whitmer for the 2024 nomination - she is female (ties into Roe v Wade), comes from a swing state and does not come from an ultra-liberal state which the other two do and which is likely to put off swing voters.
As for the 2017 Hunter Biden text to Henry Zhao of Harvest Fund Management, here it is:
""I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight,
And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction," he continued. "I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father."
It feels like Hunter Biden is absolutely trading on his father's name. There is zero evidence his father has done anything Lwrong. Also, this is the smallest of smallest fry. Kuchner got two billion dollars from the Saudis after being in the White House!
If Biden had been VP or POTUS at the time those texts were sent he would have been guilty.
But in 2017 he was just an ex-VP and failed presidential candidate
Except Hunter sent the text, not Joe. This is basic logic. I don't believe for a moment Biden knew about it, given he has been in public office for decades and there's no evidence of dodgy dealing. The Republican congressman investigating all this held a big press conference and it was all a damp squib.
This is all Trump sympathetics desperately trying to detract from the fact their man is currently being prosecuted over three separate crimes. And that is before we get the dodgy stuff the rest of family members got up to. Two BILLION from the Saudis! Jared is as corrupt as his father.
Jared, of course, had a post in the administration. Hunter is just an embarrassing child.
I am not sure that you quite grasp the seriousness of the allegations. Being in the pay of a foreign power (if it is shown that Biden was) is a far, far graver offence than anything Trump has been accused of doing.
Your son decides to be an iranian spy. Does that make you guilty of disloyalty to the russian state?
The Tories won’t do themselves any favours overruling independent pay bodies on public sector pay.
We are just likely to see more and more strikes and disruption and not just from the likes of the RMT who are politically motivated.
They're in a complete bind. They'll trot out the wage-price spiral excuse to justify bearing down on public sector pay, but the plain fact is that they're struggling to find politically acceptable cuts to fund extra spending in this area, borrowing is enormous and becoming ever more expensive, and so they're left with either digging their heels in and offering workers peanuts, or raising taxes on their core supporters to pay for more generous rises. There's no violin small enough.
The reality we are reaching the end game for the Blairite/Thatcher-lite model
It used to be chunky public spending and low taxes with the difference funded by clever balance sheet tricks (PFI/securitisation) or straight up borrowing. Wages were kept down by relaxed views on immigration
Cost of borrowing is going up and the markets are twitchy after all that QE
Asset price bubbles have driven a reasonable standard of living beyond the reach of many
Effectively unlimited immigration has resulted in underinvestment in business (low wages partly due to immigration and partly due to tax credits) drove down returns (cost saving) on investment and increased the strain on public services (governments didn’t invest in capacity).
The electorate has been trained to believe the government will always bail them out
We need a grown up conversation. Either taxes have to go up massively or public services need to be completely rethought.
But neither politicians or the electorate are ready to have that conversation.
I have been saying the same for ages. Instead everyone here wants the status quo and their particular bug bear fully funded. What the state does I agree should be full funded. That means however saying this is how much we have to spend. This is the cost of fully funding all these things. What do you want because we have to drop the rest.
Tbf I think most on here do support either higher taxes to maintain public services or lower taxes funded by spending cuts.
I am not even advocating tax cuts here, just saying we need to have a conversation as an electorate saying this is what fully funding things cost. If they want more things to be fully funded than our current tax base then say ok we will raise taxes.
The thing is the state does a myriad of things everyone is always saying all of these are underfunded and they argue they should be fully funded. A good argument and one I agree with. If we are going to do it properly let us fund it properly.
The simple fact though is that if we fully fund everything the state does then the amount of tax take would be likely equivalent to total gdp or 100% tax and I doubt even you want that
So my argument is merely right now. let us as a country decide what we want the state to do and fully fund it. If tax goes up to pay for it ok....not my favourite choice but democratic.
Instead the cons and sks lab party and the ld's whose leader I cant even remember want to go on pretending the state can do everything. The state however does it all badly because they all get underfunded
Ed Davey.
I was hoping for a reaction above informing me of the LD leader tbh. As I said I didnt ask for tax cuts I like to hope I put out a neutral argument and would be interested in your opinion
Make sure you memorize it now then. Ed Davey.
Your ideas on this? I like the thrust of them very much. More rigor and transparency around tax and spend.
The challenge is to fuse that with what's practical, and also leave room for political vision and flexibility.
For those betting on Biden's nomination and / or the 2024 race, take a look at what has happened over the past 96 hours in the US.
The questions around whether Joe Biden took illicit payments are starting to multiply (text of the WhatsApp message is at the end of this e-mail). Maybe more importantly, the story seems to be breaking out of the right-wing press into other news sources. CBS has been interviewing the IRS Whistleblower who claims the case was obstructed and asking for answers. The New York Times - of all places - asked the WH Press Secretary about the allegations at the Friday press conference (“It’s a reasonable question to ask. The president of the United States is involved, as this message seems to suggest, in some sort of a coercive conversation for business dealings by his son. Is that something that, if he wasn’t, then maybe you should tell us?").
It does not look as though this story is going away and, if anything, it seems to be gaining strength, and the Administration's blocking answers do not seem to be doing the job. Given there is still well over a year to the election, there is a case for arguing the Democrats decide JB is becoming too damaged when it comes to 2024.
If that is the case, there are two options. Persuade him to step down soon and let Harris have 12 months as President in the hope she can establish some gravitas and win 2024. That is a tall bet.
The other is to look at some of the other, mainly Governors establishing their credentials. Newsom, Whitmer and Pritzker spring to mind. Of the three, I would be putting money on Whitmer for the 2024 nomination - she is female (ties into Roe v Wade), comes from a swing state and does not come from an ultra-liberal state which the other two do and which is likely to put off swing voters.
As for the 2017 Hunter Biden text to Henry Zhao of Harvest Fund Management, here it is:
""I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight,
And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction," he continued. "I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father."
It feels like Hunter Biden is absolutely trading on his father's name. There is zero evidence his father has done anything Lwrong. Also, this is the smallest of smallest fry. Kuchner got two billion dollars from the Saudis after being in the White House!
If Biden had been VP or POTUS at the time those texts were sent he would have been guilty.
But in 2017 he was just an ex-VP and failed presidential candidate
Except Hunter sent the text, not Joe. This is basic logic. I don't believe for a moment Biden knew about it, given he has been in public office for decades and there's no evidence of dodgy dealing. The Republican congressman investigating all this held a big press conference and it was all a damp squib.
This is all Trump sympathetics desperately trying to detract from the fact their man is currently being prosecuted over three separate crimes. And that is before we get the dodgy stuff the rest of family members got up to. Two BILLION from the Saudis! Jared is as corrupt as his father.
Jared, of course, had a post in the administration. Hunter is just an embarrassing child.
I am not sure that you quite grasp the seriousness of the allegations. Being in the pay of a foreign power (if it is shown that Biden was) is a far, far graver offence than anything Trump has been accused of doing.
Your son decides to be an iranian spy. Does that make you guilty of disloyalty to the russian state?
I'm sorry, you'll have to help me, my cretin is a little rusty.
Part of the cost of housing is caused by discretionary competition for high-value housing. That's not true for fuel or even food, where the market can respond much more quickly to changes in tastes, rather than relying on capital investments that potentially last for centuries.
The Tories won’t do themselves any favours overruling independent pay bodies on public sector pay.
We are just likely to see more and more strikes and disruption and not just from the likes of the RMT who are politically motivated.
They're in a complete bind. They'll trot out the wage-price spiral excuse to justify bearing down on public sector pay, but the plain fact is that they're struggling to find politically acceptable cuts to fund extra spending in this area, borrowing is enormous and becoming ever more expensive, and so they're left with either digging their heels in and offering workers peanuts, or raising taxes on their core supporters to pay for more generous rises. There's no violin small enough.
The reality we are reaching the end game for the Blairite/Thatcher-lite model
It used to be chunky public spending and low taxes with the difference funded by clever balance sheet tricks (PFI/securitisation) or straight up borrowing. Wages were kept down by relaxed views on immigration
Cost of borrowing is going up and the markets are twitchy after all that QE
Asset price bubbles have driven a reasonable standard of living beyond the reach of many
Effectively unlimited immigration has resulted in underinvestment in business (low wages partly due to immigration and partly due to tax credits) drove down returns (cost saving) on investment and increased the strain on public services (governments didn’t invest in capacity).
The electorate has been trained to believe the government will always bail them out
We need a grown up conversation. Either taxes have to go up massively or public services need to be completely rethought.
But neither politicians or the electorate are ready to have that conversation.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Hence Labour’s housing policy.
I think they might even be serious about it - one of the shadow cabinet referred to it as the “biggest transfer of power from central to local government in more than a generation” in a radio interview today.
That's the worst thing that can happen!
More power to NIMBY Councils elected on a low turnout?
We need the Japanese system. Councils can come up with zoning plans but once land is zoned the local authority has no say whatsoever in what is done with that land. So long as Building Regulations (determined centrally) are met and so long as in a Residential Zone then you can start construction immediately. No planning, no consultation, nothing.
Oh and of course if you hold the land you are immediately taxed on it. So no reason to ever bank land.
The Tories won’t do themselves any favours overruling independent pay bodies on public sector pay.
We are just likely to see more and more strikes and disruption and not just from the likes of the RMT who are politically motivated.
They're in a complete bind. They'll trot out the wage-price spiral excuse to justify bearing down on public sector pay, but the plain fact is that they're struggling to find politically acceptable cuts to fund extra spending in this area, borrowing is enormous and becoming ever more expensive, and so they're left with either digging their heels in and offering workers peanuts, or raising taxes on their core supporters to pay for more generous rises. There's no violin small enough.
The reality we are reaching the end game for the Blairite/Thatcher-lite model
It used to be chunky public spending and low taxes with the difference funded by clever balance sheet tricks (PFI/securitisation) or straight up borrowing. Wages were kept down by relaxed views on immigration
Cost of borrowing is going up and the markets are twitchy after all that QE
Asset price bubbles have driven a reasonable standard of living beyond the reach of many
Effectively unlimited immigration has resulted in underinvestment in business (low wages partly due to immigration and partly due to tax credits) drove down returns (cost saving) on investment and increased the strain on public services (governments didn’t invest in capacity).
The electorate has been trained to believe the government will always bail them out
We need a grown up conversation. Either taxes have to go up massively or public services need to be completely rethought.
But neither politicians or the electorate are ready to have that conversation.
I have been saying the same for ages. Instead everyone here wants the status quo and their particular bug bear fully funded. What the state does I agree should be full funded. That means however saying this is how much we have to spend. This is the cost of fully funding all these things. What do you want because we have to drop the rest.
Tbf I think most on here do support either higher taxes to maintain public services or lower taxes funded by spending cuts.
I am not even advocating tax cuts here, just saying we need to have a conversation as an electorate saying this is what fully funding things cost. If they want more things to be fully funded than our current tax base then say ok we will raise taxes.
The thing is the state does a myriad of things everyone is always saying all of these are underfunded and they argue they should be fully funded. A good argument and one I agree with. If we are going to do it properly let us fund it properly.
The simple fact though is that if we fully fund everything the state does then the amount of tax take would be likely equivalent to total gdp or 100% tax and I doubt even you want that
So my argument is merely right now. let us as a country decide what we want the state to do and fully fund it. If tax goes up to pay for it ok....not my favourite choice but democratic.
Instead the cons and sks lab party and the ld's whose leader I cant even remember want to go on pretending the state can do everything. The state however does it all badly because they all get underfunded
Ed Davey.
I was hoping for a reaction above informing me of the LD leader tbh. As I said I didnt ask for tax cuts I like to hope I put out a neutral argument and would be interested in your opinion
Make sure you memorize it now then. Ed Davey.
Your ideas on this? I like the thrust of them very much. More rigor and transparency around tax and spend.
The challenge is to fuse that with what's practical, and also leave room for political vision and flexibility.
Why bother remembering it the LD's are hardly a political force.
However you still really havent answered the question
so will put them more bluntly
Regardless of whether tax take goes up or down
1) Do you agree that what the state does should be fully funded 2) Do you agree that people should be told what fully funding these actions would be and there affect on tax 3) Given 1 and 2 are yes,do you therefore agree that the british people should get a decision on what it important for the state to do
For those betting on Biden's nomination and / or the 2024 race, take a look at what has happened over the past 96 hours in the US.
The questions around whether Joe Biden took illicit payments are starting to multiply (text of the WhatsApp message is at the end of this e-mail). Maybe more importantly, the story seems to be breaking out of the right-wing press into other news sources. CBS has been interviewing the IRS Whistleblower who claims the case was obstructed and asking for answers. The New York Times - of all places - asked the WH Press Secretary about the allegations at the Friday press conference (“It’s a reasonable question to ask. The president of the United States is involved, as this message seems to suggest, in some sort of a coercive conversation for business dealings by his son. Is that something that, if he wasn’t, then maybe you should tell us?").
It does not look as though this story is going away and, if anything, it seems to be gaining strength, and the Administration's blocking answers do not seem to be doing the job. Given there is still well over a year to the election, there is a case for arguing the Democrats decide JB is becoming too damaged when it comes to 2024.
If that is the case, there are two options. Persuade him to step down soon and let Harris have 12 months as President in the hope she can establish some gravitas and win 2024. That is a tall bet.
The other is to look at some of the other, mainly Governors establishing their credentials. Newsom, Whitmer and Pritzker spring to mind. Of the three, I would be putting money on Whitmer for the 2024 nomination - she is female (ties into Roe v Wade), comes from a swing state and does not come from an ultra-liberal state which the other two do and which is likely to put off swing voters.
As for the 2017 Hunter Biden text to Henry Zhao of Harvest Fund Management, here it is:
""I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight,
And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction," he continued. "I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father."
It feels like Hunter Biden is absolutely trading on his father's name. There is zero evidence his father has done anything Lwrong. Also, this is the smallest of smallest fry. Kuchner got two billion dollars from the Saudis after being in the White House!
If Biden had been VP or POTUS at the time those texts were sent he would have been guilty.
But in 2017 he was just an ex-VP and failed presidential candidate
Except Hunter sent the text, not Joe. This is basic logic. I don't believe for a moment Biden knew about it, given he has been in public office for decades and there's no evidence of dodgy dealing. The Republican congressman investigating all this held a big press conference and it was all a damp squib.
This is all Trump sympathetics desperately trying to detract from the fact their man is currently being prosecuted over three separate crimes. And that is before we get the dodgy stuff the rest of family members got up to. Two BILLION from the Saudis! Jared is as corrupt as his father.
Jared, of course, had a post in the administration. Hunter is just an embarrassing child.
I am not sure that you quite grasp the seriousness of the allegations. Being in the pay of a foreign power (if it is shown that Biden was) is a far, far graver offence than anything Trump has been accused of doing.
And the evidence ? Precisely zero.
There’s rather more evidence that Trump was in hock to Russia - do you grasp the seriousness of that ? Insufficient, of course, to bring any such charges - but note, of course, that individuals appointed by him to manage his first presidential campaign were indeed convicted of being foreign agents.
The point about Trump’s criminal difficulties is that the prima facile evidence was enough for at least a grand jury (in Florida, of all places) to indict.
For those betting on Biden's nomination and / or the 2024 race, take a look at what has happened over the past 96 hours in the US.
The questions around whether Joe Biden took illicit payments are starting to multiply (text of the WhatsApp message is at the end of this e-mail). Maybe more importantly, the story seems to be breaking out of the right-wing press into other news sources. CBS has been interviewing the IRS Whistleblower who claims the case was obstructed and asking for answers. The New York Times - of all places - asked the WH Press Secretary about the allegations at the Friday press conference (“It’s a reasonable question to ask. The president of the United States is involved, as this message seems to suggest, in some sort of a coercive conversation for business dealings by his son. Is that something that, if he wasn’t, then maybe you should tell us?").
It does not look as though this story is going away and, if anything, it seems to be gaining strength, and the Administration's blocking answers do not seem to be doing the job. Given there is still well over a year to the election, there is a case for arguing the Democrats decide JB is becoming too damaged when it comes to 2024.
If that is the case, there are two options. Persuade him to step down soon and let Harris have 12 months as President in the hope she can establish some gravitas and win 2024. That is a tall bet.
The other is to look at some of the other, mainly Governors establishing their credentials. Newsom, Whitmer and Pritzker spring to mind. Of the three, I would be putting money on Whitmer for the 2024 nomination - she is female (ties into Roe v Wade), comes from a swing state and does not come from an ultra-liberal state which the other two do and which is likely to put off swing voters.
As for the 2017 Hunter Biden text to Henry Zhao of Harvest Fund Management, here it is:
""I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight,
And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction," he continued. "I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father."
It feels like Hunter Biden is absolutely trading on his father's name. There is zero evidence his father has done anything Lwrong. Also, this is the smallest of smallest fry. Kuchner got two billion dollars from the Saudis after being in the White House!
If Biden had been VP or POTUS at the time those texts were sent he would have been guilty.
But in 2017 he was just an ex-VP and failed presidential candidate
Except Hunter sent the text, not Joe. This is basic logic. I don't believe for a moment Biden knew about it, given he has been in public office for decades and there's no evidence of dodgy dealing. The Republican congressman investigating all this held a big press conference and it was all a damp squib.
This is all Trump sympathetics desperately trying to detract from the fact their man is currently being prosecuted over three separate crimes. And that is before we get the dodgy stuff the rest of family members got up to. Two BILLION from the Saudis! Jared is as corrupt as his father.
Jared, of course, had a post in the administration. Hunter is just an embarrassing child.
I am not sure that you quite grasp the seriousness of the allegations. Being in the pay of a foreign power (if it is shown that Biden was) is a far, far graver offence than anything Trump has been accused of doing.
I'm still trying to understand what crime that Joe Biden committed.
But unrelated I happen to think that laying all the top 3 in the WH race at current prices (Biden, Trump, DeSantis) is quite a good play. Esp Trump obvs.
Funny how this guy never shares news about what Trump's kids have been up to and how it might affect his odds.
From a very previous thread: Some time ago, I mentioned that, in the late 1960s, one of my friends taught in a Chicago school for pregnant elementary girls. rcs1000 expressed some skepticism, even after I explained that elementary school could go to 8th grade, and that it was not unusual for students to repeat a grade or two.
In the collection, there is a column published on 1 December 1992, "Parents, Not Cash, Can Enrich a School". In it, Royko argued that the problems in Chicago slum schools were a result of broken families, not too low spending:
'And crying out for money for Chicago's schools isn't the answer, unless the money is spent in a way that will get results.
But how do you use money to replace a family structure that isn't there? If you know the answer to that question, then pass it along to the eighth-grade teacher at a West Side school who wearily told me:
"I try to teach, but it isn't easy when my smartest student is a girl who is already pregnant with her second child."'
Which is the same problem that I, and my friend, saw in those schools decades earlier.
(Full disclosure: My parents separated when I was 18, and about to go away to college.)
If you haven't read Royko, you ought to, if you want to understand urban politics in Chicago and similar cities. And I should add that many of the columns in that collection are just plain fun to read.
For those betting on Biden's nomination and / or the 2024 race, take a look at what has happened over the past 96 hours in the US.
The questions around whether Joe Biden took illicit payments are starting to multiply (text of the WhatsApp message is at the end of this e-mail). Maybe more importantly, the story seems to be breaking out of the right-wing press into other news sources. CBS has been interviewing the IRS Whistleblower who claims the case was obstructed and asking for answers. The New York Times - of all places - asked the WH Press Secretary about the allegations at the Friday press conference (“It’s a reasonable question to ask. The president of the United States is involved, as this message seems to suggest, in some sort of a coercive conversation for business dealings by his son. Is that something that, if he wasn’t, then maybe you should tell us?").
It does not look as though this story is going away and, if anything, it seems to be gaining strength, and the Administration's blocking answers do not seem to be doing the job. Given there is still well over a year to the election, there is a case for arguing the Democrats decide JB is becoming too damaged when it comes to 2024.
If that is the case, there are two options. Persuade him to step down soon and let Harris have 12 months as President in the hope she can establish some gravitas and win 2024. That is a tall bet.
The other is to look at some of the other, mainly Governors establishing their credentials. Newsom, Whitmer and Pritzker spring to mind. Of the three, I would be putting money on Whitmer for the 2024 nomination - she is female (ties into Roe v Wade), comes from a swing state and does not come from an ultra-liberal state which the other two do and which is likely to put off swing voters.
As for the 2017 Hunter Biden text to Henry Zhao of Harvest Fund Management, here it is:
""I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight,
And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction," he continued. "I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father."
It feels like Hunter Biden is absolutely trading on his father's name. There is zero evidence his father has done anything Lwrong. Also, this is the smallest of smallest fry. Kuchner got two billion dollars from the Saudis after being in the White House!
If Biden had been VP or POTUS at the time those texts were sent he would have been guilty.
But in 2017 he was just an ex-VP and failed presidential candidate
Except Hunter sent the text, not Joe. This is basic logic. I don't believe for a moment Biden knew about it, given he has been in public office for decades and there's no evidence of dodgy dealing. The Republican congressman investigating all this held a big press conference and it was all a damp squib.
This is all Trump sympathetics desperately trying to detract from the fact their man is currently being prosecuted over three separate crimes. And that is before we get the dodgy stuff the rest of family members got up to. Two BILLION from the Saudis! Jared is as corrupt as his father.
Jared, of course, had a post in the administration. Hunter is just an embarrassing child.
I am not sure that you quite grasp the seriousness of the allegations. Being in the pay of a foreign power (if it is shown that Biden was) is a far, far graver offence than anything Trump has been accused of doing.
Your son decides to be an iranian spy. Does that make you guilty of disloyalty to the russian state?
I'm sorry, you'll have to help me, my cretin is a little rusty.
Ok, imagine that you decide to become a spy for (say) the Italian government.
Do you (a) tell your dad that you have decided to turn traitor, and ask if there's any juicy info you could pass along to help fund your crack habit; or (b) keep schtum and see what you can pick up.
The Tories won’t do themselves any favours overruling independent pay bodies on public sector pay.
We are just likely to see more and more strikes and disruption and not just from the likes of the RMT who are politically motivated.
They're in a complete bind. They'll trot out the wage-price spiral excuse to justify bearing down on public sector pay, but the plain fact is that they're struggling to find politically acceptable cuts to fund extra spending in this area, borrowing is enormous and becoming ever more expensive, and so they're left with either digging their heels in and offering workers peanuts, or raising taxes on their core supporters to pay for more generous rises. There's no violin small enough.
The reality we are reaching the end game for the Blairite/Thatcher-lite model
It used to be chunky public spending and low taxes with the difference funded by clever balance sheet tricks (PFI/securitisation) or straight up borrowing. Wages were kept down by relaxed views on immigration
Cost of borrowing is going up and the markets are twitchy after all that QE
Asset price bubbles have driven a reasonable standard of living beyond the reach of many
Effectively unlimited immigration has resulted in underinvestment in business (low wages partly due to immigration and partly due to tax credits) drove down returns (cost saving) on investment and increased the strain on public services (governments didn’t invest in capacity).
The electorate has been trained to believe the government will always bail them out
We need a grown up conversation. Either taxes have to go up massively or public services need to be completely rethought.
But neither politicians or the electorate are ready to have that conversation.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Indeed. Fundamentally, the cost of accommodation is a total rip-off - and it's even worse for renters than mortgage payers. Myself, if I was a renter - even living as I do in a modest one-bed flat - rather than owning outright then I'd be paying about as much for housing as all my other basic bills put together, including a healthy food budget as well as energy, TV/broadband and water.
This is why there's been such a mass pile-in into the BTL landlord business by small investors. It was money for old rope for anybody who could get hold of a BTL mortgage on an interest-only basis, and it's still money for old rope for any landlord who owns the rental outright or has a decent equity share. Just set up a little flat, install a renter and improve your own standard of living immensely by extracting a large chunk of their earned income for yourself. It's actually quite surprising that more people haven't done it when you think about it.
Tax rates on rents are high, compared to the untaxed status of enjoying the occupancy of a house you own yourself. Otherwise the world would indeed look like you suggest, and other countries like Switzerland look a lot more like the mass rental scenario.
Part of the cost of housing is caused by discretionary competition for high-value housing. That's not true for fuel or even food, where the market can respond much more quickly to changes in tastes, rather than relying on capital investments that potentially last for centuries.
Yes, this is why ensuring there is enough supply of high-value housing is so important for overall affordability. Otherwise the people who can afford to outbid each other will drive up the prices of the next tier of property and it ripples out to push up the cost of housing more generally.
The Tories won’t do themselves any favours overruling independent pay bodies on public sector pay.
We are just likely to see more and more strikes and disruption and not just from the likes of the RMT who are politically motivated.
They're in a complete bind. They'll trot out the wage-price spiral excuse to justify bearing down on public sector pay, but the plain fact is that they're struggling to find politically acceptable cuts to fund extra spending in this area, borrowing is enormous and becoming ever more expensive, and so they're left with either digging their heels in and offering workers peanuts, or raising taxes on their core supporters to pay for more generous rises. There's no violin small enough.
The reality we are reaching the end game for the Blairite/Thatcher-lite model
It used to be chunky public spending and low taxes with the difference funded by clever balance sheet tricks (PFI/securitisation) or straight up borrowing. Wages were kept down by relaxed views on immigration
Cost of borrowing is going up and the markets are twitchy after all that QE
Asset price bubbles have driven a reasonable standard of living beyond the reach of many
Effectively unlimited immigration has resulted in underinvestment in business (low wages partly due to immigration and partly due to tax credits) drove down returns (cost saving) on investment and increased the strain on public services (governments didn’t invest in capacity).
The electorate has been trained to believe the government will always bail them out
We need a grown up conversation. Either taxes have to go up massively or public services need to be completely rethought.
But neither politicians or the electorate are ready to have that conversation.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Indeed. Fundamentally, the cost of accommodation is a total rip-off - and it's even worse for renters than mortgage payers. Myself, if I was a renter - even living as I do in a modest one-bed flat - rather than owning outright then I'd be paying about as much for housing as all my other basic bills put together, including a healthy food budget as well as energy, TV/broadband and water.
This is why there's been such a mass pile-in into the BTL landlord business by small investors. It was money for old rope for anybody who could get hold of a BTL mortgage on an interest-only basis, and it's still money for old rope for any landlord who owns the rental outright or has a decent equity share. Just set up a little flat, install a renter and improve your own standard of living immensely by extracting a large chunk of their earned income for yourself. It's actually quite surprising that more people haven't done it when you think about it.
Tax rates on rents are high, compared to the untaxed status of enjoying the occupancy of a house you own yourself. Otherwise the world would indeed look like you suggest, and other countries like Switzerland look a lot more like the mass rental scenario.
Tax rates on rents are absurdly low, lower than tax rates on earned income. No NI on income from rents.
For those betting on Biden's nomination and / or the 2024 race, take a look at what has happened over the past 96 hours in the US.
The questions around whether Joe Biden took illicit payments are starting to multiply (text of the WhatsApp message is at the end of this e-mail). Maybe more importantly, the story seems to be breaking out of the right-wing press into other news sources. CBS has been interviewing the IRS Whistleblower who claims the case was obstructed and asking for answers. The New York Times - of all places - asked the WH Press Secretary about the allegations at the Friday press conference (“It’s a reasonable question to ask. The president of the United States is involved, as this message seems to suggest, in some sort of a coercive conversation for business dealings by his son. Is that something that, if he wasn’t, then maybe you should tell us?").
It does not look as though this story is going away and, if anything, it seems to be gaining strength, and the Administration's blocking answers do not seem to be doing the job. Given there is still well over a year to the election, there is a case for arguing the Democrats decide JB is becoming too damaged when it comes to 2024.
If that is the case, there are two options. Persuade him to step down soon and let Harris have 12 months as President in the hope she can establish some gravitas and win 2024. That is a tall bet.
The other is to look at some of the other, mainly Governors establishing their credentials. Newsom, Whitmer and Pritzker spring to mind. Of the three, I would be putting money on Whitmer for the 2024 nomination - she is female (ties into Roe v Wade), comes from a swing state and does not come from an ultra-liberal state which the other two do and which is likely to put off swing voters.
As for the 2017 Hunter Biden text to Henry Zhao of Harvest Fund Management, here it is:
""I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight,
And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction," he continued. "I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father."
It feels like Hunter Biden is absolutely trading on his father's name. There is zero evidence his father has done anything Lwrong. Also, this is the smallest of smallest fry. Kuchner got two billion dollars from the Saudis after being in the White House!
If Biden had been VP or POTUS at the time those texts were sent he would have been guilty.
But in 2017 he was just an ex-VP and failed presidential candidate
Except Hunter sent the text, not Joe. This is basic logic. I don't believe for a moment Biden knew about it, given he has been in public office for decades and there's no evidence of dodgy dealing. The Republican congressman investigating all this held a big press conference and it was all a damp squib.
This is all Trump sympathetics desperately trying to detract from the fact their man is currently being prosecuted over three separate crimes. And that is before we get the dodgy stuff the rest of family members got up to. Two BILLION from the Saudis! Jared is as corrupt as his father.
Jared, of course, had a post in the administration. Hunter is just an embarrassing child.
I am not sure that you quite grasp the seriousness of the allegations. Being in the pay of a foreign power (if it is shown that Biden was) is a far, far graver offence than anything Trump has been accused of doing.
FFS. Donald Trump launched a violent attack that stormed the US federal seat of government to stop the transfer of power.
And even if you want to limit things to "being in the pay of foreign power", the Trump administration helped the Saudis and then got $2billion given to Kushner's funds.
The Tories won’t do themselves any favours overruling independent pay bodies on public sector pay.
We are just likely to see more and more strikes and disruption and not just from the likes of the RMT who are politically motivated.
They're in a complete bind. They'll trot out the wage-price spiral excuse to justify bearing down on public sector pay, but the plain fact is that they're struggling to find politically acceptable cuts to fund extra spending in this area, borrowing is enormous and becoming ever more expensive, and so they're left with either digging their heels in and offering workers peanuts, or raising taxes on their core supporters to pay for more generous rises. There's no violin small enough.
The reality we are reaching the end game for the Blairite/Thatcher-lite model
It used to be chunky public spending and low taxes with the difference funded by clever balance sheet tricks (PFI/securitisation) or straight up borrowing. Wages were kept down by relaxed views on immigration
Cost of borrowing is going up and the markets are twitchy after all that QE
Asset price bubbles have driven a reasonable standard of living beyond the reach of many
Effectively unlimited immigration has resulted in underinvestment in business (low wages partly due to immigration and partly due to tax credits) drove down returns (cost saving) on investment and increased the strain on public services (governments didn’t invest in capacity).
The electorate has been trained to believe the government will always bail them out
We need a grown up conversation. Either taxes have to go up massively or public services need to be completely rethought.
But neither politicians or the electorate are ready to have that conversation.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Indeed. Fundamentally, the cost of accommodation is a total rip-off - and it's even worse for renters than mortgage payers. Myself, if I was a renter - even living as I do in a modest one-bed flat - rather than owning outright then I'd be paying about as much for housing as all my other basic bills put together, including a healthy food budget as well as energy, TV/broadband and water.
This is why there's been such a mass pile-in into the BTL landlord business by small investors. It was money for old rope for anybody who could get hold of a BTL mortgage on an interest-only basis, and it's still money for old rope for any landlord who owns the rental outright or has a decent equity share. Just set up a little flat, install a renter and improve your own standard of living immensely by extracting a large chunk of their earned income for yourself. It's actually quite surprising that more people haven't done it when you think about it.
Tax rates on rents are high, compared to the untaxed status of enjoying the occupancy of a house you own yourself. Otherwise the world would indeed look like you suggest, and other countries like Switzerland look a lot more like the mass rental scenario.
Tax rates on rents are absurdly low, lower than tax rates on earned income. No NI on income from rents.
Not true, actually. I have a little field inherited from an ancestor and kept for sentimental/environmental reasons, and I get £80 pa for it from the farmer. But I have to pay NI on that. Class 2 or 3. Apparently it counts as a business.
Part of the cost of housing is caused by discretionary competition for high-value housing. That's not true for fuel or even food, where the market can respond much more quickly to changes in tastes, rather than relying on capital investments that potentially last for centuries.
Yes, this is why ensuring there is enough supply of high-value housing is so important for overall affordability. Otherwise the people who can afford to outbid each other will drive up the prices of the next tier of property and it ripples out to push up the cost of housing more generally.
Precisely and when you get more people bidding for properties the price goes up. I am still in contact with my old landlord in slough. He just rented out the studio appartment I used to rent which was an l shaped place with no windows just a light well 15 wide 20' long then the other part of the l was 15 by 10. He just got bit 1100 by one of the people wanting to rent it. I paid 750 in september last year
The Tories won’t do themselves any favours overruling independent pay bodies on public sector pay.
We are just likely to see more and more strikes and disruption and not just from the likes of the RMT who are politically motivated.
They're in a complete bind. They'll trot out the wage-price spiral excuse to justify bearing down on public sector pay, but the plain fact is that they're struggling to find politically acceptable cuts to fund extra spending in this area, borrowing is enormous and becoming ever more expensive, and so they're left with either digging their heels in and offering workers peanuts, or raising taxes on their core supporters to pay for more generous rises. There's no violin small enough.
The reality we are reaching the end game for the Blairite/Thatcher-lite model
It used to be chunky public spending and low taxes with the difference funded by clever balance sheet tricks (PFI/securitisation) or straight up borrowing. Wages were kept down by relaxed views on immigration
Cost of borrowing is going up and the markets are twitchy after all that QE
Asset price bubbles have driven a reasonable standard of living beyond the reach of many
Effectively unlimited immigration has resulted in underinvestment in business (low wages partly due to immigration and partly due to tax credits) drove down returns (cost saving) on investment and increased the strain on public services (governments didn’t invest in capacity).
The electorate has been trained to believe the government will always bail them out
We need a grown up conversation. Either taxes have to go up massively or public services need to be completely rethought.
But neither politicians or the electorate are ready to have that conversation.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Indeed. Fundamentally, the cost of accommodation is a total rip-off - and it's even worse for renters than mortgage payers. Myself, if I was a renter - even living as I do in a modest one-bed flat - rather than owning outright then I'd be paying about as much for housing as all my other basic bills put together, including a healthy food budget as well as energy, TV/broadband and water.
This is why there's been such a mass pile-in into the BTL landlord business by small investors. It was money for old rope for anybody who could get hold of a BTL mortgage on an interest-only basis, and it's still money for old rope for any landlord who owns the rental outright or has a decent equity share. Just set up a little flat, install a renter and improve your own standard of living immensely by extracting a large chunk of their earned income for yourself. It's actually quite surprising that more people haven't done it when you think about it.
The fact that BTL became a significant thing (put down a deposit, pay a mortgage on the rest, get a tenant and watch the profits roll in) ought to have been a massive red light that something was wrong. That was... early Blair era? A something for nothing that has been balanced out by nothing for something ever since.
And whilst sorting housing might not be sufficient to solve Britain's problems, I suspect it's necessary. Otherwise, what is to stop any gains from a growing economy just flowing to landlords through higher rents?
For those betting on Biden's nomination and / or the 2024 race, take a look at what has happened over the past 96 hours in the US.
The questions around whether Joe Biden took illicit payments are starting to multiply (text of the WhatsApp message is at the end of this e-mail). Maybe more importantly, the story seems to be breaking out of the right-wing press into other news sources. CBS has been interviewing the IRS Whistleblower who claims the case was obstructed and asking for answers. The New York Times - of all places - asked the WH Press Secretary about the allegations at the Friday press conference (“It’s a reasonable question to ask. The president of the United States is involved, as this message seems to suggest, in some sort of a coercive conversation for business dealings by his son. Is that something that, if he wasn’t, then maybe you should tell us?").
It does not look as though this story is going away and, if anything, it seems to be gaining strength, and the Administration's blocking answers do not seem to be doing the job. Given there is still well over a year to the election, there is a case for arguing the Democrats decide JB is becoming too damaged when it comes to 2024.
If that is the case, there are two options. Persuade him to step down soon and let Harris have 12 months as President in the hope she can establish some gravitas and win 2024. That is a tall bet.
The other is to look at some of the other, mainly Governors establishing their credentials. Newsom, Whitmer and Pritzker spring to mind. Of the three, I would be putting money on Whitmer for the 2024 nomination - she is female (ties into Roe v Wade), comes from a swing state and does not come from an ultra-liberal state which the other two do and which is likely to put off swing voters.
As for the 2017 Hunter Biden text to Henry Zhao of Harvest Fund Management, here it is:
""I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight,
And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction," he continued. "I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father."
It feels like Hunter Biden is absolutely trading on his father's name. There is zero evidence his father has done anything Lwrong. Also, this is the smallest of smallest fry. Kuchner got two billion dollars from the Saudis after being in the White House!
If Biden had been VP or POTUS at the time those texts were sent he would have been guilty.
But in 2017 he was just an ex-VP and failed presidential candidate
Except Hunter sent the text, not Joe. This is basic logic. I don't believe for a moment Biden knew about it, given he has been in public office for decades and there's no evidence of dodgy dealing. The Republican congressman investigating all this held a big press conference and it was all a damp squib.
This is all Trump sympathetics desperately trying to detract from the fact their man is currently being prosecuted over three separate crimes. And that is before we get the dodgy stuff the rest of family members got up to. Two BILLION from the Saudis! Jared is as corrupt as his father.
Jared, of course, had a post in the administration. Hunter is just an embarrassing child.
I am not sure that you quite grasp the seriousness of the allegations. Being in the pay of a foreign power (if it is shown that Biden was) is a far, far graver offence than anything Trump has been accused of doing.
I'm still trying to understand what crime that Joe Biden committed.
Perhaps you could explain it to me.
Criminal charges tend to follow investigations, not precede them. It would be nice to think we all support a full investigation about what money changed hands, where it came from, where it ended up, and what influence it may have paid for.
Part of the cost of housing is caused by discretionary competition for high-value housing. That's not true for fuel or even food, where the market can respond much more quickly to changes in tastes, rather than relying on capital investments that potentially last for centuries.
Yes, this is why ensuring there is enough supply of high-value housing is so important for overall affordability. Otherwise the people who can afford to outbid each other will drive up the prices of the next tier of property and it ripples out to push up the cost of housing more generally.
But it is challenging. Considering London, which has become much more desirable overall in the last 40 years, entire boroughs that once attracted middle-class residential interest are now unfavoured by that cohort. When tastes and attitudes change faster than the housing stock, how can they be satisfied except with massive trailer parks that move every ten years?!
The Tories won’t do themselves any favours overruling independent pay bodies on public sector pay.
We are just likely to see more and more strikes and disruption and not just from the likes of the RMT who are politically motivated.
They're in a complete bind. They'll trot out the wage-price spiral excuse to justify bearing down on public sector pay, but the plain fact is that they're struggling to find politically acceptable cuts to fund extra spending in this area, borrowing is enormous and becoming ever more expensive, and so they're left with either digging their heels in and offering workers peanuts, or raising taxes on their core supporters to pay for more generous rises. There's no violin small enough.
The reality we are reaching the end game for the Blairite/Thatcher-lite model
It used to be chunky public spending and low taxes with the difference funded by clever balance sheet tricks (PFI/securitisation) or straight up borrowing. Wages were kept down by relaxed views on immigration
Cost of borrowing is going up and the markets are twitchy after all that QE
Asset price bubbles have driven a reasonable standard of living beyond the reach of many
Effectively unlimited immigration has resulted in underinvestment in business (low wages partly due to immigration and partly due to tax credits) drove down returns (cost saving) on investment and increased the strain on public services (governments didn’t invest in capacity).
The electorate has been trained to believe the government will always bail them out
We need a grown up conversation. Either taxes have to go up massively or public services need to be completely rethought.
But neither politicians or the electorate are ready to have that conversation.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Indeed. Fundamentally, the cost of accommodation is a total rip-off - and it's even worse for renters than mortgage payers. Myself, if I was a renter - even living as I do in a modest one-bed flat - rather than owning outright then I'd be paying about as much for housing as all my other basic bills put together, including a healthy food budget as well as energy, TV/broadband and water.
This is why there's been such a mass pile-in into the BTL landlord business by small investors. It was money for old rope for anybody who could get hold of a BTL mortgage on an interest-only basis, and it's still money for old rope for any landlord who owns the rental outright or has a decent equity share. Just set up a little flat, install a renter and improve your own standard of living immensely by extracting a large chunk of their earned income for yourself. It's actually quite surprising that more people haven't done it when you think about it.
The fact that BTL became a significant thing (put down a deposit, pay a mortgage on the rest, get a tenant and watch the profits roll in) ought to have been a massive red light that something was wrong. That was... early Blair era? A something for nothing that has been balanced out by nothing for something ever since.
And whilst sorting housing might not be sufficient to solve Britain's problems, I suspect it's necessary. Otherwise, what is to stop any gains from a growing economy just flowing to landlords through higher rents?
Brown I believe changed the rules so properties could be part of a pension fund
For those betting on Biden's nomination and / or the 2024 race, take a look at what has happened over the past 96 hours in the US.
The questions around whether Joe Biden took illicit payments are starting to multiply (text of the WhatsApp message is at the end of this e-mail). Maybe more importantly, the story seems to be breaking out of the right-wing press into other news sources. CBS has been interviewing the IRS Whistleblower who claims the case was obstructed and asking for answers. The New York Times - of all places - asked the WH Press Secretary about the allegations at the Friday press conference (“It’s a reasonable question to ask. The president of the United States is involved, as this message seems to suggest, in some sort of a coercive conversation for business dealings by his son. Is that something that, if he wasn’t, then maybe you should tell us?").
It does not look as though this story is going away and, if anything, it seems to be gaining strength, and the Administration's blocking answers do not seem to be doing the job. Given there is still well over a year to the election, there is a case for arguing the Democrats decide JB is becoming too damaged when it comes to 2024.
If that is the case, there are two options. Persuade him to step down soon and let Harris have 12 months as President in the hope she can establish some gravitas and win 2024. That is a tall bet.
The other is to look at some of the other, mainly Governors establishing their credentials. Newsom, Whitmer and Pritzker spring to mind. Of the three, I would be putting money on Whitmer for the 2024 nomination - she is female (ties into Roe v Wade), comes from a swing state and does not come from an ultra-liberal state which the other two do and which is likely to put off swing voters.
As for the 2017 Hunter Biden text to Henry Zhao of Harvest Fund Management, here it is:
""I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight,
And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction," he continued. "I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father."
It feels like Hunter Biden is absolutely trading on his father's name. There is zero evidence his father has done anything Lwrong. Also, this is the smallest of smallest fry. Kuchner got two billion dollars from the Saudis after being in the White House!
If Biden had been VP or POTUS at the time those texts were sent he would have been guilty.
But in 2017 he was just an ex-VP and failed presidential candidate
Except Hunter sent the text, not Joe. This is basic logic. I don't believe for a moment Biden knew about it, given he has been in public office for decades and there's no evidence of dodgy dealing. The Republican congressman investigating all this held a big press conference and it was all a damp squib.
This is all Trump sympathetics desperately trying to detract from the fact their man is currently being prosecuted over three separate crimes. And that is before we get the dodgy stuff the rest of family members got up to. Two BILLION from the Saudis! Jared is as corrupt as his father.
Jared, of course, had a post in the administration. Hunter is just an embarrassing child.
I am not sure that you quite grasp the seriousness of the allegations. Being in the pay of a foreign power (if it is shown that Biden was) is a far, far graver offence than anything Trump has been accused of doing.
Your son decides to be an iranian spy. Does that make you guilty of disloyalty to the russian state?
I'm sorry, you'll have to help me, my cretin is a little rusty.
Ok, imagine that you decide to become a spy for (say) the Italian government.
Do you (a) tell your dad that you have decided to turn traitor, and ask if there's any juicy info you could pass along to help fund your crack habit; or (b) keep schtum and see what you can pick up.
Answers on a postcard please.
Oh, was he talking about Hunter ? It gets quite confusing when both he and his dad are called “Biden” when random allegations are being thrown around.
Why he’s drawing a comparison between Trump’s problems and those of Hunter Biden, and suggesting that the latter might be of more consequence, is quite beyond me.
Part of the cost of housing is caused by discretionary competition for high-value housing. That's not true for fuel or even food, where the market can respond much more quickly to changes in tastes, rather than relying on capital investments that potentially last for centuries.
Yes, this is why ensuring there is enough supply of high-value housing is so important for overall affordability. Otherwise the people who can afford to outbid each other will drive up the prices of the next tier of property and it ripples out to push up the cost of housing more generally.
But it is challenging. Considering London, which has become much more desirable overall in the last 40 years, entire boroughs that once attracted middle-class residential interest are now unfavoured by that cohort. When tastes and attitudes change faster than the housing stock, how can they be satisfied except with massive trailer parks that move every ten years?!
A problem which is being addressed by ensuring most new housing stock won't last 40 years.
The Tories won’t do themselves any favours overruling independent pay bodies on public sector pay.
We are just likely to see more and more strikes and disruption and not just from the likes of the RMT who are politically motivated.
They're in a complete bind. They'll trot out the wage-price spiral excuse to justify bearing down on public sector pay, but the plain fact is that they're struggling to find politically acceptable cuts to fund extra spending in this area, borrowing is enormous and becoming ever more expensive, and so they're left with either digging their heels in and offering workers peanuts, or raising taxes on their core supporters to pay for more generous rises. There's no violin small enough.
The reality we are reaching the end game for the Blairite/Thatcher-lite model
It used to be chunky public spending and low taxes with the difference funded by clever balance sheet tricks (PFI/securitisation) or straight up borrowing. Wages were kept down by relaxed views on immigration
Cost of borrowing is going up and the markets are twitchy after all that QE
Asset price bubbles have driven a reasonable standard of living beyond the reach of many
Effectively unlimited immigration has resulted in underinvestment in business (low wages partly due to immigration and partly due to tax credits) drove down returns (cost saving) on investment and increased the strain on public services (governments didn’t invest in capacity).
The electorate has been trained to believe the government will always bail them out
We need a grown up conversation. Either taxes have to go up massively or public services need to be completely rethought.
But neither politicians or the electorate are ready to have that conversation.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Indeed. Fundamentally, the cost of accommodation is a total rip-off - and it's even worse for renters than mortgage payers. Myself, if I was a renter - even living as I do in a modest one-bed flat - rather than owning outright then I'd be paying about as much for housing as all my other basic bills put together, including a healthy food budget as well as energy, TV/broadband and water.
This is why there's been such a mass pile-in into the BTL landlord business by small investors. It was money for old rope for anybody who could get hold of a BTL mortgage on an interest-only basis, and it's still money for old rope for any landlord who owns the rental outright or has a decent equity share. Just set up a little flat, install a renter and improve your own standard of living immensely by extracting a large chunk of their earned income for yourself. It's actually quite surprising that more people haven't done it when you think about it.
The easy money has largely gone now though. If you own outright you're better to sell and invest the cash. Similar yield, less hassle, avoid the coming minicrash in property values.
For those betting on Biden's nomination and / or the 2024 race, take a look at what has happened over the past 96 hours in the US.
The questions around whether Joe Biden took illicit payments are starting to multiply (text of the WhatsApp message is at the end of this e-mail). Maybe more importantly, the story seems to be breaking out of the right-wing press into other news sources. CBS has been interviewing the IRS Whistleblower who claims the case was obstructed and asking for answers. The New York Times - of all places - asked the WH Press Secretary about the allegations at the Friday press conference (“It’s a reasonable question to ask. The president of the United States is involved, as this message seems to suggest, in some sort of a coercive conversation for business dealings by his son. Is that something that, if he wasn’t, then maybe you should tell us?").
It does not look as though this story is going away and, if anything, it seems to be gaining strength, and the Administration's blocking answers do not seem to be doing the job. Given there is still well over a year to the election, there is a case for arguing the Democrats decide JB is becoming too damaged when it comes to 2024.
If that is the case, there are two options. Persuade him to step down soon and let Harris have 12 months as President in the hope she can establish some gravitas and win 2024. That is a tall bet.
The other is to look at some of the other, mainly Governors establishing their credentials. Newsom, Whitmer and Pritzker spring to mind. Of the three, I would be putting money on Whitmer for the 2024 nomination - she is female (ties into Roe v Wade), comes from a swing state and does not come from an ultra-liberal state which the other two do and which is likely to put off swing voters.
As for the 2017 Hunter Biden text to Henry Zhao of Harvest Fund Management, here it is:
""I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight,
And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction," he continued. "I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father."
It feels like Hunter Biden is absolutely trading on his father's name. There is zero evidence his father has done anything Lwrong. Also, this is the smallest of smallest fry. Kuchner got two billion dollars from the Saudis after being in the White House!
If Biden had been VP or POTUS at the time those texts were sent he would have been guilty.
But in 2017 he was just an ex-VP and failed presidential candidate
Except Hunter sent the text, not Joe. This is basic logic. I don't believe for a moment Biden knew about it, given he has been in public office for decades and there's no evidence of dodgy dealing. The Republican congressman investigating all this held a big press conference and it was all a damp squib.
This is all Trump sympathetics desperately trying to detract from the fact their man is currently being prosecuted over three separate crimes. And that is before we get the dodgy stuff the rest of family members got up to. Two BILLION from the Saudis! Jared is as corrupt as his father.
Jared, of course, had a post in the administration. Hunter is just an embarrassing child.
I am not sure that you quite grasp the seriousness of the allegations. Being in the pay of a foreign power (if it is shown that Biden was) is a far, far graver offence than anything Trump has been accused of doing.
I'm still trying to understand what crime that Joe Biden committed.
Perhaps you could explain it to me.
Criminal charges tend to follow investigations, not precede them. It would be nice to think we all support a full investigation about what money changed hands, where it came from, where it ended up, and what influence it may have paid for.
The Tories won’t do themselves any favours overruling independent pay bodies on public sector pay.
We are just likely to see more and more strikes and disruption and not just from the likes of the RMT who are politically motivated.
They're in a complete bind. They'll trot out the wage-price spiral excuse to justify bearing down on public sector pay, but the plain fact is that they're struggling to find politically acceptable cuts to fund extra spending in this area, borrowing is enormous and becoming ever more expensive, and so they're left with either digging their heels in and offering workers peanuts, or raising taxes on their core supporters to pay for more generous rises. There's no violin small enough.
The reality we are reaching the end game for the Blairite/Thatcher-lite model
It used to be chunky public spending and low taxes with the difference funded by clever balance sheet tricks (PFI/securitisation) or straight up borrowing. Wages were kept down by relaxed views on immigration
Cost of borrowing is going up and the markets are twitchy after all that QE
Asset price bubbles have driven a reasonable standard of living beyond the reach of many
Effectively unlimited immigration has resulted in underinvestment in business (low wages partly due to immigration and partly due to tax credits) drove down returns (cost saving) on investment and increased the strain on public services (governments didn’t invest in capacity).
The electorate has been trained to believe the government will always bail them out
We need a grown up conversation. Either taxes have to go up massively or public services need to be completely rethought.
But neither politicians or the electorate are ready to have that conversation.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Hence Labour’s housing policy.
I think they might even be serious about it - one of the shadow cabinet referred to it as the “biggest transfer of power from central to local government in more than a generation” in a radio interview today.
That's the worst thing that can happen!
Is it ?
Or is it simply an attempt to reverse the worst aspects of Thatcher’s housing policy from three and a half decades ago ? That is a very large factor in landing us with the problems we now have.
For those betting on Biden's nomination and / or the 2024 race, take a look at what has happened over the past 96 hours in the US.
The questions around whether Joe Biden took illicit payments are starting to multiply (text of the WhatsApp message is at the end of this e-mail). Maybe more importantly, the story seems to be breaking out of the right-wing press into other news sources. CBS has been interviewing the IRS Whistleblower who claims the case was obstructed and asking for answers. The New York Times - of all places - asked the WH Press Secretary about the allegations at the Friday press conference (“It’s a reasonable question to ask. The president of the United States is involved, as this message seems to suggest, in some sort of a coercive conversation for business dealings by his son. Is that something that, if he wasn’t, then maybe you should tell us?").
It does not look as though this story is going away and, if anything, it seems to be gaining strength, and the Administration's blocking answers do not seem to be doing the job. Given there is still well over a year to the election, there is a case for arguing the Democrats decide JB is becoming too damaged when it comes to 2024.
If that is the case, there are two options. Persuade him to step down soon and let Harris have 12 months as President in the hope she can establish some gravitas and win 2024. That is a tall bet.
The other is to look at some of the other, mainly Governors establishing their credentials. Newsom, Whitmer and Pritzker spring to mind. Of the three, I would be putting money on Whitmer for the 2024 nomination - she is female (ties into Roe v Wade), comes from a swing state and does not come from an ultra-liberal state which the other two do and which is likely to put off swing voters.
As for the 2017 Hunter Biden text to Henry Zhao of Harvest Fund Management, here it is:
""I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight,
And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction," he continued. "I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father."
It feels like Hunter Biden is absolutely trading on his father's name. There is zero evidence his father has done anything Lwrong. Also, this is the smallest of smallest fry. Kuchner got two billion dollars from the Saudis after being in the White House!
If Biden had been VP or POTUS at the time those texts were sent he would have been guilty.
But in 2017 he was just an ex-VP and failed presidential candidate
Except Hunter sent the text, not Joe. This is basic logic. I don't believe for a moment Biden knew about it, given he has been in public office for decades and there's no evidence of dodgy dealing. The Republican congressman investigating all this held a big press conference and it was all a damp squib.
This is all Trump sympathetics desperately trying to detract from the fact their man is currently being prosecuted over three separate crimes. And that is before we get the dodgy stuff the rest of family members got up to. Two BILLION from the Saudis! Jared is as corrupt as his father.
Jared, of course, had a post in the administration. Hunter is just an embarrassing child.
I am not sure that you quite grasp the seriousness of the allegations. Being in the pay of a foreign power (if it is shown that Biden was) is a far, far graver offence than anything Trump has been accused of doing.
Your son decides to be an iranian spy. Does that make you guilty of disloyalty to the russian state?
I'm sorry, you'll have to help me, my cretin is a little rusty.
Ok, imagine that you decide to become a spy for (say) the Italian government.
Do you (a) tell your dad that you have decided to turn traitor, and ask if there's any juicy info you could pass along to help fund your crack habit; or (b) keep schtum and see what you can pick up.
Answers on a postcard please.
I think if my business with said foreign power was based around them buying influence with my Dad, I'd at least have to make a credible impression on them that I was working side by side with him, and in the medium term, I'd have to show cause and effect - decisions going their way etc.
It may be that Biden Jnr managed to pull the wool over Biden Snr's eyes in this regard, keeping him totally out of the picture, or it may not be - that's for an investigation to ascertain.
But unrelated I happen to think that laying all the top 3 in the WH race at current prices (Biden, Trump, DeSantis) is quite a good play. Esp Trump obvs.
Funny how this guy never shares news about what Trump's kids have been up to and how it might affect his odds.
Yes, GOP propaganda disguised as a betting tip. Mr Ed would be purring.
The Tories won’t do themselves any favours overruling independent pay bodies on public sector pay.
We are just likely to see more and more strikes and disruption and not just from the likes of the RMT who are politically motivated.
They're in a complete bind. They'll trot out the wage-price spiral excuse to justify bearing down on public sector pay, but the plain fact is that they're struggling to find politically acceptable cuts to fund extra spending in this area, borrowing is enormous and becoming ever more expensive, and so they're left with either digging their heels in and offering workers peanuts, or raising taxes on their core supporters to pay for more generous rises. There's no violin small enough.
The reality we are reaching the end game for the Blairite/Thatcher-lite model
It used to be chunky public spending and low taxes with the difference funded by clever balance sheet tricks (PFI/securitisation) or straight up borrowing. Wages were kept down by relaxed views on immigration
Cost of borrowing is going up and the markets are twitchy after all that QE
Asset price bubbles have driven a reasonable standard of living beyond the reach of many
Effectively unlimited immigration has resulted in underinvestment in business (low wages partly due to immigration and partly due to tax credits) drove down returns (cost saving) on investment and increased the strain on public services (governments didn’t invest in capacity).
The electorate has been trained to believe the government will always bail them out
We need a grown up conversation. Either taxes have to go up massively or public services need to be completely rethought.
But neither politicians or the electorate are ready to have that conversation.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Hence Labour’s housing policy.
I think they might even be serious about it - one of the shadow cabinet referred to it as the “biggest transfer of power from central to local government in more than a generation” in a radio interview today.
That's the worst thing that can happen!
Is it ?
Or is it simply an attempt to reverse the worst aspects of Thatcher’s housing policy from three and a half decades ago ? That is a very large factor in landing us with the problems we now have.
Thatchers choice to sell off council housing was less than ideal however there was a choice made before that to make council housing based on need. This I think was a bigger mistake because people put their name down and found themselves falling down the list because people kept coming in above them. It made them cynical about council housing so they supported it as there was no chance of them getting a council house
The Tories won’t do themselves any favours overruling independent pay bodies on public sector pay.
We are just likely to see more and more strikes and disruption and not just from the likes of the RMT who are politically motivated.
They're in a complete bind. They'll trot out the wage-price spiral excuse to justify bearing down on public sector pay, but the plain fact is that they're struggling to find politically acceptable cuts to fund extra spending in this area, borrowing is enormous and becoming ever more expensive, and so they're left with either digging their heels in and offering workers peanuts, or raising taxes on their core supporters to pay for more generous rises. There's no violin small enough.
The reality we are reaching the end game for the Blairite/Thatcher-lite model
It used to be chunky public spending and low taxes with the difference funded by clever balance sheet tricks (PFI/securitisation) or straight up borrowing. Wages were kept down by relaxed views on immigration
Cost of borrowing is going up and the markets are twitchy after all that QE
Asset price bubbles have driven a reasonable standard of living beyond the reach of many
Effectively unlimited immigration has resulted in underinvestment in business (low wages partly due to immigration and partly due to tax credits) drove down returns (cost saving) on investment and increased the strain on public services (governments didn’t invest in capacity).
The electorate has been trained to believe the government will always bail them out
We need a grown up conversation. Either taxes have to go up massively or public services need to be completely rethought.
But neither politicians or the electorate are ready to have that conversation.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Indeed. Fundamentally, the cost of accommodation is a total rip-off - and it's even worse for renters than mortgage payers. Myself, if I was a renter - even living as I do in a modest one-bed flat - rather than owning outright then I'd be paying about as much for housing as all my other basic bills put together, including a healthy food budget as well as energy, TV/broadband and water.
This is why there's been such a mass pile-in into the BTL landlord business by small investors. It was money for old rope for anybody who could get hold of a BTL mortgage on an interest-only basis, and it's still money for old rope for any landlord who owns the rental outright or has a decent equity share. Just set up a little flat, install a renter and improve your own standard of living immensely by extracting a large chunk of their earned income for yourself. It's actually quite surprising that more people haven't done it when you think about it.
Tax rates on rents are high, compared to the untaxed status of enjoying the occupancy of a house you own yourself. Otherwise the world would indeed look like you suggest, and other countries like Switzerland look a lot more like the mass rental scenario.
Tax rates on rents are absurdly low, lower than tax rates on earned income. No NI on income from rents.
Tax rates on servicing a mortgage are even lower; some blend of the bank's corporation tax rate and the zero rate on housing equity. And as the equity grows, the tax take falls. So the government will get more out of the renter, almost always.
For those betting on Biden's nomination and / or the 2024 race, take a look at what has happened over the past 96 hours in the US.
The questions around whether Joe Biden took illicit payments are starting to multiply (text of the WhatsApp message is at the end of this e-mail). Maybe more importantly, the story seems to be breaking out of the right-wing press into other news sources. CBS has been interviewing the IRS Whistleblower who claims the case was obstructed and asking for answers. The New York Times - of all places - asked the WH Press Secretary about the allegations at the Friday press conference (“It’s a reasonable question to ask. The president of the United States is involved, as this message seems to suggest, in some sort of a coercive conversation for business dealings by his son. Is that something that, if he wasn’t, then maybe you should tell us?").
It does not look as though this story is going away and, if anything, it seems to be gaining strength, and the Administration's blocking answers do not seem to be doing the job. Given there is still well over a year to the election, there is a case for arguing the Democrats decide JB is becoming too damaged when it comes to 2024.
If that is the case, there are two options. Persuade him to step down soon and let Harris have 12 months as President in the hope she can establish some gravitas and win 2024. That is a tall bet.
The other is to look at some of the other, mainly Governors establishing their credentials. Newsom, Whitmer and Pritzker spring to mind. Of the three, I would be putting money on Whitmer for the 2024 nomination - she is female (ties into Roe v Wade), comes from a swing state and does not come from an ultra-liberal state which the other two do and which is likely to put off swing voters.
As for the 2017 Hunter Biden text to Henry Zhao of Harvest Fund Management, here it is:
""I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight,
And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction," he continued. "I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father."
It feels like Hunter Biden is absolutely trading on his father's name. There is zero evidence his father has done anything Lwrong. Also, this is the smallest of smallest fry. Kuchner got two billion dollars from the Saudis after being in the White House!
If Biden had been VP or POTUS at the time those texts were sent he would have been guilty.
But in 2017 he was just an ex-VP and failed presidential candidate
Except Hunter sent the text, not Joe. This is basic logic. I don't believe for a moment Biden knew about it, given he has been in public office for decades and there's no evidence of dodgy dealing. The Republican congressman investigating all this held a big press conference and it was all a damp squib.
This is all Trump sympathetics desperately trying to detract from the fact their man is currently being prosecuted over three separate crimes. And that is before we get the dodgy stuff the rest of family members got up to. Two BILLION from the Saudis! Jared is as corrupt as his father.
Jared, of course, had a post in the administration. Hunter is just an embarrassing child.
I am not sure that you quite grasp the seriousness of the allegations. Being in the pay of a foreign power (if it is shown that Biden was) is a far, far graver offence than anything Trump has been accused of doing.
I'm still trying to understand what crime that Joe Biden committed.
Perhaps you could explain it to me.
The message seems to be that if evidence one day emerges to show that Joe Biden has committed a serious crime that would be terrible and he should face the consequences.
For those betting on Biden's nomination and / or the 2024 race, take a look at what has happened over the past 96 hours in the US.
The questions around whether Joe Biden took illicit payments are starting to multiply (text of the WhatsApp message is at the end of this e-mail). Maybe more importantly, the story seems to be breaking out of the right-wing press into other news sources. CBS has been interviewing the IRS Whistleblower who claims the case was obstructed and asking for answers. The New York Times - of all places - asked the WH Press Secretary about the allegations at the Friday press conference (“It’s a reasonable question to ask. The president of the United States is involved, as this message seems to suggest, in some sort of a coercive conversation for business dealings by his son. Is that something that, if he wasn’t, then maybe you should tell us?").
It does not look as though this story is going away and, if anything, it seems to be gaining strength, and the Administration's blocking answers do not seem to be doing the job. Given there is still well over a year to the election, there is a case for arguing the Democrats decide JB is becoming too damaged when it comes to 2024.
If that is the case, there are two options. Persuade him to step down soon and let Harris have 12 months as President in the hope she can establish some gravitas and win 2024. That is a tall bet.
The other is to look at some of the other, mainly Governors establishing their credentials. Newsom, Whitmer and Pritzker spring to mind. Of the three, I would be putting money on Whitmer for the 2024 nomination - she is female (ties into Roe v Wade), comes from a swing state and does not come from an ultra-liberal state which the other two do and which is likely to put off swing voters.
As for the 2017 Hunter Biden text to Henry Zhao of Harvest Fund Management, here it is:
""I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight,
And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction," he continued. "I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father."
It feels like Hunter Biden is absolutely trading on his father's name. There is zero evidence his father has done anything Lwrong. Also, this is the smallest of smallest fry. Kuchner got two billion dollars from the Saudis after being in the White House!
If Biden had been VP or POTUS at the time those texts were sent he would have been guilty.
But in 2017 he was just an ex-VP and failed presidential candidate
Except Hunter sent the text, not Joe. This is basic logic. I don't believe for a moment Biden knew about it, given he has been in public office for decades and there's no evidence of dodgy dealing. The Republican congressman investigating all this held a big press conference and it was all a damp squib.
This is all Trump sympathetics desperately trying to detract from the fact their man is currently being prosecuted over three separate crimes. And that is before we get the dodgy stuff the rest of family members got up to. Two BILLION from the Saudis! Jared is as corrupt as his father.
Jared, of course, had a post in the administration. Hunter is just an embarrassing child.
I am not sure that you quite grasp the seriousness of the allegations. Being in the pay of a foreign power (if it is shown that Biden was) is a far, far graver offence than anything Trump has been accused of doing.
Your son decides to be an iranian spy. Does that make you guilty of disloyalty to the russian state?
I'm sorry, you'll have to help me, my cretin is a little rusty.
Ok, imagine that you decide to become a spy for (say) the Italian government.
Do you (a) tell your dad that you have decided to turn traitor, and ask if there's any juicy info you could pass along to help fund your crack habit; or (b) keep schtum and see what you can pick up.
Answers on a postcard please.
I think if my business with said foreign power was based around them buying influence with my Dad, I'd at least have to make a credible impression on them that I was working side by side with him, and in the medium term, I'd have to show cause and effect - decisions going their way etc.
It may be that Biden Jnr managed to pull the wool over Biden Snr's eyes in this regard, keeping him totally out of the picture, or it may not be - that's for an investigation to ascertain.
For those betting on Biden's nomination and / or the 2024 race, take a look at what has happened over the past 96 hours in the US.
The questions around whether Joe Biden took illicit payments are starting to multiply (text of the WhatsApp message is at the end of this e-mail). Maybe more importantly, the story seems to be breaking out of the right-wing press into other news sources. CBS has been interviewing the IRS Whistleblower who claims the case was obstructed and asking for answers. The New York Times - of all places - asked the WH Press Secretary about the allegations at the Friday press conference (“It’s a reasonable question to ask. The president of the United States is involved, as this message seems to suggest, in some sort of a coercive conversation for business dealings by his son. Is that something that, if he wasn’t, then maybe you should tell us?").
It does not look as though this story is going away and, if anything, it seems to be gaining strength, and the Administration's blocking answers do not seem to be doing the job. Given there is still well over a year to the election, there is a case for arguing the Democrats decide JB is becoming too damaged when it comes to 2024.
If that is the case, there are two options. Persuade him to step down soon and let Harris have 12 months as President in the hope she can establish some gravitas and win 2024. That is a tall bet.
The other is to look at some of the other, mainly Governors establishing their credentials. Newsom, Whitmer and Pritzker spring to mind. Of the three, I would be putting money on Whitmer for the 2024 nomination - she is female (ties into Roe v Wade), comes from a swing state and does not come from an ultra-liberal state which the other two do and which is likely to put off swing voters.
As for the 2017 Hunter Biden text to Henry Zhao of Harvest Fund Management, here it is:
""I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight,
And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction," he continued. "I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father."
It feels like Hunter Biden is absolutely trading on his father's name. There is zero evidence his father has done anything Lwrong. Also, this is the smallest of smallest fry. Kuchner got two billion dollars from the Saudis after being in the White House!
If Biden had been VP or POTUS at the time those texts were sent he would have been guilty.
But in 2017 he was just an ex-VP and failed presidential candidate
Except Hunter sent the text, not Joe. This is basic logic. I don't believe for a moment Biden knew about it, given he has been in public office for decades and there's no evidence of dodgy dealing. The Republican congressman investigating all this held a big press conference and it was all a damp squib.
This is all Trump sympathetics desperately trying to detract from the fact their man is currently being prosecuted over three separate crimes. And that is before we get the dodgy stuff the rest of family members got up to. Two BILLION from the Saudis! Jared is as corrupt as his father.
Jared, of course, had a post in the administration. Hunter is just an embarrassing child.
I am not sure that you quite grasp the seriousness of the allegations. Being in the pay of a foreign power (if it is shown that Biden was) is a far, far graver offence than anything Trump has been accused of doing.
I'm still trying to understand what crime that Joe Biden committed.
Perhaps you could explain it to me.
The message seems to be that if evidence one day emerges to show that Joe Biden has committed a serious crime that would be terrible and he should face the consequences.
Which I can't argue with really.
Joe is actually generally a nice guy, so I dont believe he would have been complicit with hunters actions as he would have said what the fuck are you doing son thats not right
The Tories won’t do themselves any favours overruling independent pay bodies on public sector pay.
We are just likely to see more and more strikes and disruption and not just from the likes of the RMT who are politically motivated.
They're in a complete bind. They'll trot out the wage-price spiral excuse to justify bearing down on public sector pay, but the plain fact is that they're struggling to find politically acceptable cuts to fund extra spending in this area, borrowing is enormous and becoming ever more expensive, and so they're left with either digging their heels in and offering workers peanuts, or raising taxes on their core supporters to pay for more generous rises. There's no violin small enough.
The reality we are reaching the end game for the Blairite/Thatcher-lite model
It used to be chunky public spending and low taxes with the difference funded by clever balance sheet tricks (PFI/securitisation) or straight up borrowing. Wages were kept down by relaxed views on immigration
Cost of borrowing is going up and the markets are twitchy after all that QE
Asset price bubbles have driven a reasonable standard of living beyond the reach of many
Effectively unlimited immigration has resulted in underinvestment in business (low wages partly due to immigration and partly due to tax credits) drove down returns (cost saving) on investment and increased the strain on public services (governments didn’t invest in capacity).
The electorate has been trained to believe the government will always bail them out
We need a grown up conversation. Either taxes have to go up massively or public services need to be completely rethought.
But neither politicians or the electorate are ready to have that conversation.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Hence Labour’s housing policy.
I think they might even be serious about it - one of the shadow cabinet referred to it as the “biggest transfer of power from central to local government in more than a generation” in a radio interview today.
That's the worst thing that can happen!
Is it ?
Or is it simply an attempt to reverse the worst aspects of Thatcher’s housing policy from three and a half decades ago ? That is a very large factor in landing us with the problems we now have.
Thatchers choice to sell off council housing was less than ideal however there was a choice made before that to make council housing based on need. This I think was a bigger mistake because people put their name down and found themselves falling down the list because people kept coming in above them. It made them cynical about council housing so they supported it as there was no chance of them getting a council house
Oh, I don’t have a problem with the policy of selling council houses - that was a net positive. What did the real damage was central government appropriating the great bulk of the proceeds, over the course of a couple of decades, and preventing local authorities from building more.
Arguably the single biggest contributor to our current mess.
For those betting on Biden's nomination and / or the 2024 race, take a look at what has happened over the past 96 hours in the US.
The questions around whether Joe Biden took illicit payments are starting to multiply (text of the WhatsApp message is at the end of this e-mail). Maybe more importantly, the story seems to be breaking out of the right-wing press into other news sources. CBS has been interviewing the IRS Whistleblower who claims the case was obstructed and asking for answers. The New York Times - of all places - asked the WH Press Secretary about the allegations at the Friday press conference (“It’s a reasonable question to ask. The president of the United States is involved, as this message seems to suggest, in some sort of a coercive conversation for business dealings by his son. Is that something that, if he wasn’t, then maybe you should tell us?").
It does not look as though this story is going away and, if anything, it seems to be gaining strength, and the Administration's blocking answers do not seem to be doing the job. Given there is still well over a year to the election, there is a case for arguing the Democrats decide JB is becoming too damaged when it comes to 2024.
If that is the case, there are two options. Persuade him to step down soon and let Harris have 12 months as President in the hope she can establish some gravitas and win 2024. That is a tall bet.
The other is to look at some of the other, mainly Governors establishing their credentials. Newsom, Whitmer and Pritzker spring to mind. Of the three, I would be putting money on Whitmer for the 2024 nomination - she is female (ties into Roe v Wade), comes from a swing state and does not come from an ultra-liberal state which the other two do and which is likely to put off swing voters.
As for the 2017 Hunter Biden text to Henry Zhao of Harvest Fund Management, here it is:
""I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight,
And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction," he continued. "I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father."
It feels like Hunter Biden is absolutely trading on his father's name. There is zero evidence his father has done anything Lwrong. Also, this is the smallest of smallest fry. Kuchner got two billion dollars from the Saudis after being in the White House!
If Biden had been VP or POTUS at the time those texts were sent he would have been guilty.
But in 2017 he was just an ex-VP and failed presidential candidate
Except Hunter sent the text, not Joe. This is basic logic. I don't believe for a moment Biden knew about it, given he has been in public office for decades and there's no evidence of dodgy dealing. The Republican congressman investigating all this held a big press conference and it was all a damp squib.
This is all Trump sympathetics desperately trying to detract from the fact their man is currently being prosecuted over three separate crimes. And that is before we get the dodgy stuff the rest of family members got up to. Two BILLION from the Saudis! Jared is as corrupt as his father.
Jared, of course, had a post in the administration. Hunter is just an embarrassing child.
I am not sure that you quite grasp the seriousness of the allegations. Being in the pay of a foreign power (if it is shown that Biden was) is a far, far graver offence than anything Trump has been accused of doing.
Your son decides to be an iranian spy. Does that make you guilty of disloyalty to the russian state?
I'm sorry, you'll have to help me, my cretin is a little rusty.
Ok, imagine that you decide to become a spy for (say) the Italian government.
Do you (a) tell your dad that you have decided to turn traitor, and ask if there's any juicy info you could pass along to help fund your crack habit; or (b) keep schtum and see what you can pick up.
Answers on a postcard please.
I think if my business with said foreign power was based around them buying influence with my Dad, I'd at least have to make a credible impression on them that I was working side by side with him, and in the medium term, I'd have to show cause and effect - decisions going their way etc.
It may be that Biden Jnr managed to pull the wool over Biden Snr's eyes in this regard, keeping him totally out of the picture, or it may not be - that's for an investigation to ascertain.
You do realise this is 2017 we're talking about. Mr Biden had no office to influence anything. So that doesn't say much for the putative foreign "intelligence" agent.
But unrelated I happen to think that laying all the top 3 in the WH race at current prices (Biden, Trump, DeSantis) is quite a good play. Esp Trump obvs.
Funny how this guy never shares news about what Trump's kids have been up to and how it might affect his odds.
Yes, GOP propaganda disguised as a betting tip. Mr Ed would be purring.
Ah well, at least Mr Ed wouldn't be downplaying how many people the Russians have killed, like yourself did.
Anyway, you are missing the point. If all you say is correct, then the NYT and CBS should not be giving this the light of day. If they are raising questions, and putting it in such a way, then Biden has got some problems.
Re @Tres, plenty of people to talk about how Trump hasn't got a chance on here. It's the national sport.
The Tories won’t do themselves any favours overruling independent pay bodies on public sector pay.
We are just likely to see more and more strikes and disruption and not just from the likes of the RMT who are politically motivated.
They're in a complete bind. They'll trot out the wage-price spiral excuse to justify bearing down on public sector pay, but the plain fact is that they're struggling to find politically acceptable cuts to fund extra spending in this area, borrowing is enormous and becoming ever more expensive, and so they're left with either digging their heels in and offering workers peanuts, or raising taxes on their core supporters to pay for more generous rises. There's no violin small enough.
The reality we are reaching the end game for the Blairite/Thatcher-lite model
It used to be chunky public spending and low taxes with the difference funded by clever balance sheet tricks (PFI/securitisation) or straight up borrowing. Wages were kept down by relaxed views on immigration
Cost of borrowing is going up and the markets are twitchy after all that QE
Asset price bubbles have driven a reasonable standard of living beyond the reach of many
Effectively unlimited immigration has resulted in underinvestment in business (low wages partly due to immigration and partly due to tax credits) drove down returns (cost saving) on investment and increased the strain on public services (governments didn’t invest in capacity).
The electorate has been trained to believe the government will always bail them out
We need a grown up conversation. Either taxes have to go up massively or public services need to be completely rethought.
But neither politicians or the electorate are ready to have that conversation.
I have been saying the same for ages. Instead everyone here wants the status quo and their particular bug bear fully funded. What the state does I agree should be full funded. That means however saying this is how much we have to spend. This is the cost of fully funding all these things. What do you want because we have to drop the rest.
Tbf I think most on here do support either higher taxes to maintain public services or lower taxes funded by spending cuts.
I am not even advocating tax cuts here, just saying we need to have a conversation as an electorate saying this is what fully funding things cost. If they want more things to be fully funded than our current tax base then say ok we will raise taxes.
The thing is the state does a myriad of things everyone is always saying all of these are underfunded and they argue they should be fully funded. A good argument and one I agree with. If we are going to do it properly let us fund it properly.
The simple fact though is that if we fully fund everything the state does then the amount of tax take would be likely equivalent to total gdp or 100% tax and I doubt even you want that
So my argument is merely right now. let us as a country decide what we want the state to do and fully fund it. If tax goes up to pay for it ok....not my favourite choice but democratic.
Instead the cons and sks lab party and the ld's whose leader I cant even remember want to go on pretending the state can do everything. The state however does it all badly because they all get underfunded
Ed Davey.
I was hoping for a reaction above informing me of the LD leader tbh. As I said I didnt ask for tax cuts I like to hope I put out a neutral argument and would be interested in your opinion
Make sure you memorize it now then. Ed Davey.
Your ideas on this? I like the thrust of them very much. More rigor and transparency around tax and spend.
The challenge is to fuse that with what's practical, and also leave room for political vision and flexibility.
Why bother remembering it the LD's are hardly a political force.
However you still really havent answered the question
so will put them more bluntly
Regardless of whether tax take goes up or down
1) Do you agree that what the state does should be fully funded 2) Do you agree that people should be told what fully funding these actions would be and there affect on tax 3) Given 1 and 2 are yes,do you therefore agree that the british people should get a decision on what it important for the state to do
I answer yes on all 3. What is your your answer
Ah so no, because borrowing is sometimes the right thing to do. But yes I do support the electorate having a real choice on priorities and being told the truth about them.
But unrelated I happen to think that laying all the top 3 in the WH race at current prices (Biden, Trump, DeSantis) is quite a good play. Esp Trump obvs.
Funny how this guy never shares news about what Trump's kids have been up to and how it might affect his odds.
Yes, GOP propaganda disguised as a betting tip. Mr Ed would be purring.
Ah well, at least Mr Ed wouldn't be downplaying how many people the Russians have killed, like yourself did.
Anyway, you are missing the point. If all you say is correct, then the NYT and CBS should not be giving this the light of day. If they are raising questions, and putting it in such a way, then Biden has got some problems.
Re @Tres, plenty of people to talk about how Trump hasn't got a chance on here. It's the national sport.
More people say he shouldn't have a chance than say he hasn't got a chance. After 2016 clearly it is possible.
Part of the cost of housing is caused by discretionary competition for high-value housing. That's not true for fuel or even food, where the market can respond much more quickly to changes in tastes, rather than relying on capital investments that potentially last for centuries.
Yes, this is why ensuring there is enough supply of high-value housing is so important for overall affordability. Otherwise the people who can afford to outbid each other will drive up the prices of the next tier of property and it ripples out to push up the cost of housing more generally.
Precisely and when you get more people bidding for properties the price goes up. I am still in contact with my old landlord in slough. He just rented out the studio appartment I used to rent which was an l shaped place with no windows just a light well 15 wide 20' long then the other part of the l was 15 by 10. He just got bit 1100 by one of the people wanting to rent it. I paid 750 in september last year
Hardly surprising: a logical consequence of decades of increasingly constricted supply followed by a sudden hike in interest rates causing a stampede exit by landlords. Of course you're going to end up with large numbers of desperate renters - who need a home, it's a necessity you can't do without - including many who will just have been thrown out by distressed landlords fire selling, competing to outbid one another. The surviving landlords in higher demand areas must be absolutely coining it.
Even up here, a good distance from London, what little property is available on the rental market starts at £550pcm for a room in an HMO, climbing to £950pcm for a two bed flat (and obviously much more for various grades of house.) For comparison, when I was last renting in 2014 I paid £650pcm for a two bed flat. Rents might have gone up by about a third in the intervening period but I'm pretty confident that earnings haven't.
The Tories won’t do themselves any favours overruling independent pay bodies on public sector pay.
We are just likely to see more and more strikes and disruption and not just from the likes of the RMT who are politically motivated.
They're in a complete bind. They'll trot out the wage-price spiral excuse to justify bearing down on public sector pay, but the plain fact is that they're struggling to find politically acceptable cuts to fund extra spending in this area, borrowing is enormous and becoming ever more expensive, and so they're left with either digging their heels in and offering workers peanuts, or raising taxes on their core supporters to pay for more generous rises. There's no violin small enough.
The reality we are reaching the end game for the Blairite/Thatcher-lite model
It used to be chunky public spending and low taxes with the difference funded by clever balance sheet tricks (PFI/securitisation) or straight up borrowing. Wages were kept down by relaxed views on immigration
Cost of borrowing is going up and the markets are twitchy after all that QE
Asset price bubbles have driven a reasonable standard of living beyond the reach of many
Effectively unlimited immigration has resulted in underinvestment in business (low wages partly due to immigration and partly due to tax credits) drove down returns (cost saving) on investment and increased the strain on public services (governments didn’t invest in capacity).
The electorate has been trained to believe the government will always bail them out
We need a grown up conversation. Either taxes have to go up massively or public services need to be completely rethought.
But neither politicians or the electorate are ready to have that conversation.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Hence Labour’s housing policy.
I think they might even be serious about it - one of the shadow cabinet referred to it as the “biggest transfer of power from central to local government in more than a generation” in a radio interview today.
That's the worst thing that can happen!
Is it ?
Or is it simply an attempt to reverse the worst aspects of Thatcher’s housing policy from three and a half decades ago ? That is a very large factor in landing us with the problems we now have.
Thatchers choice to sell off council housing was less than ideal however there was a choice made before that to make council housing based on need. This I think was a bigger mistake because people put their name down and found themselves falling down the list because people kept coming in above them. It made them cynical about council housing so they supported it as there was no chance of them getting a council house
Oh, I don’t have a problem with the policy of selling council houses - that was a net positive. What did the real damage was central government appropriating the great bulk of the proceeds, over the course of a couple of decades, and preventing local authorities from building more.
Arguably the single biggest contributor to our current mess.
Well yes on that I agee. They should have been able to use the money to build more. However before that there was a lot of disfaction about council housing being directed by need rather than time on the list.
This could however be somewhat ameliorated if those no longer in need got told they no longer needed council housing and asked to leave. Maybe if tenancies had been reviewed every 5 years and no inheritable rights for them
For those betting on Biden's nomination and / or the 2024 race, take a look at what has happened over the past 96 hours in the US.
The questions around whether Joe Biden took illicit payments are starting to multiply (text of the WhatsApp message is at the end of this e-mail). Maybe more importantly, the story seems to be breaking out of the right-wing press into other news sources. CBS has been interviewing the IRS Whistleblower who claims the case was obstructed and asking for answers. The New York Times - of all places - asked the WH Press Secretary about the allegations at the Friday press conference (“It’s a reasonable question to ask. The president of the United States is involved, as this message seems to suggest, in some sort of a coercive conversation for business dealings by his son. Is that something that, if he wasn’t, then maybe you should tell us?").
It does not look as though this story is going away and, if anything, it seems to be gaining strength, and the Administration's blocking answers do not seem to be doing the job. Given there is still well over a year to the election, there is a case for arguing the Democrats decide JB is becoming too damaged when it comes to 2024.
If that is the case, there are two options. Persuade him to step down soon and let Harris have 12 months as President in the hope she can establish some gravitas and win 2024. That is a tall bet.
The other is to look at some of the other, mainly Governors establishing their credentials. Newsom, Whitmer and Pritzker spring to mind. Of the three, I would be putting money on Whitmer for the 2024 nomination - she is female (ties into Roe v Wade), comes from a swing state and does not come from an ultra-liberal state which the other two do and which is likely to put off swing voters.
As for the 2017 Hunter Biden text to Henry Zhao of Harvest Fund Management, here it is:
""I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight,
And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction," he continued. "I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father."
It feels like Hunter Biden is absolutely trading on his father's name. There is zero evidence his father has done anything Lwrong. Also, this is the smallest of smallest fry. Kuchner got two billion dollars from the Saudis after being in the White House!
If Biden had been VP or POTUS at the time those texts were sent he would have been guilty.
But in 2017 he was just an ex-VP and failed presidential candidate
Except Hunter sent the text, not Joe. This is basic logic. I don't believe for a moment Biden knew about it, given he has been in public office for decades and there's no evidence of dodgy dealing. The Republican congressman investigating all this held a big press conference and it was all a damp squib.
This is all Trump sympathetics desperately trying to detract from the fact their man is currently being prosecuted over three separate crimes. And that is before we get the dodgy stuff the rest of family members got up to. Two BILLION from the Saudis! Jared is as corrupt as his father.
Jared, of course, had a post in the administration. Hunter is just an embarrassing child.
I am not sure that you quite grasp the seriousness of the allegations. Being in the pay of a foreign power (if it is shown that Biden was) is a far, far graver offence than anything Trump has been accused of doing.
Your son decides to be an iranian spy. Does that make you guilty of disloyalty to the russian state?
I'm sorry, you'll have to help me, my cretin is a little rusty.
Ok, imagine that you decide to become a spy for (say) the Italian government.
Do you (a) tell your dad that you have decided to turn traitor, and ask if there's any juicy info you could pass along to help fund your crack habit; or (b) keep schtum and see what you can pick up.
Answers on a postcard please.
I think if my business with said foreign power was based around them buying influence with my Dad, I'd at least have to make a credible impression on them that I was working side by side with him, and in the medium term, I'd have to show cause and effect - decisions going their way etc.
It may be that Biden Jnr managed to pull the wool over Biden Snr's eyes in this regard, keeping him totally out of the picture, or it may not be - that's for an investigation to ascertain.
There has already been a multi year investigation, by a Trump appointee, which President Biden has not attempted to interfere with.
But unrelated I happen to think that laying all the top 3 in the WH race at current prices (Biden, Trump, DeSantis) is quite a good play. Esp Trump obvs.
Funny how this guy never shares news about what Trump's kids have been up to and how it might affect his odds.
Yes, GOP propaganda disguised as a betting tip. Mr Ed would be purring.
Ah well, at least Mr Ed wouldn't be downplaying how many people the Russians have killed, like yourself did.
Anyway, you are missing the point. If all you say is correct, then the NYT and CBS should not be giving this the light of day. If they are raising questions, and putting it in such a way, then Biden has got some problems.
Re @Tres, plenty of people to talk about how Trump hasn't got a chance on here. It's the national sport.
Not logical.
The Guardian, for instance, talked about the Tory attempts to smear SKS, but that doesn't mean they were actually true, only that the smears were a current political thing.
Would like it to be true, though my fear would be that humiliation over Wagner versus humilation over Ukraine are of very different scales and so the same logic would not apply.
Still needs to be pursued though, as mollifying him has never worked, he just takes it as reason to do more later. Since the beginning of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, analysts & officials have claimed that Putin will never back down; that he needs a facing-saving win (i.e. Ukrainian territory) to end his war. Events yesterday completely undermined that assumption...
Instead of doubling down with more force to crush the mutiny, Putin accepted humiliation instead. He was the rat trapped in the corner that so many Putinologists have told us to fear. But he didn't lash out & go crazy. He negotiated & with a traitor...
The lesson for the war in Ukraine is clear. Putin is more likely to negotiate and end his war if he is losing on the battlefield. Those who have argued that Ukraine must not attack Crimea for fear of triggering escalation must now reevaluate that hypothesis https://twitter.com/McFaul/status/1672930748742119426
The Tories won’t do themselves any favours overruling independent pay bodies on public sector pay.
We are just likely to see more and more strikes and disruption and not just from the likes of the RMT who are politically motivated.
They're in a complete bind. They'll trot out the wage-price spiral excuse to justify bearing down on public sector pay, but the plain fact is that they're struggling to find politically acceptable cuts to fund extra spending in this area, borrowing is enormous and becoming ever more expensive, and so they're left with either digging their heels in and offering workers peanuts, or raising taxes on their core supporters to pay for more generous rises. There's no violin small enough.
The reality we are reaching the end game for the Blairite/Thatcher-lite model
It used to be chunky public spending and low taxes with the difference funded by clever balance sheet tricks (PFI/securitisation) or straight up borrowing. Wages were kept down by relaxed views on immigration
Cost of borrowing is going up and the markets are twitchy after all that QE
Asset price bubbles have driven a reasonable standard of living beyond the reach of many
Effectively unlimited immigration has resulted in underinvestment in business (low wages partly due to immigration and partly due to tax credits) drove down returns (cost saving) on investment and increased the strain on public services (governments didn’t invest in capacity).
The electorate has been trained to believe the government will always bail them out
We need a grown up conversation. Either taxes have to go up massively or public services need to be completely rethought.
But neither politicians or the electorate are ready to have that conversation.
While much of this is true, it is also the case that other countries have had similar situations to us, and have managed to avoid excessively expensive housing or stagnant business investment.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
It's almost as if our planning system might be different to theirs.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Build new towns (or refurbish old ones) in the frozen north and left-behind regions. It solves the housing problem, levelling up and rebalancing the economy away from an overheated London in one fell swoop.
The Sunday open thread – politicalbetting.com
Comments
The questions around whether Joe Biden took illicit payments are starting to multiply (text of the WhatsApp message is at the end of this e-mail). Maybe more importantly, the story seems to be breaking out of the right-wing press into other news sources. CBS has been interviewing the IRS Whistleblower who claims the case was obstructed and asking for answers. The New York Times - of all places - asked the WH Press Secretary about the allegations at the Friday press conference (“It’s a reasonable question to ask. The president of the United States is involved, as this message seems to suggest, in some sort of a coercive conversation for business dealings by his son. Is that something that, if he wasn’t, then maybe you should tell us?").
It does not look as though this story is going away and, if anything, it seems to be gaining strength, and the Administration's blocking answers do not seem to be doing the job. Given there is still well over a year to the election, there is a case for arguing the Democrats decide JB is becoming too damaged when it comes to 2024.
If that is the case, there are two options. Persuade him to step down soon and let Harris have 12 months as President in the hope she can establish some gravitas and win 2024. That is a tall bet.
The other is to look at some of the other, mainly Governors establishing their credentials. Newsom, Whitmer and Pritzker spring to mind. Of the three, I would be putting money on Whitmer for the 2024 nomination - she is female (ties into Roe v Wade), comes from a swing state and does not come from an ultra-liberal state which the other two do and which is likely to put off swing voters.
As for the 2017 Hunter Biden text to Henry Zhao of Harvest Fund Management, here it is:
""I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight,
And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction," he continued. "I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father."
It used to be chunky public spending and low taxes with the difference funded by clever balance sheet tricks (PFI/securitisation) or straight up borrowing. Wages were kept down by relaxed views on immigration
Cost of borrowing is going up and the markets are twitchy after all that QE
Asset price bubbles have driven a reasonable standard of living beyond the reach of many
Effectively unlimited immigration has resulted in underinvestment in business (low wages partly due to immigration and partly due to tax credits) drove down returns (cost saving) on investment and increased the strain on public services (governments didn’t invest in capacity).
The electorate has been trained to believe the government will always bail them out
We need a grown up conversation. Either taxes have to go up massively or public services need to be completely rethought.
But neither politicians or the electorate are ready to have that conversation.
My reply fpt I have been saying the same for ages. Instead everyone here wants the status quo and their particular bug bear fully funded. What the state does I agree should be full funded. That means however saying this is how much we have to spend. This is the cost of fully funding all these things. What do you want because we have to drop the rest.
But in 2017 he was just an ex-VP and failed presidential candidate
That just looks like bad Hunter not bad Joe.
'You know who my dad is, right?'
But unrelated I happen to think that laying all the top 3 in the WH race at current prices (Biden, Trump, DeSantis) is quite a good play. Esp Trump obvs.
As an October surprise, it’s seriously premature.
As an attempt to unseat Biden, risible.
They therefore cannot be the whole story.
Just heard the commentator say tickets for Trent Bridge are free tomorrow.
"So. If you're a PE teacher just say to the Head, "I'm taking all the kids to the Test today!""
OK. Permission slips. Risk assessment. Staffing numbers. All other classes abandoned. Not delivering the core curriculum in breach of Statute. Transport? Arrangements for the kids to be collected? Every single parent to be phoned? Those who don't want to go? Exams. Schemes of work. Food.
Honestly.
Republican appointed prosecutors have spent years investigating this, and turned up nothing. Hunter Biden’s guilty plea total offences effectively ends the matter … but no doubt they’ll spend the next year and a half rehashing what they they already know.
(That's a joke, I actually find cricket adequate entertainment, sometimes.)
This is all Trump sympathetics desperately trying to detract from the fact their man is currently being prosecuted over three separate crimes. And that is before we get the dodgy stuff the rest of family members got up to. Two BILLION from the Saudis! Jared is as corrupt as his father.
The thing is the state does a myriad of things everyone is always saying all of these are underfunded and they argue they should be fully funded. A good argument and one I agree with. If we are going to do it properly let us fund it properly.
The simple fact though is that if we fully fund everything the state does then the amount of tax take would be likely equivalent to total gdp or 100% tax and I doubt even you want that
So my argument is merely right now. let us as a country decide what we want the state to do and fully fund it. If tax goes up to pay for it ok....not my favourite choice but democratic.
Instead the cons and sks lab party and the ld's whose leader I cant even remember want to go on pretending the state can do everything. The state however does it all badly because they all get underfunded
Public services would need to be 'cut'. Just saying 'rethought' is already finessing and spinning things.
If we want that honest 'grown up' conversation (which we do) it has to feature the unvarnished truth.
The largest cost in household budgets is Housing. Not food, not gas, not electricity or anything else it is housing.
A very large proportion of the cost of housing is the cost of land.
And the cost of land with planning permission is inflated over land without.
Resolve one and others follow.
Hunter is just an embarrassing child.
As I said I didnt ask for tax cuts I like to hope I put out a neutral argument and would be interested in your opinion
I think they might even be serious about it - one of the shadow cabinet referred to it as the “biggest transfer of power from central to local government in more than a generation” in a radio interview today.
1. In 2017, a text Hunter Biden sent implied he had the protection of his dad
2. At that time, his dad was just a private citizen
Hunter Biden is a junkie. And like the vast majority of junkies, he will have told many lies along the way.
Hunter Biden was also the son of a former VP.
That will, no doubt, have given him ample opportunity to turn his status and his lies into drugs, and to protect him to some extent, even if his father was completely unaware of it.
But I'm struggling to see what crime, or even impropriety, Joe Biden committed.
It is an area where, sadly, the Conservative Party is in hoc to its retiree voters.
This is why there's been such a mass pile-in into the BTL landlord business by small investors. It was money for old rope for anybody who could get hold of a BTL mortgage on an interest-only basis, and it's still money for old rope for any landlord who owns the rental outright or has a decent equity share. Just set up a little flat, install a renter and improve your own standard of living immensely by extracting a large chunk of their earned income for yourself. It's actually quite surprising that more people haven't done it when you think about it.
Your ideas on this? I like the thrust of them very much. More rigor and transparency around tax and spend.
The challenge is to fuse that with what's practical, and also leave room for political vision and flexibility.
More power to NIMBY Councils elected on a low turnout?
We need the Japanese system. Councils can come up with zoning plans but once land is zoned the local authority has no say whatsoever in what is done with that land. So long as Building Regulations (determined centrally) are met and so long as in a Residential Zone then you can start construction immediately. No planning, no consultation, nothing.
Oh and of course if you hold the land you are immediately taxed on it. So no reason to ever bank land.
However you still really havent answered the question
so will put them more bluntly
Regardless of whether tax take goes up or down
1) Do you agree that what the state does should be fully funded
2) Do you agree that people should be told what fully funding these actions would be and there affect on tax
3) Given 1 and 2 are yes,do you therefore agree that the british people should get a decision on what it important for the state to do
I answer yes on all 3. What is your your answer
Precisely zero.
There’s rather more evidence that Trump was in hock to Russia - do you grasp the seriousness of that ? Insufficient, of course, to bring any such charges - but note, of course, that individuals appointed by him to manage his first presidential campaign were indeed convicted of being foreign agents.
The point about Trump’s criminal difficulties is that the prima facile evidence was enough for at least a grand jury (in Florida, of all places) to indict.
Perhaps you could explain it to me.
A week or so ago, I ran across my copy of a Mike Royko collection: https://www.amazon.com/One-More-Time-Best-Royko/dp/0226730727/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2WFRJMHL4KNAI&keywords=Mike+Royko&qid=1687710985&s=books&sprefix=mike+royko,stripbooks,687&sr=1-1
In the collection, there is a column published on 1 December 1992, "Parents, Not Cash, Can Enrich a School". In it, Royko argued that the problems in Chicago slum schools were a result of broken families, not too low spending:
'And crying out for money for Chicago's schools isn't the answer, unless the money is spent in a way that will get results.
But how do you use money to replace a family structure that isn't there? If you know the answer to that question, then pass it along to the eighth-grade teacher at a West Side school who wearily told me:
"I try to teach, but it isn't easy when my smartest student is a girl who is already pregnant with her second child."'
Which is the same problem that I, and my friend, saw in those schools decades earlier.
(Full disclosure: My parents separated when I was 18, and about to go away to college.)
If you haven't read Royko, you ought to, if you want to understand urban politics in Chicago and similar cities. And I should add that many of the columns in that collection are just plain fun to read.
Do you (a) tell your dad that you have decided to turn traitor, and ask if there's any juicy info you could pass along to help fund your crack habit; or (b) keep schtum and see what you can pick up.
Answers on a postcard please.
And even if you want to limit things to "being in the pay of foreign power", the Trump administration helped the Saudis and then got $2billion given to Kushner's funds.
And whilst sorting housing might not be sufficient to solve Britain's problems, I suspect it's necessary. Otherwise, what is to stop any gains from a growing economy just flowing to landlords through higher rents?
It gets quite confusing when both he and his dad are called “Biden” when random allegations are being thrown around.
Why he’s drawing a comparison between Trump’s problems and those of Hunter Biden, and suggesting that the latter might be of more consequence, is quite beyond me.
What crime do you think he might have committed?
Or is it simply an attempt to reverse the worst aspects of Thatcher’s housing policy from three and a half decades ago ?
That is a very large factor in landing us with the problems we now have.
Do you think the fathers of all junkies need to be investigated, just in case they happen to have committed the same crime as their child?
It may be that Biden Jnr managed to pull the wool over Biden Snr's eyes in this regard, keeping him totally out of the picture, or it may not be - that's for an investigation to ascertain.
Which I can't argue with really.
Still dont like his politics has to be said
Arguably the single biggest contributor to our current mess.
Anyway, you are missing the point. If all you say is correct, then the NYT and CBS should not be giving this the light of day. If they are raising questions, and putting it in such a way, then Biden has got some problems.
Re @Tres, plenty of people to talk about how Trump hasn't got a chance on here. It's the national sport.
Even up here, a good distance from London, what little property is available on the rental market starts at £550pcm for a room in an HMO, climbing to £950pcm for a two bed flat (and obviously much more for various grades of house.) For comparison, when I was last renting in 2014 I paid £650pcm for a two bed flat. Rents might have gone up by about a third in the intervening period but I'm pretty confident that earnings haven't.
This could however be somewhat ameliorated if those no longer in need got told they no longer needed council housing and asked to leave. Maybe if tenancies had been reviewed every 5 years and no inheritable rights for them
The Guardian, for instance, talked about the Tory attempts to smear SKS, but that doesn't mean they were actually true, only that the smears were a current political thing.
Still needs to be pursued though, as mollifying him has never worked, he just takes it as reason to do more later.
Since the beginning of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, analysts & officials have claimed that Putin will never back down; that he needs a facing-saving win (i.e. Ukrainian territory) to end his war. Events yesterday completely undermined that assumption...
Instead of doubling down with more force to crush the mutiny, Putin accepted humiliation instead. He was the rat trapped in the corner that so many Putinologists have told us to fear. But he didn't lash out & go crazy. He negotiated & with a traitor...
The lesson for the war in Ukraine is clear. Putin is more likely to negotiate and end his war if he is losing on the battlefield. Those who have argued that Ukraine must not attack Crimea for fear of triggering escalation must now reevaluate that hypothesis
https://twitter.com/McFaul/status/1672930748742119426