The PM is rich? So what. He is leader of the Conservative Party not a Corbynite Marxist sect.
What voters want to see is their own economic circumstances improve which he and Hunt are doing by cutting inflation and growing the economy and hopefully in due course cutting tax as well.
As for getting rid of Rishi, barely more than a year ago OGH was telling Tories to get rid of Boris in favour of Rishi!
Cutting inflation is not a sufficient condition for people to "see their own economic circumstances improve". What matters to most people is the difference between their income inflation and price inflation. Inflation is still high.
We're not going destitute as fast as we were, darling. I think i'll vote conservative now.
And don't forget the cumulative effect - it will be quite some time before real wages are back where they were before Sunak got in.
Yes. We're just off the back of 20 straight months of CPI inflation being above wage inflation. We've had one month with wages going up faster than CPI. So even if every month is the mirror of the months before, we'll still be worse off than we were in October 2021 by the time the election comes around.
Especially thanks to fiscal drag.
Real take-home wages are still falling currently, even with nominal wages growing faster than inflation.
Fiscal drag, combined with benefits going up by CPI, is reducing income inequality across the UK. In terms of finding an equitable way to close the deficit during a cost-of-living crisis, passing on the costs of inflation to higher incomes is not, on the face of it, a particularly bad thing.
However, it's introducing even more perverse incentives into the system. And I'd much prefer it if they simply increased tax rates for higher earners rather than doing it stealthily. Politically impossible though.
Obviously not a high tax payer then. More like they ought to get a grip on waste and make their employees and themselves do some real work. Big pay rises and numbers cut to cover the cost and make them have to do a day's work.
On topic of course his wealth is a problem. For several reasons it diminishes and dilutes all he says on the economy which in turn makes people less inclined to vote for him.
There is a perception that he is adding PM to his list of achievements for no particular driving reason. Both Boris and Dave were rich but at least people understood why they wanted to be PM (solipsism and noblesse oblige respectively).
I think that's right. Few except those on the extreme left give a damn about his wealth in itself, and they wouldn't vote for him anyway. What matters is that he hasn't set out a positive vision for making this country richer or better generally.
What may save Sunak is that Starmer seems incapable of doing it as well.
There is a perception that he is adding PM to his list of achievements for no particular driving reason. Both Boris and Dave were rich but at least people understood why they wanted to be PM (solipsism and noblesse oblige respectively).
Yes, there's probably something in that.
It's something he could addresed by painting his long term vision and plan for this country, where he wants to lead us.
But he doesn't. So that reinforces that.
Sunak clearly has a vision- see his Mais lecture from last year. Low tax, low regulation so that enterprise can thrive. The main difference with Trussism is that he wants to do it responsibly. (Which is a good thing.)
Rishi's problem is partly that isn't the mandate he inherited from the 2019 majority. The other is that it's not where the British people are and Sunak can't persuade for toffee.
The PM is rich? So what. He is leader of the Conservative Party not a Corbynite Marxist sect.
What voters want to see is their own economic circumstances improve which he and Hunt are doing by cutting inflation and growing the economy and hopefully in due course cutting tax as well.
As for getting rid of Rishi, barely more than a year ago OGH was telling Tories to get rid of Boris in favour of Rishi!
Cutting inflation is not a sufficient condition for people to "see their own economic circumstances improve". What matters to most people is the difference between their income inflation and price inflation. Inflation is still high.
And this is within the Chancellor's control somewhat, ending fiscal drag would see take home pay keep up better with price inflation.
Doesn't help getting a 7% pay rise (if you can get one) if inflation is 6% and tax thresholds are frozen so much or most of your pay rise gets taken away in taxes.
Fiscal drag in those circumstances means you're still worse off.
My pay rise (private sector) was just 3% so with fiscal drag on tax bands, and high mortgage rates kicking in, it's a heck of a squeeze.
Fundamentally, people are much worse off and the government is simply going to run out of time.
Exactly and all these public sector workers with big pay rises , gold plated pensions , as many days off as they like while working from home whinge endlessly. Most would not last a week in private sector.
The target is for it to be 2/3 of the median wage by next October. In a government that overall aspires to disappointing this is a real success story in terms of making work pay and reducing income inequality.
I wouldn't want to criticise any increase in the minimum wage but the 2/3 median wage target seems to represent more the downgrading of other work in the economy, it is being gradually bought down to minimum wage levels in a comparative sense. The marginal tax (Income tax, NI) that you pay for every pound above the minimum wage is quite significant, particularly if you are paying off a student loan.
Whilst purporting to be reducing 'income inequality' the one thing the government are noticeably not doing is adding more taxes to income from wealth. It is creating a structure whereby the gap between the workers and the capitalists increases. It is a contrast to here in Finland where the taxes on wealth are similar to the taxes on employment. Therefore more money is raised to provide things like free university education and council house building, along with many other advantages for the working age population who pay similar levels of tax to people in the UK.
The PM is rich? So what. He is leader of the Conservative Party not a Corbynite Marxist sect.
What voters want to see is their own economic circumstances improve which he and Hunt are doing by cutting inflation and growing the economy and hopefully in due course cutting tax as well.
As for getting rid of Rishi, barely more than a year ago OGH was telling Tories to get rid of Boris in favour of Rishi!
Cutting inflation is not a sufficient condition for people to "see their own economic circumstances improve". What matters to most people is the difference between their income inflation and price inflation. Inflation is still high.
We're not going destitute as fast as we were, darling. I think i'll vote conservative now.
And don't forget the cumulative effect - it will be quite some time before real wages are back where they were before Sunak got in.
Yes. We're just off the back of 20 straight months of CPI inflation being above wage inflation. We've had one month with wages going up faster than CPI. So even if every month is the mirror of the months before, we'll still be worse off than we were in October 2021 by the time the election comes around.
Especially thanks to fiscal drag.
Real take-home wages are still falling currently, even with nominal wages growing faster than inflation.
You’re in danger of post hoc data mining
Wages aren’t growing!
Oops.
Real wages aren’t growing! 😁
Fuck!
Shit! Umm! Fiscal drag, thats’s it. Fiscal drag!
Realtake-home wages aren’t growing! 😁
Excuse me but I've been banging the drum on fiscal drag and opposed it since it was announced. I'm entirely consistent.
And of course I was a loyal Tory until Sunak started putting up taxes like National Insurance and fiscal drag.
I have my principles. I believe people should be able to keep more of their own income they work for. The Tories used to believe that too.
I haven't left the Tories, Sunak's Tories have left me.
The PM is rich? So what. He is leader of the Conservative Party not a Corbynite Marxist sect.
What voters want to see is their own economic circumstances improve which he and Hunt are doing by cutting inflation and growing the economy and hopefully in due course cutting tax as well.
As for getting rid of Rishi, barely more than a year ago OGH was telling Tories to get rid of Boris in favour of Rishi!
Cutting inflation is not a sufficient condition for people to "see their own economic circumstances improve". What matters to most people is the difference between their income inflation and price inflation. Inflation is still high.
And this is within the Chancellor's control somewhat, ending fiscal drag would see take home pay keep up better with price inflation.
Doesn't help getting a 7% pay rise (if you can get one) if inflation is 6% and tax thresholds are frozen so much or most of your pay rise gets taken away in taxes.
Fiscal drag in those circumstances means you're still worse off.
My pay rise (private sector) was just 3% so with fiscal drag on tax bands, and high mortgage rates kicking in, it's a heck of a squeeze.
Fundamentally, people are much worse off and the government is simply going to run out of time.
Exactly and all these public sector workers with big pay rises , gold plated pensions , as many days off as they like while working from home whinge endlessly. Most would not last a week in private sector.
In this context the large amounts of unfilled posts in the public sector are suprising - given the conditions described above.
The PM is rich? So what. He is leader of the Conservative Party not a Corbynite Marxist sect.
What voters want to see is their own economic circumstances improve which he and Hunt are doing by cutting inflation and growing the economy and hopefully in due course cutting tax as well.
As for getting rid of Rishi, barely more than a year ago OGH was telling Tories to get rid of Boris in favour of Rishi!
Cutting inflation is not a sufficient condition for people to "see their own economic circumstances improve". What matters to most people is the difference between their income inflation and price inflation. Inflation is still high.
We're not going destitute as fast as we were, darling. I think i'll vote conservative now.
And don't forget the cumulative effect - it will be quite some time before real wages are back where they were before Sunak got in.
Yes. We're just off the back of 20 straight months of CPI inflation being above wage inflation. We've had one month with wages going up faster than CPI. So even if every month is the mirror of the months before, we'll still be worse off than we were in October 2021 by the time the election comes around.
Especially thanks to fiscal drag.
Real take-home wages are still falling currently, even with nominal wages growing faster than inflation.
You’re in danger of post hoc data mining
Wages aren’t growing!
Oops.
Real wages aren’t growing! 😁
Fuck!
Shit! Umm! Fiscal drag, thats’s it. Fiscal drag!
Realtake-home wages aren’t growing! 😁
Excuse me but I've been banging the drum on fiscal drag and opposed it since it was announced. I'm entirely consistent.
And of course I was a loyal Tory until Sunak started putting up taxes like National Insurance and fiscal drag.
I have my principles. I believe people should be able to keep more of their own income they work for. The Tories used to believe that too.
I haven't left the Tories, Sunak's Tories have left me.
I'm sure Rishi wants lower taxes. But he wants them in the same way that St Augustine wanted chastity.
(Unless he can find ways of cutting government spending on a recurring basis, I'd rather it was funded by taxes than borrowing. The mix of taxes he's using is a disgrace, though.)
There is a perception that he is adding PM to his list of achievements for no particular driving reason. Both Boris and Dave were rich but at least people understood why they wanted to be PM (solipsism and noblesse oblige respectively).
Yes, there's probably something in that.
It's something he could addresed by painting his long term vision and plan for this country, where he wants to lead us.
But he doesn't. So that reinforces that.
Sunak clearly has a vision- see his Mais lecture from last year. Low tax, low regulation so that enterprise can thrive. The main difference with Trussism is that he wants to do it responsibly. (Which is a good thing.)
Rishi's problem is partly that isn't the mandate he inherited from the 2019 majority. The other is that it's not where the British people are and Sunak can't persuade for toffee.
No, he doesn't want to do it responsibly.
Responsibly would be to ensure taxes are low and consistent.
He wants to do the polar opposite. He wants to make taxes low on his select few he wants to prioritise, and in order to do that he's willing to jack up taxes on others.
Lets see with any tax cuts is it going to be prioritised on where taxes get obscenely high in the tax system? Such as where taxes go up to 80p in the marginal pound?
Or is he going to splurge it irresponsibly in an across the board income tax cut, which is not where the problems in the tax system lie.
Hence why he put up National Insurance instead of Income Tax.
The PM is rich? So what. He is leader of the Conservative Party not a Corbynite Marxist sect.
What voters want to see is their own economic circumstances improve which he and Hunt are doing by cutting inflation and growing the economy and hopefully in due course cutting tax as well.
As for getting rid of Rishi, barely more than a year ago OGH was telling Tories to get rid of Boris in favour of Rishi!
Cutting inflation is not a sufficient condition for people to "see their own economic circumstances improve". What matters to most people is the difference between their income inflation and price inflation. Inflation is still high.
We're not going destitute as fast as we were, darling. I think i'll vote conservative now.
And don't forget the cumulative effect - it will be quite some time before real wages are back where they were before Sunak got in.
Yes. We're just off the back of 20 straight months of CPI inflation being above wage inflation. We've had one month with wages going up faster than CPI. So even if every month is the mirror of the months before, we'll still be worse off than we were in October 2021 by the time the election comes around.
Especially thanks to fiscal drag.
Real take-home wages are still falling currently, even with nominal wages growing faster than inflation.
You’re in danger of post hoc data mining
Wages aren’t growing!
Oops.
Real wages aren’t growing! 😁
Fuck!
Shit! Umm! Fiscal drag, thats’s it. Fiscal drag!
Realtake-home wages aren’t growing! 😁
Excuse me but I've been banging the drum on fiscal drag and opposed it since it was announced. I'm entirely consistent.
And of course I was a loyal Tory until Sunak started putting up taxes like National Insurance and fiscal drag.
I have my principles. I believe people should be able to keep more of their own income they work for. The Tories used to believe that too.
I haven't left the Tories, Sunak's Tories have left me.
I am not ideologically attached to any party: in character, i think I'm socially liberal, and fiscally conservative.
But: I do have strong views on the sort of country I want; and I simply cannot see how we can get a country more in line with my vision *without* increasing the total tax take. There are just too many issues in the country that require more public spending.
I see calls for keeping tax levels the same, or even reducing the total tax take, as declinism for the country.
It therefore becomes a question of which party I trust most to increase taxes sensibly and spend the money wisely. And I don't trust any of them to do that, but I probably trust Sinak's Conservatives the least.
The target is for it to be 2/3 of the median wage by next October. In a government that overall aspires to disappointing this is a real success story in terms of making work pay and reducing income inequality.
I wouldn't want to criticise any increase in the minimum wage but the 2/3 median wage target seems to represent more the downgrading of other work in the economy, it is being gradually bought down to minimum wage levels in a comparative sense. The marginal tax (Income tax, NI) that you pay for every pound above the minimum wage is quite significant, particularly if you are paying off a student loan.
Whilst purporting to be reducing 'income inequality' the one thing the government are noticeably not doing is adding more taxes to income from wealth. It is creating a structure whereby the gap between the workers and the capitalists increases. It is a contrast to here in Finland where the taxes on wealth are similar to the taxes on employment. Therefore more money is raised to provide things like free university education and council house building, along with many other advantages for the working age population who pay similar levels of tax to people in the UK.
Like politics, all pay is relative. An £11 minimum wage is £22k pa for a 40 hour week. Some routine jobs are not complicated, interact constantly with civilised and polite folk, and have little responsibility (which is not a problem - that's life). However lots of jobs that are difficult, arduous, back breaking, interface with monsters, keep you awake all night, shouty, complex and full of blame pay between say 22 and 28k pa.
A problem will always therefore develop from the fact that you can do OK in much of the UK as a couple on minimum wage (£44k pa) and actually have a nicer life than people earning not much more.
Is this part of the background to the outbreak of strikes from junior professionals and others?
The PM is rich? So what. He is leader of the Conservative Party not a Corbynite Marxist sect.
What voters want to see is their own economic circumstances improve which he and Hunt are doing by cutting inflation and growing the economy and hopefully in due course cutting tax as well.
As for getting rid of Rishi, barely more than a year ago OGH was telling Tories to get rid of Boris in favour of Rishi!
Cutting inflation is not a sufficient condition for people to "see their own economic circumstances improve". What matters to most people is the difference between their income inflation and price inflation. Inflation is still high.
And this is within the Chancellor's control somewhat, ending fiscal drag would see take home pay keep up better with price inflation.
Doesn't help getting a 7% pay rise (if you can get one) if inflation is 6% and tax thresholds are frozen so much or most of your pay rise gets taken away in taxes.
Fiscal drag in those circumstances means you're still worse off.
My pay rise (private sector) was just 3% so with fiscal drag on tax bands, and high mortgage rates kicking in, it's a heck of a squeeze.
Fundamentally, people are much worse off and the government is simply going to run out of time.
Exactly and all these public sector workers with big pay rises , gold plated pensions , as many days off as they like while working from home whinge endlessly. Most would not last a week in private sector.
In this context the large amounts of unfilled posts in the public sector are suprising - given the conditions described above.
The PM is rich? So what. He is leader of the Conservative Party not a Corbynite Marxist sect.
What voters want to see is their own economic circumstances improve which he and Hunt are doing by cutting inflation and growing the economy and hopefully in due course cutting tax as well.
As for getting rid of Rishi, barely more than a year ago OGH was telling Tories to get rid of Boris in favour of Rishi!
Cutting inflation is not a sufficient condition for people to "see their own economic circumstances improve". What matters to most people is the difference between their income inflation and price inflation. Inflation is still high.
We're not going destitute as fast as we were, darling. I think i'll vote conservative now.
And don't forget the cumulative effect - it will be quite some time before real wages are back where they were before Sunak got in.
Yes. We're just off the back of 20 straight months of CPI inflation being above wage inflation. We've had one month with wages going up faster than CPI. So even if every month is the mirror of the months before, we'll still be worse off than we were in October 2021 by the time the election comes around.
Especially thanks to fiscal drag.
Real take-home wages are still falling currently, even with nominal wages growing faster than inflation.
You’re in danger of post hoc data mining
Wages aren’t growing!
Oops.
Real wages aren’t growing! 😁
Fuck!
Shit! Umm! Fiscal drag, thats’s it. Fiscal drag!
Realtake-home wages aren’t growing! 😁
Excuse me but I've been banging the drum on fiscal drag and opposed it since it was announced. I'm entirely consistent.
And of course I was a loyal Tory until Sunak started putting up taxes like National Insurance and fiscal drag.
I have my principles. I believe people should be able to keep more of their own income they work for. The Tories used to believe that too.
I haven't left the Tories, Sunak's Tories have left me.
I am not ideologically attached to any party: in character, i think I'm socially liberal, and fiscally conservative.
But: I do have strong views on the sort of country I want; and I simply cannot see how we can get a country more in line with my vision *without* increasing the total tax take. There are just too many issues in the country that require more public spending.
I see calls for keeping tax levels the same, or even reducing the total tax take, as declinism for the country.
It therefore becomes a question of which party I trust most to increase taxes sensibly and spend the money wisely. And I don't trust any of them to do that, but I probably trust Sinak's Conservatives the least.
I think we can afford to not increase the total tax take, but if you do want to increase the total tax take (and Sunak is doing so) there's a right and a wrong way to do so.
Increasing taxes by putting the burden solely on those working for a living (NI), or graduates (graduate tax), or by cliff edges jacking up marginal tax to 80% or higher is not the right way to do it. Nor is fiscal drag which hurts people inconsistently.
If you want to increase the total tax take, do so honestly. Even out our tax rates so everyone pays a consistent tax rate no matter how they earn their money for starters - taxing some 41% while others on the same income pay 20% is not positive. Changing it so you tax some 40% and others on the exact same income 19% [as I suspect Sunak wants to do] isn't a step in the right direction.
Morning all! Day 1 using an iPhone. Generally ok, though there are a few oddities which I don't know if crap on purpose or I am missing something.
There are various versions of the keyboard which show up seemingly at random, but Apple doesn't consistently show a full stop? I know there is double tap space, but sometimes i get a full stop and sometimes I don't. Would be great to fix a layout.
And the other one - App folders. Do I really have to have a 3x3 grid if i put two apps in a folder? I don't always have 9 of the same kind of app. I don't want to litter every app on my home pages. Just resize the sodding thing.
Who are these 100K people who can get benefit but have no obligation to look for work?
Hunt seems to have just told Radio 4 that it is not people with illness or disability.
Partners of someone who is working full time?
I'm not certain on this but believe since Universal Credit is applied for as a family and not as individuals, if one partner works full time I'm guessing there is no requirement for the other to do so since the partner has already met the obligation to work.
What would Hunt propose? That someone working full time is denied universal credit despite working full time unless their partner does too?
I was chatting to a LibDem friend (also a stand-holder at the Tory conference) about tactical voting, and we looked at the plausible situation that Labour wins some sort of overall majority while the LIbDems gain say 20 more seats from tactical voting. Labour then has 4-5 years in power amid unpromising economic conditions and could become quite unpopular. The LibDems will then want to attack the Government, as all Opposition parties do, and will try to get Tory tactical votes on the basis that "only the LibDems can beat Labour". The problem will then be that "loaned" Labour votes this time (who may poll as Labour but vote LibDem in 2024) will then recoil.
Polling the cross-currents will then become *remarkably* difficult.
Going back very many decades, the Liberals and now LibDems do better when a Conservative government is unpopular than when a Labour government is unpopular. The principal reason for this is that there are many unhappy Tories who nevertheless baulk at switching to Labour, whereas unhappy Labour voters are much more willing to switch directly to the Conservatives - as we saw in the so-called red wall seats. Yet, conversely, determined Tory voters are the more difficult to persuade to vote tactically.
We saw exactly the opposite in 2010, when the Labour government was unpopular but the majority of those moving away from Labour moved to the LDs which is why they got so many MPs.
Red Wall movement was 'away from labour' because of Corbyn and 'to Conservative' because of Boris & Brexit. In that sense 2019 was an outlier.
Who are these 100K people who can get benefit but have no obligation to look for work?
Hunt seems to have just told Radio 4 that it is not people with illness or disability.
Partners of someone who is working full time?
I'm not certain on this but believe since Universal Credit is applied for as a family and not as individuals, if one partner works full time I'm guessing there is no requirement for the other to do so since the partner has already met the obligation to work.
What would Hunt propose? That someone working full time is denied universal credit despite working full time unless their partner does too?
The PM is rich? So what. He is leader of the Conservative Party not a Corbynite Marxist sect.
What voters want to see is their own economic circumstances improve which he and Hunt are doing by cutting inflation and growing the economy and hopefully in due course cutting tax as well.
As for getting rid of Rishi, barely more than a year ago OGH was telling Tories to get rid of Boris in favour of Rishi!
Cutting inflation is not a sufficient condition for people to "see their own economic circumstances improve". What matters to most people is the difference between their income inflation and price inflation. Inflation is still high.
We're not going destitute as fast as we were, darling. I think i'll vote conservative now.
And don't forget the cumulative effect - it will be quite some time before real wages are back where they were before Sunak got in.
Yes. We're just off the back of 20 straight months of CPI inflation being above wage inflation. We've had one month with wages going up faster than CPI. So even if every month is the mirror of the months before, we'll still be worse off than we were in October 2021 by the time the election comes around.
Especially thanks to fiscal drag.
Real take-home wages are still falling currently, even with nominal wages growing faster than inflation.
You’re in danger of post hoc data mining
Wages aren’t growing!
Oops.
Real wages aren’t growing! 😁
Fuck!
Shit! Umm! Fiscal drag, thats’s it. Fiscal drag!
Realtake-home wages aren’t growing! 😁
Excuse me but I've been banging the drum on fiscal drag and opposed it since it was announced. I'm entirely consistent.
And of course I was a loyal Tory until Sunak started putting up taxes like National Insurance and fiscal drag.
I have my principles. I believe people should be able to keep more of their own income they work for. The Tories used to believe that too.
I haven't left the Tories, Sunak's Tories have left me.
I'm sure Rishi wants lower taxes. But he wants them in the same way that St Augustine wanted chastity.
(Unless he can find ways of cutting government spending on a recurring basis, I'd rather it was funded by taxes than borrowing. The mix of taxes he's using is a disgrace, though.)
Two questions.
How can you talk tax cuts when borrowing £100billion+ a year.
Why are we borrowing £100 billion this year instead of balancing the books now the pandemic is over?
Who are these 100K people who can get benefit but have no obligation to look for work?
Hunt seems to have just told Radio 4 that it is not people with illness or disability.
Partners of someone who is working full time?
I'm not certain on this but believe since Universal Credit is applied for as a family and not as individuals, if one partner works full time I'm guessing there is no requirement for the other to do so since the partner has already met the obligation to work.
What would Hunt propose? That someone working full time is denied universal credit despite working full time unless their partner does too?
Doesn't matter, since very little of this is going to happen before the next election. And then, it's pretty unlikely that it won't happen at all.
(See also: MOBILE PHONES TO BE BANNED IN SCHOOLS in today's Mail. Which has already melted down to GOVERNMENT TO ISSUE GUIDANCE.)
I was chatting to a LibDem friend (also a stand-holder at the Tory conference) about tactical voting, and we looked at the plausible situation that Labour wins some sort of overall majority while the LIbDems gain say 20 more seats from tactical voting. Labour then has 4-5 years in power amid unpromising economic conditions and could become quite unpopular. The LibDems will then want to attack the Government, as all Opposition parties do, and will try to get Tory tactical votes on the basis that "only the LibDems can beat Labour". The problem will then be that "loaned" Labour votes this time (who may poll as Labour but vote LibDem in 2024) will then recoil.
Polling the cross-currents will then become *remarkably* difficult.
Going back very many decades, the Liberals and now LibDems do better when a Conservative government is unpopular than when a Labour government is unpopular. The principal reason for this is that there are many unhappy Tories who nevertheless baulk at switching to Labour, whereas unhappy Labour voters are much more willing to switch directly to the Conservatives - as we saw in the so-called red wall seats. Yet, conversely, determined Tory voters are the more difficult to persuade to vote tactically.
We saw exactly the opposite in 2010, when the Labour government was unpopular but the majority of those moving away from Labour moved to the LDs which is why they got so many MPs.
Red Wall movement was 'away from labour' because of Corbyn and 'to Conservative' because of Boris & Brexit. In that sense 2019 was an outlier.
2010 was a case in point though: Lib Dem vote share went up a little, but they lost seats. Wasted votes in Labour constituencies. LD seat count pretty much reverse-correlates with Tory vote share.
The contrast between Boris (moderately rich* by most people’s standards, and definitely v posh) and Rishi (a bit posh and global-elite level wealth) is interesting.
There is a bit of old-money/new money in this, but Boris understood that by translating these characteristics into a Beano character made it easier for people to accept and move past these things (ultimately, being a caricature mean that his personal fundamentals became visible in the end, and time ran out, but he got a bloody good run out of it).
Rishi, with his exam-cramming day-boy vibe, his gimpy voice and lack of charisma can’t play the same trick, so he is perceived (a bit unfairly) as out of touch Rishi Rich; Ed Miliband with added billions.
*I’m aware that he is likely an absolute car wreck of personal finance, but he still has far more access to money - whether paid in exchange for old-rope news columns or borrowed from chums - than the average person could dream of.
The target is for it to be 2/3 of the median wage by next October. In a government that overall aspires to disappointing this is a real success story in terms of making work pay and reducing income inequality.
I wouldn't want to criticise any increase in the minimum wage but the 2/3 median wage target seems to represent more the downgrading of other work in the economy, it is being gradually bought down to minimum wage levels in a comparative sense. The marginal tax (Income tax, NI) that you pay for every pound above the minimum wage is quite significant, particularly if you are paying off a student loan.
Whilst purporting to be reducing 'income inequality' the one thing the government are noticeably not doing is adding more taxes to income from wealth. It is creating a structure whereby the gap between the workers and the capitalists increases. It is a contrast to here in Finland where the taxes on wealth are similar to the taxes on employment. Therefore more money is raised to provide things like free university education and council house building, along with many other advantages for the working age population who pay similar levels of tax to people in the UK.
Like politics, all pay is relative. An £11 minimum wage is £22k pa for a 40 hour week. Some routine jobs are not complicated, interact constantly with civilised and polite folk, and have little responsibility (which is not a problem - that's life). However lots of jobs that are difficult, arduous, back breaking, interface with monsters, keep you awake all night, shouty, complex and full of blame pay between say 22 and 28k pa.
A problem will always therefore develop from the fact that you can do OK in much of the UK as a couple on minimum wage (£44k pa) and actually have a nicer life than people earning not much more.
Is this part of the background to the outbreak of strikes from junior professionals and others?
A lot of high skilled, degree level jobs in the public sector, particularly local councils are paying only slightly above minimum wage, say £26k. You are responsible for some quite heavy stuff that can blow up quickly in your face and often there is no support, your manager just complains about you. I've seen this quite a bit, people starting and then saying 'no thanks' after about 3 months. The problem then is that you find out you are on a path to nowhere. If you don't get promoted you may be on £30k after 10 years. Why not just go and drive a van or make people coffee?
It says 54% want to leave the ECHR so the UK can deport more migrants .
No tables or exact question wording although I suspect it’s a push poll designed to help elicit that majority . This is the poll commissioned by the latest bunch of lunatic Tory backbenchers .
Who are these 100K people who can get benefit but have no obligation to look for work?
Hunt seems to have just told Radio 4 that it is not people with illness or disability.
Partners of someone who is working full time?
I'm not certain on this but believe since Universal Credit is applied for as a family and not as individuals, if one partner works full time I'm guessing there is no requirement for the other to do so since the partner has already met the obligation to work.
What would Hunt propose? That someone working full time is denied universal credit despite working full time unless their partner does too?
Doesn't matter, since very little of this is going to happen before the next election. And then, it's pretty unlikely that it won't happen at all.
(See also: MOBILE PHONES TO BE BANNED IN SCHOOLS in today's Mail. Which has already melted down to GOVERNMENT TO ISSUE GUIDANCE.)
It's the headline that is important. No one sees the rowback 3 days later on page 12.
The PM is rich? So what. He is leader of the Conservative Party not a Corbynite Marxist sect.
What voters want to see is their own economic circumstances improve which he and Hunt are doing by cutting inflation and growing the economy and hopefully in due course cutting tax as well.
As for getting rid of Rishi, barely more than a year ago OGH was telling Tories to get rid of Boris in favour of Rishi!
Cutting inflation is not a sufficient condition for people to "see their own economic circumstances improve". What matters to most people is the difference between their income inflation and price inflation. Inflation is still high.
We're not going destitute as fast as we were, darling. I think i'll vote conservative now.
And don't forget the cumulative effect - it will be quite some time before real wages are back where they were before Sunak got in.
Yes. We're just off the back of 20 straight months of CPI inflation being above wage inflation. We've had one month with wages going up faster than CPI. So even if every month is the mirror of the months before, we'll still be worse off than we were in October 2021 by the time the election comes around.
Especially thanks to fiscal drag.
Real take-home wages are still falling currently, even with nominal wages growing faster than inflation.
You’re in danger of post hoc data mining
Wages aren’t growing!
Oops.
Real wages aren’t growing! 😁
Fuck!
Shit! Umm! Fiscal drag, thats’s it. Fiscal drag!
Realtake-home wages aren’t growing! 😁
Excuse me but I've been banging the drum on fiscal drag and opposed it since it was announced. I'm entirely consistent.
And of course I was a loyal Tory until Sunak started putting up taxes like National Insurance and fiscal drag.
I have my principles. I believe people should be able to keep more of their own income they work for. The Tories used to believe that too.
I haven't left the Tories, Sunak's Tories have left me.
I'm sure Rishi wants lower taxes. But he wants them in the same way that St Augustine wanted chastity.
(Unless he can find ways of cutting government spending on a recurring basis, I'd rather it was funded by taxes than borrowing. The mix of taxes he's using is a disgrace, though.)
Two questions.
How can you talk tax cuts when borrowing £100billion+ a year.
Why are we borrowing £100 billion this year instead of balancing the books now the pandemic is over?
There is nothing wrong with borrowing if you are using the money to invest eg in infrastructure or education where the return is substantially greater than the interest on the borrowing.
We have plenty of borrowing headroom. The national debt is about one year's GDP. Individuals often have mortgage debt of up to three time annual salary and find it sustainable. Plenty of headroom.
But to borrow to cut taxes is severely damaging and driven by ideology.
So I agree with your first sentence but not your second.
I was chatting to a LibDem friend (also a stand-holder at the Tory conference) about tactical voting, and we looked at the plausible situation that Labour wins some sort of overall majority while the LIbDems gain say 20 more seats from tactical voting. Labour then has 4-5 years in power amid unpromising economic conditions and could become quite unpopular. The LibDems will then want to attack the Government, as all Opposition parties do, and will try to get Tory tactical votes on the basis that "only the LibDems can beat Labour". The problem will then be that "loaned" Labour votes this time (who may poll as Labour but vote LibDem in 2024) will then recoil.
Polling the cross-currents will then become *remarkably* difficult.
Going back very many decades, the Liberals and now LibDems do better when a Conservative government is unpopular than when a Labour government is unpopular. The principal reason for this is that there are many unhappy Tories who nevertheless baulk at switching to Labour, whereas unhappy Labour voters are much more willing to switch directly to the Conservatives - as we saw in the so-called red wall seats. Yet, conversely, determined Tory voters are the more difficult to persuade to vote tactically.
We saw exactly the opposite in 2010, when the Labour government was unpopular but the majority of those moving away from Labour moved to the LDs which is why they got so many MPs.
Red Wall movement was 'away from labour' because of Corbyn and 'to Conservative' because of Boris & Brexit. In that sense 2019 was an outlier.
The LibDems lost five seats in 2010, and their vote share was only up 1%.
Who are these 100K people who can get benefit but have no obligation to look for work?
Hunt seems to have just told Radio 4 that it is not people with illness or disability.
Partners of someone who is working full time?
I'm not certain on this but believe since Universal Credit is applied for as a family and not as individuals, if one partner works full time I'm guessing there is no requirement for the other to do so since the partner has already met the obligation to work.
What would Hunt propose? That someone working full time is denied universal credit despite working full time unless their partner does too?
Doesn't matter, since very little of this is going to happen before the next election. And then, it's pretty unlikely that it won't happen at all.
(See also: MOBILE PHONES TO BE BANNED IN SCHOOLS in today's Mail. Which has already melted down to GOVERNMENT TO ISSUE GUIDANCE.)
I don't see why any school wouldn't just insist on pupils handing in their phones at the start of the day and then giving them back at the end quite honestly.
The target is for it to be 2/3 of the median wage by next October. In a government that overall aspires to disappointing this is a real success story in terms of making work pay and reducing income inequality.
I wouldn't want to criticise any increase in the minimum wage but the 2/3 median wage target seems to represent more the downgrading of other work in the economy, it is being gradually bought down to minimum wage levels in a comparative sense. The marginal tax (Income tax, NI) that you pay for every pound above the minimum wage is quite significant, particularly if you are paying off a student loan.
Whilst purporting to be reducing 'income inequality' the one thing the government are noticeably not doing is adding more taxes to income from wealth. It is creating a structure whereby the gap between the workers and the capitalists increases. It is a contrast to here in Finland where the taxes on wealth are similar to the taxes on employment. Therefore more money is raised to provide things like free university education and council house building, along with many other advantages for the working age population who pay similar levels of tax to people in the UK.
Like politics, all pay is relative. An £11 minimum wage is £22k pa for a 40 hour week. Some routine jobs are not complicated, interact constantly with civilised and polite folk, and have little responsibility (which is not a problem - that's life). However lots of jobs that are difficult, arduous, back breaking, interface with monsters, keep you awake all night, shouty, complex and full of blame pay between say 22 and 28k pa.
A problem will always therefore develop from the fact that you can do OK in much of the UK as a couple on minimum wage (£44k pa) and actually have a nicer life than people earning not much more.
Is this part of the background to the outbreak of strikes from junior professionals and others?
A lot of high skilled, degree level jobs in the public sector, particularly local councils are paying only slightly above minimum wage, say £26k. You are responsible for some quite heavy stuff that can blow up quickly in your face and often there is no support, your manager just complains about you. I've seen this quite a bit, people starting and then saying 'no thanks' after about 3 months. The problem then is that you find out you are on a path to nowhere. If you don't get promoted you may be on £30k after 10 years. Why not just go and drive a van or make people coffee?
Exactly. Another issue is that the £22K minimum wage person will be paying tax and NI on 9-10K of that sum, meaning that the lowest paid FT workers are paying £3K or so in tax/NI.
There is an absurdity about saying that the lowest you can earn for a FT job ('living wage') is an amount which attracts thousands in IT and NI.
And of course absurd that the tax rate on low incomes is so high, while the marginal rate on the richest isn't much more.
I was chatting to a LibDem friend (also a stand-holder at the Tory conference) about tactical voting, and we looked at the plausible situation that Labour wins some sort of overall majority while the LIbDems gain say 20 more seats from tactical voting. Labour then has 4-5 years in power amid unpromising economic conditions and could become quite unpopular. The LibDems will then want to attack the Government, as all Opposition parties do, and will try to get Tory tactical votes on the basis that "only the LibDems can beat Labour". The problem will then be that "loaned" Labour votes this time (who may poll as Labour but vote LibDem in 2024) will then recoil.
Polling the cross-currents will then become *remarkably* difficult.
Going back very many decades, the Liberals and now LibDems do better when a Conservative government is unpopular than when a Labour government is unpopular. The principal reason for this is that there are many unhappy Tories who nevertheless baulk at switching to Labour, whereas unhappy Labour voters are much more willing to switch directly to the Conservatives - as we saw in the so-called red wall seats. Yet, conversely, determined Tory voters are the more difficult to persuade to vote tactically.
We saw exactly the opposite in 2010, when the Labour government was unpopular but the majority of those moving away from Labour moved to the LDs which is why they got so many MPs.
Red Wall movement was 'away from labour' because of Corbyn and 'to Conservative' because of Boris & Brexit. In that sense 2019 was an outlier.
The LibDems lost five seats in 2010, and their vote share was only up 1%.
Yes the Lib Dems best election was 2005 when there was a "pox on both your houses" attitude and the Tories won more votes than Labour across England, but the seats played out differently.
The PM is rich? So what. He is leader of the Conservative Party not a Corbynite Marxist sect.
What voters want to see is their own economic circumstances improve which he and Hunt are doing by cutting inflation and growing the economy and hopefully in due course cutting tax as well.
As for getting rid of Rishi, barely more than a year ago OGH was telling Tories to get rid of Boris in favour of Rishi!
Cutting inflation is not a sufficient condition for people to "see their own economic circumstances improve". What matters to most people is the difference between their income inflation and price inflation. Inflation is still high.
We're not going destitute as fast as we were, darling. I think i'll vote conservative now.
And don't forget the cumulative effect - it will be quite some time before real wages are back where they were before Sunak got in.
Yes. We're just off the back of 20 straight months of CPI inflation being above wage inflation. We've had one month with wages going up faster than CPI. So even if every month is the mirror of the months before, we'll still be worse off than we were in October 2021 by the time the election comes around.
Especially thanks to fiscal drag.
Real take-home wages are still falling currently, even with nominal wages growing faster than inflation.
You’re in danger of post hoc data mining
Wages aren’t growing!
Oops.
Real wages aren’t growing! 😁
Fuck!
Shit! Umm! Fiscal drag, thats’s it. Fiscal drag!
Realtake-home wages aren’t growing! 😁
Excuse me but I've been banging the drum on fiscal drag and opposed it since it was announced. I'm entirely consistent.
And of course I was a loyal Tory until Sunak started putting up taxes like National Insurance and fiscal drag.
I have my principles. I believe people should be able to keep more of their own income they work for. The Tories used to believe that too.
I haven't left the Tories, Sunak's Tories have left me.
I'm sure Rishi wants lower taxes. But he wants them in the same way that St Augustine wanted chastity.
(Unless he can find ways of cutting government spending on a recurring basis, I'd rather it was funded by taxes than borrowing. The mix of taxes he's using is a disgrace, though.)
Two questions.
How can you talk tax cuts when borrowing £100billion+ a year.
Why are we borrowing £100 billion this year instead of balancing the books now the pandemic is over?
There is nothing wrong with borrowing if you are using the money to invest eg in infrastructure or education where the return is substantially greater than the interest on the borrowing.
We have plenty of borrowing headroom. The national debt is about one year's GDP. Individuals often have mortgage debt of up to three time annual salary and find it sustainable. Plenty of headroom.
But to borrow to cut taxes is severely damaging and driven by ideology.
So I agree with your first sentence but not your second.
Currently we are paying nearly £100 billion pa in debt interest. I think you are suggesting that it is sustainable to be paying much much more than that. How much is too much?
The target is for it to be 2/3 of the median wage by next October. In a government that overall aspires to disappointing this is a real success story in terms of making work pay and reducing income inequality.
I wouldn't want to criticise any increase in the minimum wage but the 2/3 median wage target seems to represent more the downgrading of other work in the economy, it is being gradually bought down to minimum wage levels in a comparative sense. The marginal tax (Income tax, NI) that you pay for every pound above the minimum wage is quite significant, particularly if you are paying off a student loan.
Whilst purporting to be reducing 'income inequality' the one thing the government are noticeably not doing is adding more taxes to income from wealth. It is creating a structure whereby the gap between the workers and the capitalists increases. It is a contrast to here in Finland where the taxes on wealth are similar to the taxes on employment. Therefore more money is raised to provide things like free university education and council house building, along with many other advantages for the working age population who pay similar levels of tax to people in the UK.
Like politics, all pay is relative. An £11 minimum wage is £22k pa for a 40 hour week. Some routine jobs are not complicated, interact constantly with civilised and polite folk, and have little responsibility (which is not a problem - that's life). However lots of jobs that are difficult, arduous, back breaking, interface with monsters, keep you awake all night, shouty, complex and full of blame pay between say 22 and 28k pa.
A problem will always therefore develop from the fact that you can do OK in much of the UK as a couple on minimum wage (£44k pa) and actually have a nicer life than people earning not much more.
Is this part of the background to the outbreak of strikes from junior professionals and others?
A lot of high skilled, degree level jobs in the public sector, particularly local councils are paying only slightly above minimum wage, say £26k. You are responsible for some quite heavy stuff that can blow up quickly in your face and often there is no support, your manager just complains about you. I've seen this quite a bit, people starting and then saying 'no thanks' after about 3 months. The problem then is that you find out you are on a path to nowhere. If you don't get promoted you may be on £30k after 10 years. Why not just go and drive a van or make people coffee?
Exactly. Another issue is that the £22K minimum wage person will be paying tax and NI on 9-10K of that sum, meaning that the lowest paid FT workers are paying £3K or so in tax/NI.
There is an absurdity about saying that the lowest you can earn for a FT job ('living wage') is an amount which attracts thousands in IT and NI.
And of course absurd that the tax rate on low incomes is so high, while the marginal rate on the richest isn't much more.
If the lowest earners are getting UC then their real marginal tax rate is about 80%
Between UC taper for low earners, the taper at 50k and the taper at 100k you have to be amongst the richest to avoid the risk of 80% plus marginal tax rates.
The contrast between Boris (moderately rich* by most people’s standards, and definitely v posh) and Rishi (a bit posh and global-elite level wealth) is interesting.
There is a bit of old-money/new money in this, but Boris understood that by translating these characteristics into a Beano character made it easier for people to accept and move past these things (ultimately, being a caricature mean that his personal fundamentals became visible in the end, and time ran out, but he got a bloody good run out of it).
Rishi, with his exam-cramming day-boy vibe, his gimpy voice and lack of charisma can’t play the same trick, so he is perceived (a bit unfairly) as out of touch Rishi Rich; Ed Miliband with added billions.
*I’m aware that he is likely an absolute car wreck of personal finance, but he still has far more access to money - whether paid in exchange for old-rope news columns or borrowed from chums - than the average person could dream of.
The PM is rich? So what. He is leader of the Conservative Party not a Corbynite Marxist sect.
What voters want to see is their own economic circumstances improve which he and Hunt are doing by cutting inflation and growing the economy and hopefully in due course cutting tax as well.
As for getting rid of Rishi, barely more than a year ago OGH was telling Tories to get rid of Boris in favour of Rishi!
Cutting inflation is not a sufficient condition for people to "see their own economic circumstances improve". What matters to most people is the difference between their income inflation and price inflation. Inflation is still high.
We're not going destitute as fast as we were, darling. I think i'll vote conservative now.
And don't forget the cumulative effect - it will be quite some time before real wages are back where they were before Sunak got in.
Yes. We're just off the back of 20 straight months of CPI inflation being above wage inflation. We've had one month with wages going up faster than CPI. So even if every month is the mirror of the months before, we'll still be worse off than we were in October 2021 by the time the election comes around.
Especially thanks to fiscal drag.
Real take-home wages are still falling currently, even with nominal wages growing faster than inflation.
You’re in danger of post hoc data mining
Wages aren’t growing!
Oops.
Real wages aren’t growing! 😁
Fuck!
Shit! Umm! Fiscal drag, thats’s it. Fiscal drag!
Realtake-home wages aren’t growing! 😁
Excuse me but I've been banging the drum on fiscal drag and opposed it since it was announced. I'm entirely consistent.
And of course I was a loyal Tory until Sunak started putting up taxes like National Insurance and fiscal drag.
I have my principles. I believe people should be able to keep more of their own income they work for. The Tories used to believe that too.
I haven't left the Tories, Sunak's Tories have left me.
I'm sure Rishi wants lower taxes. But he wants them in the same way that St Augustine wanted chastity.
(Unless he can find ways of cutting government spending on a recurring basis, I'd rather it was funded by taxes than borrowing. The mix of taxes he's using is a disgrace, though.)
Two questions.
How can you talk tax cuts when borrowing £100billion+ a year.
Why are we borrowing £100 billion this year instead of balancing the books now the pandemic is over?
There is nothing wrong with borrowing if you are using the money to invest eg in infrastructure or education where the return is substantially greater than the interest on the borrowing.
We have plenty of borrowing headroom. The national debt is about one year's GDP. Individuals often have mortgage debt of up to three time annual salary and find it sustainable. Plenty of headroom.
But to borrow to cut taxes is severely damaging and driven by ideology.
So I agree with your first sentence but not your second.
Pretty much the entire deficit is due to interest payments on government debt. So Britain would be in a much better place if it wasn't having to service so much debt. It doesn't make much sense to me to add even more debt, and even more future debt interest payments, particularly when the future demographic challenges means that it becomes harder to service debts in the future, with an ageing population, and a shrinking global population.
And besides all that, after the experience of the Truss Calamity, I'm amazed that anyone could think that Britain has any headroom to borrow more. The market response showed that there wasn't much appetite to lend Britain more money, nor confidence in Britain being able to service larger debts.
Worked out over the weekend that my newly-graduated daughter is paying a higher tax rate on her income (20% basic rate + 9% student loans graduate tax + 12 % national insurance = 41%) than my Dad is on his pension (40% higher rate of income tax). Absolutely insane.
The PM is rich? So what. He is leader of the Conservative Party not a Corbynite Marxist sect.
What voters want to see is their own economic circumstances improve which he and Hunt are doing by cutting inflation and growing the economy and hopefully in due course cutting tax as well.
As for getting rid of Rishi, barely more than a year ago OGH was telling Tories to get rid of Boris in favour of Rishi!
Cutting inflation is not a sufficient condition for people to "see their own economic circumstances improve". What matters to most people is the difference between their income inflation and price inflation. Inflation is still high.
We're not going destitute as fast as we were, darling. I think i'll vote conservative now.
And don't forget the cumulative effect - it will be quite some time before real wages are back where they were before Sunak got in.
Yes. We're just off the back of 20 straight months of CPI inflation being above wage inflation. We've had one month with wages going up faster than CPI. So even if every month is the mirror of the months before, we'll still be worse off than we were in October 2021 by the time the election comes around.
Especially thanks to fiscal drag.
Real take-home wages are still falling currently, even with nominal wages growing faster than inflation.
You’re in danger of post hoc data mining
Wages aren’t growing!
Oops.
Real wages aren’t growing! 😁
Fuck!
Shit! Umm! Fiscal drag, thats’s it. Fiscal drag!
Realtake-home wages aren’t growing! 😁
A lot of people are really struggling with paying bills, and if they're coming to an end of a fixed term mortgage deal any time soon, they're going to be proper fucked. Falling inflation means nothing when you're already skint. Sunak being mega loaded at a time of financial crisis for most of the population won't help his chances at the election booth. Not his fault he married well, but them's the breaks.
Most of the Sunaks’ wealth comes from Rishi’s father-in-law, not from his own or his wife’s actions.
Why is that a negative?
Andy was equating Sunak’s wealth with success. Success implies the wealth was earned. Getting rich because your father-in-law gave you lots of money is not what people generally mean by success in this context.
The PM is rich? So what. He is leader of the Conservative Party not a Corbynite Marxist sect.
What voters want to see is their own economic circumstances improve which he and Hunt are doing by cutting inflation and growing the economy and hopefully in due course cutting tax as well.
As for getting rid of Rishi, barely more than a year ago OGH was telling Tories to get rid of Boris in favour of Rishi!
Cutting inflation is not a sufficient condition for people to "see their own economic circumstances improve". What matters to most people is the difference between their income inflation and price inflation. Inflation is still high.
We're not going destitute as fast as we were, darling. I think i'll vote conservative now.
And don't forget the cumulative effect - it will be quite some time before real wages are back where they were before Sunak got in.
Yes. We're just off the back of 20 straight months of CPI inflation being above wage inflation. We've had one month with wages going up faster than CPI. So even if every month is the mirror of the months before, we'll still be worse off than we were in October 2021 by the time the election comes around.
Especially thanks to fiscal drag.
Real take-home wages are still falling currently, even with nominal wages growing faster than inflation.
You’re in danger of post hoc data mining
Wages aren’t growing!
Oops.
Real wages aren’t growing! 😁
Fuck!
Shit! Umm! Fiscal drag, thats’s it. Fiscal drag!
Realtake-home wages aren’t growing! 😁
Excuse me but I've been banging the drum on fiscal drag and opposed it since it was announced. I'm entirely consistent.
And of course I was a loyal Tory until Sunak started putting up taxes like National Insurance and fiscal drag.
I have my principles. I believe people should be able to keep more of their own income they work for. The Tories used to believe that too.
I haven't left the Tories, Sunak's Tories have left me.
I'm sure Rishi wants lower taxes. But he wants them in the same way that St Augustine wanted chastity.
(Unless he can find ways of cutting government spending on a recurring basis, I'd rather it was funded by taxes than borrowing. The mix of taxes he's using is a disgrace, though.)
Two questions.
How can you talk tax cuts when borrowing £100billion+ a year.
Why are we borrowing £100 billion this year instead of balancing the books now the pandemic is over?
There is nothing wrong with borrowing if you are using the money to invest eg in infrastructure or education where the return is substantially greater than the interest on the borrowing.
We have plenty of borrowing headroom. The national debt is about one year's GDP. Individuals often have mortgage debt of up to three time annual salary and find it sustainable. Plenty of headroom.
But to borrow to cut taxes is severely damaging and driven by ideology.
So I agree with your first sentence but not your second.
Currently we are paying nearly £100 billion pa in debt interest. I think you are suggesting that it is sustainable to be paying much much more than that. How much is too much?
There's no precise figure, but this makes sense: There is nothing wrong with borrowing...where the return is substantially greater than the interest on the borrowing.
How you define 'substantially' is up to you, but the basic argument that we should not cut investment which is highly likely show a significant positive return, is a decent one. And not a bad test for which capital projects ought to be prioritised.
Who are these 100K people who can get benefit but have no obligation to look for work?
Hunt seems to have just told Radio 4 that it is not people with illness or disability.
Partners of someone who is working full time?
I'm not certain on this but believe since Universal Credit is applied for as a family and not as individuals, if one partner works full time I'm guessing there is no requirement for the other to do so since the partner has already met the obligation to work.
What would Hunt propose? That someone working full time is denied universal credit despite working full time unless their partner does too?
Doesn't matter, since very little of this is going to happen before the next election. And then, it's pretty unlikely that it won't happen at all.
(See also: MOBILE PHONES TO BE BANNED IN SCHOOLS in today's Mail. Which has already melted down to GOVERNMENT TO ISSUE GUIDANCE.)
It's the headline that is important. No one sees the rowback 3 days later on page 12.
As it's been promised a couple of times before, such promises are, like changes of PM, subject to the law of diminishing returns.
The PM is rich? So what. He is leader of the Conservative Party not a Corbynite Marxist sect.
What voters want to see is their own economic circumstances improve which he and Hunt are doing by cutting inflation and growing the economy and hopefully in due course cutting tax as well.
As for getting rid of Rishi, barely more than a year ago OGH was telling Tories to get rid of Boris in favour of Rishi!
Cutting inflation is not a sufficient condition for people to "see their own economic circumstances improve". What matters to most people is the difference between their income inflation and price inflation. Inflation is still high.
We're not going destitute as fast as we were, darling. I think i'll vote conservative now.
And don't forget the cumulative effect - it will be quite some time before real wages are back where they were before Sunak got in.
Yes. We're just off the back of 20 straight months of CPI inflation being above wage inflation. We've had one month with wages going up faster than CPI. So even if every month is the mirror of the months before, we'll still be worse off than we were in October 2021 by the time the election comes around.
Especially thanks to fiscal drag.
Real take-home wages are still falling currently, even with nominal wages growing faster than inflation.
You’re in danger of post hoc data mining
Wages aren’t growing!
Oops.
Real wages aren’t growing! 😁
Fuck!
Shit! Umm! Fiscal drag, thats’s it. Fiscal drag!
Realtake-home wages aren’t growing! 😁
Excuse me but I've been banging the drum on fiscal drag and opposed it since it was announced. I'm entirely consistent.
And of course I was a loyal Tory until Sunak started putting up taxes like National Insurance and fiscal drag.
I have my principles. I believe people should be able to keep more of their own income they work for. The Tories used to believe that too.
I haven't left the Tories, Sunak's Tories have left me.
Though you did also vote for Blair so not that loyal a Tory even before Sunak
The target is for it to be 2/3 of the median wage by next October. In a government that overall aspires to disappointing this is a real success story in terms of making work pay and reducing income inequality.
I wouldn't want to criticise any increase in the minimum wage but the 2/3 median wage target seems to represent more the downgrading of other work in the economy, it is being gradually bought down to minimum wage levels in a comparative sense. The marginal tax (Income tax, NI) that you pay for every pound above the minimum wage is quite significant, particularly if you are paying off a student loan.
Whilst purporting to be reducing 'income inequality' the one thing the government are noticeably not doing is adding more taxes to income from wealth. It is creating a structure whereby the gap between the workers and the capitalists increases. It is a contrast to here in Finland where the taxes on wealth are similar to the taxes on employment. Therefore more money is raised to provide things like free university education and council house building, along with many other advantages for the working age population who pay similar levels of tax to people in the UK.
Like politics, all pay is relative. An £11 minimum wage is £22k pa for a 40 hour week. Some routine jobs are not complicated, interact constantly with civilised and polite folk, and have little responsibility (which is not a problem - that's life). However lots of jobs that are difficult, arduous, back breaking, interface with monsters, keep you awake all night, shouty, complex and full of blame pay between say 22 and 28k pa.
A problem will always therefore develop from the fact that you can do OK in much of the UK as a couple on minimum wage (£44k pa) and actually have a nicer life than people earning not much more.
Is this part of the background to the outbreak of strikes from junior professionals and others?
A lot of high skilled, degree level jobs in the public sector, particularly local councils are paying only slightly above minimum wage, say £26k. You are responsible for some quite heavy stuff that can blow up quickly in your face and often there is no support, your manager just complains about you. I've seen this quite a bit, people starting and then saying 'no thanks' after about 3 months. The problem then is that you find out you are on a path to nowhere. If you don't get promoted you may be on £30k after 10 years. Why not just go and drive a van or make people coffee?
Exactly. Another issue is that the £22K minimum wage person will be paying tax and NI on 9-10K of that sum, meaning that the lowest paid FT workers are paying £3K or so in tax/NI.
There is an absurdity about saying that the lowest you can earn for a FT job ('living wage') is an amount which attracts thousands in IT and NI.
And of course absurd that the tax rate on low incomes is so high, while the marginal rate on the richest isn't much more.
The lowest earners were taken out of income tax by the Coalition
Who are these 100K people who can get benefit but have no obligation to look for work?
Hunt seems to have just told Radio 4 that it is not people with illness or disability.
Partners of someone who is working full time?
I'm not certain on this but believe since Universal Credit is applied for as a family and not as individuals, if one partner works full time I'm guessing there is no requirement for the other to do so since the partner has already met the obligation to work.
What would Hunt propose? That someone working full time is denied universal credit despite working full time unless their partner does too?
Doesn't matter, since very little of this is going to happen before the next election. And then, it's pretty unlikely that it won't happen at all.
(See also: MOBILE PHONES TO BE BANNED IN SCHOOLS in today's Mail. Which has already melted down to GOVERNMENT TO ISSUE GUIDANCE.)
I don't see why any school wouldn't just insist on pupils handing in their phones at the start of the day and then giving them back at the end quite honestly.
We should be doing the opposite. In the modern world the mobile phone is a useful tool - young people should be taught in schools healthy phone usage habits as well as how to best use their phones in a work setting. I use my personal phone all the time for meetings and note taking; others have company phones to keep in touch with clients and also sent and receive emails. If young people only associate their phones with binge watching the newest netflix show, or scrolling on tiktok and instagram all day - that's bad.
Who are these 100K people who can get benefit but have no obligation to look for work?
Hunt seems to have just told Radio 4 that it is not people with illness or disability.
Those on sickness benefits who are capable of some work, including working from home as Mel Stride says
That doesn't make sense at all. Being on SB by definition means one can't do work full stop. So either that is a fib or the organization has been very badly run. And that is under the existing criteria already - remember, this is an organization which demands that people with trisomy 21 have an interview every now and then to see if they are miraculously cured.
Rather, it is seemingly more of the same old same old.
But we don't really know till the autumn statement.
"One option under consideration involves closing the claims of those who have six months or more of a “nil award” – which can happen if someone is persistently sanctioned or no longer qualifies.
Under this plan, the claimant would then be barred from making a new claim for a certain period, as a means of trying to get people to stick to their “claimant commitment” that sets out how they should engage with looking for work."
Looking at Whitestone's website, this is an example of yet another pollster set up to poll on specific subjects. Historically pollsters used political opinion polling as a loss-leader to advertise their skillsets and abilities in other sectors. They knew a lot about polling and cared about getting it right[1]. The growth in the 2020s of pollsters with a different set of motives is a bit worrying.
[1] The fact that that was not enough to prevent some horrendously bad calls is a different conversation
The target is for it to be 2/3 of the median wage by next October. In a government that overall aspires to disappointing this is a real success story in terms of making work pay and reducing income inequality.
I wouldn't want to criticise any increase in the minimum wage but the 2/3 median wage target seems to represent more the downgrading of other work in the economy, it is being gradually bought down to minimum wage levels in a comparative sense. The marginal tax (Income tax, NI) that you pay for every pound above the minimum wage is quite significant, particularly if you are paying off a student loan.
Whilst purporting to be reducing 'income inequality' the one thing the government are noticeably not doing is adding more taxes to income from wealth. It is creating a structure whereby the gap between the workers and the capitalists increases. It is a contrast to here in Finland where the taxes on wealth are similar to the taxes on employment. Therefore more money is raised to provide things like free university education and council house building, along with many other advantages for the working age population who pay similar levels of tax to people in the UK.
Like politics, all pay is relative. An £11 minimum wage is £22k pa for a 40 hour week. Some routine jobs are not complicated, interact constantly with civilised and polite folk, and have little responsibility (which is not a problem - that's life). However lots of jobs that are difficult, arduous, back breaking, interface with monsters, keep you awake all night, shouty, complex and full of blame pay between say 22 and 28k pa.
A problem will always therefore develop from the fact that you can do OK in much of the UK as a couple on minimum wage (£44k pa) and actually have a nicer life than people earning not much more.
Is this part of the background to the outbreak of strikes from junior professionals and others?
A lot of high skilled, degree level jobs in the public sector, particularly local councils are paying only slightly above minimum wage, say £26k. You are responsible for some quite heavy stuff that can blow up quickly in your face and often there is no support, your manager just complains about you. I've seen this quite a bit, people starting and then saying 'no thanks' after about 3 months. The problem then is that you find out you are on a path to nowhere. If you don't get promoted you may be on £30k after 10 years. Why not just go and drive a van or make people coffee?
For most of the last decade the average public sector worker has sent more than the average private sector worker and had a better pension and generally more flexible working.
The highest skilled earn more in the private sector but for most others the public sector has many advantages
The target is for it to be 2/3 of the median wage by next October. In a government that overall aspires to disappointing this is a real success story in terms of making work pay and reducing income inequality.
I wouldn't want to criticise any increase in the minimum wage but the 2/3 median wage target seems to represent more the downgrading of other work in the economy, it is being gradually bought down to minimum wage levels in a comparative sense. The marginal tax (Income tax, NI) that you pay for every pound above the minimum wage is quite significant, particularly if you are paying off a student loan.
Whilst purporting to be reducing 'income inequality' the one thing the government are noticeably not doing is adding more taxes to income from wealth. It is creating a structure whereby the gap between the workers and the capitalists increases. It is a contrast to here in Finland where the taxes on wealth are similar to the taxes on employment. Therefore more money is raised to provide things like free university education and council house building, along with many other advantages for the working age population who pay similar levels of tax to people in the UK.
Like politics, all pay is relative. An £11 minimum wage is £22k pa for a 40 hour week. Some routine jobs are not complicated, interact constantly with civilised and polite folk, and have little responsibility (which is not a problem - that's life). However lots of jobs that are difficult, arduous, back breaking, interface with monsters, keep you awake all night, shouty, complex and full of blame pay between say 22 and 28k pa.
A problem will always therefore develop from the fact that you can do OK in much of the UK as a couple on minimum wage (£44k pa) and actually have a nicer life than people earning not much more.
Is this part of the background to the outbreak of strikes from junior professionals and others?
A lot of high skilled, degree level jobs in the public sector, particularly local councils are paying only slightly above minimum wage, say £26k. You are responsible for some quite heavy stuff that can blow up quickly in your face and often there is no support, your manager just complains about you. I've seen this quite a bit, people starting and then saying 'no thanks' after about 3 months. The problem then is that you find out you are on a path to nowhere. If you don't get promoted you may be on £30k after 10 years. Why not just go and drive a van or make people coffee?
Exactly. Another issue is that the £22K minimum wage person will be paying tax and NI on 9-10K of that sum, meaning that the lowest paid FT workers are paying £3K or so in tax/NI.
There is an absurdity about saying that the lowest you can earn for a FT job ('living wage') is an amount which attracts thousands in IT and NI.
And of course absurd that the tax rate on low incomes is so high, while the marginal rate on the richest isn't much more.
The lowest earners were taken out of income tax by the Coalition
And look what happens when the LDs pulled out. Years of fiscal drag and the lowest earners shovelled back into tax.
The PM is rich? So what. He is leader of the Conservative Party not a Corbynite Marxist sect.
What voters want to see is their own economic circumstances improve which he and Hunt are doing by cutting inflation and growing the economy and hopefully in due course cutting tax as well.
As for getting rid of Rishi, barely more than a year ago OGH was telling Tories to get rid of Boris in favour of Rishi!
Cutting inflation is not a sufficient condition for people to "see their own economic circumstances improve". What matters to most people is the difference between their income inflation and price inflation. Inflation is still high.
We're not going destitute as fast as we were, darling. I think i'll vote conservative now.
And don't forget the cumulative effect - it will be quite some time before real wages are back where they were before Sunak got in.
Yes. We're just off the back of 20 straight months of CPI inflation being above wage inflation. We've had one month with wages going up faster than CPI. So even if every month is the mirror of the months before, we'll still be worse off than we were in October 2021 by the time the election comes around.
Especially thanks to fiscal drag.
Real take-home wages are still falling currently, even with nominal wages growing faster than inflation.
You’re in danger of post hoc data mining
Wages aren’t growing!
Oops.
Real wages aren’t growing! 😁
Fuck!
Shit! Umm! Fiscal drag, thats’s it. Fiscal drag!
Realtake-home wages aren’t growing! 😁
Excuse me but I've been banging the drum on fiscal drag and opposed it since it was announced. I'm entirely consistent.
And of course I was a loyal Tory until Sunak started putting up taxes like National Insurance and fiscal drag.
I have my principles. I believe people should be able to keep more of their own income they work for. The Tories used to believe that too.
I haven't left the Tories, Sunak's Tories have left me.
I'm sure Rishi wants lower taxes. But he wants them in the same way that St Augustine wanted chastity.
(Unless he can find ways of cutting government spending on a recurring basis, I'd rather it was funded by taxes than borrowing. The mix of taxes he's using is a disgrace, though.)
Two questions.
How can you talk tax cuts when borrowing £100billion+ a year.
Why are we borrowing £100 billion this year instead of balancing the books now the pandemic is over?
There is nothing wrong with borrowing if you are using the money to invest eg in infrastructure or education where the return is substantially greater than the interest on the borrowing.
We have plenty of borrowing headroom. The national debt is about one year's GDP. Individuals often have mortgage debt of up to three time annual salary and find it sustainable. Plenty of headroom.
But to borrow to cut taxes is severely damaging and driven by ideology.
So I agree with your first sentence but not your second.
Currently we are paying nearly £100 billion pa in debt interest. I think you are suggesting that it is sustainable to be paying much much more than that. How much is too much?
The government tax take is about £1,000 billion pa. So the interest payment is about 10% of income.
If you have a mortgage, what % of your annual pay does the interest on the mortgage represent? The average UK mortgage is about £200,000. which is much more than 100% of average income. The interest payment of say £10,000 pa is 20-25% of average income of mortgage holders.
So to answer your question, I think £200 billion in debt interest is getting a bit high. Plenty of headroom at the moment.
But you have to invest the extra borrowing for a good return and not just fritter it away in tax cuts and consumer spending. Even that has some economic return in boosting the economy but capital investment should take priority for any extra borrowing.
The target is for it to be 2/3 of the median wage by next October. In a government that overall aspires to disappointing this is a real success story in terms of making work pay and reducing income inequality.
I wouldn't want to criticise any increase in the minimum wage but the 2/3 median wage target seems to represent more the downgrading of other work in the economy, it is being gradually bought down to minimum wage levels in a comparative sense. The marginal tax (Income tax, NI) that you pay for every pound above the minimum wage is quite significant, particularly if you are paying off a student loan.
Whilst purporting to be reducing 'income inequality' the one thing the government are noticeably not doing is adding more taxes to income from wealth. It is creating a structure whereby the gap between the workers and the capitalists increases. It is a contrast to here in Finland where the taxes on wealth are similar to the taxes on employment. Therefore more money is raised to provide things like free university education and council house building, along with many other advantages for the working age population who pay similar levels of tax to people in the UK.
Like politics, all pay is relative. An £11 minimum wage is £22k pa for a 40 hour week. Some routine jobs are not complicated, interact constantly with civilised and polite folk, and have little responsibility (which is not a problem - that's life). However lots of jobs that are difficult, arduous, back breaking, interface with monsters, keep you awake all night, shouty, complex and full of blame pay between say 22 and 28k pa.
A problem will always therefore develop from the fact that you can do OK in much of the UK as a couple on minimum wage (£44k pa) and actually have a nicer life than people earning not much more.
Is this part of the background to the outbreak of strikes from junior professionals and others?
A lot of high skilled, degree level jobs in the public sector, particularly local councils are paying only slightly above minimum wage, say £26k. You are responsible for some quite heavy stuff that can blow up quickly in your face and often there is no support, your manager just complains about you. I've seen this quite a bit, people starting and then saying 'no thanks' after about 3 months. The problem then is that you find out you are on a path to nowhere. If you don't get promoted you may be on £30k after 10 years. Why not just go and drive a van or make people coffee?
Exactly. Another issue is that the £22K minimum wage person will be paying tax and NI on 9-10K of that sum, meaning that the lowest paid FT workers are paying £3K or so in tax/NI.
There is an absurdity about saying that the lowest you can earn for a FT job ('living wage') is an amount which attracts thousands in IT and NI.
And of course absurd that the tax rate on low incomes is so high, while the marginal rate on the richest isn't much more.
The lowest earners were taken out of income tax by the Coalition
Do you actually believe that?
Anyone on full time minimum wage is most definitely paying tax.
Perhaps you mean those earning less than minimum wage? Or part timers?
Who are these 100K people who can get benefit but have no obligation to look for work?
Hunt seems to have just told Radio 4 that it is not people with illness or disability.
Those on sickness benefits who are capable of some work, including working from home as Mel Stride says
That doesn't make sense at all. Being on SB by definition means one can't do work full stop. So either that is a fib or the organization has been very badly run. And that is under the existing criteria already - remember, this is an organization which demands that people with trisomy 21 have an interview every now and then to see if they are miraculously cured.
Rather, it is seemingly more of the same old same old.
But we don't really know till the autumn statement.
"One option under consideration involves closing the claims of those who have six months or more of a “nil award” – which can happen if someone is persistently sanctioned or no longer qualifies.
Under this plan, the claimant would then be barred from making a new claim for a certain period, as a means of trying to get people to stick to their “claimant commitment” that sets out how they should engage with looking for work."
There are millions on long-term sickness benefits, not all of them so disabled they cannot do any work at all
The target is for it to be 2/3 of the median wage by next October. In a government that overall aspires to disappointing this is a real success story in terms of making work pay and reducing income inequality.
I wouldn't want to criticise any increase in the minimum wage but the 2/3 median wage target seems to represent more the downgrading of other work in the economy, it is being gradually bought down to minimum wage levels in a comparative sense. The marginal tax (Income tax, NI) that you pay for every pound above the minimum wage is quite significant, particularly if you are paying off a student loan.
Whilst purporting to be reducing 'income inequality' the one thing the government are noticeably not doing is adding more taxes to income from wealth. It is creating a structure whereby the gap between the workers and the capitalists increases. It is a contrast to here in Finland where the taxes on wealth are similar to the taxes on employment. Therefore more money is raised to provide things like free university education and council house building, along with many other advantages for the working age population who pay similar levels of tax to people in the UK.
Like politics, all pay is relative. An £11 minimum wage is £22k pa for a 40 hour week. Some routine jobs are not complicated, interact constantly with civilised and polite folk, and have little responsibility (which is not a problem - that's life). However lots of jobs that are difficult, arduous, back breaking, interface with monsters, keep you awake all night, shouty, complex and full of blame pay between say 22 and 28k pa.
A problem will always therefore develop from the fact that you can do OK in much of the UK as a couple on minimum wage (£44k pa) and actually have a nicer life than people earning not much more.
Is this part of the background to the outbreak of strikes from junior professionals and others?
A lot of high skilled, degree level jobs in the public sector, particularly local councils are paying only slightly above minimum wage, say £26k. You are responsible for some quite heavy stuff that can blow up quickly in your face and often there is no support, your manager just complains about you. I've seen this quite a bit, people starting and then saying 'no thanks' after about 3 months. The problem then is that you find out you are on a path to nowhere. If you don't get promoted you may be on £30k after 10 years. Why not just go and drive a van or make people coffee?
For most of the last decade the average public sector worker has sent more than the average private sector worker and had a better pension and generally more flexible working.
The highest skilled earn more in the private sector but for most others the public sector has many advantages
Not really - while the public sector may put more into your pension pay hasn't kept place with inflation for the past 13 years so wages are often 30% less than they would be elsewhere..
In reality the only way anyone can keep their pay reasonable is to change employer every few years..
Who are these 100K people who can get benefit but have no obligation to look for work?
Hunt seems to have just told Radio 4 that it is not people with illness or disability.
Partners of someone who is working full time?
I'm not certain on this but believe since Universal Credit is applied for as a family and not as individuals, if one partner works full time I'm guessing there is no requirement for the other to do so since the partner has already met the obligation to work.
What would Hunt propose? That someone working full time is denied universal credit despite working full time unless their partner does too?
Yes, it's based on household income so at certain income levels you go into Light Touch or Working Enough and the Jobcentre stops hassling you to get a better-paid job or more hours. And it's amazing how resistant people can be to this at a time of 10% inflation. This sort of reflects tax credits, where you used to get extra money off HMRC but no-one suggested you might like to earn some more money instead.
The level at which you move into the light-touch group has however been increasing.
So those not required to work include those whose partners earn enough to put them into the light touch or earning enough groups, plus primary carers of a child under 3 (I think) and those caring for a disabled adult or child for more than 35 hours in the week. Plus those deemed too ill to work.
The target is for it to be 2/3 of the median wage by next October. In a government that overall aspires to disappointing this is a real success story in terms of making work pay and reducing income inequality.
I wouldn't want to criticise any increase in the minimum wage but the 2/3 median wage target seems to represent more the downgrading of other work in the economy, it is being gradually bought down to minimum wage levels in a comparative sense. The marginal tax (Income tax, NI) that you pay for every pound above the minimum wage is quite significant, particularly if you are paying off a student loan.
Whilst purporting to be reducing 'income inequality' the one thing the government are noticeably not doing is adding more taxes to income from wealth. It is creating a structure whereby the gap between the workers and the capitalists increases. It is a contrast to here in Finland where the taxes on wealth are similar to the taxes on employment. Therefore more money is raised to provide things like free university education and council house building, along with many other advantages for the working age population who pay similar levels of tax to people in the UK.
Like politics, all pay is relative. An £11 minimum wage is £22k pa for a 40 hour week. Some routine jobs are not complicated, interact constantly with civilised and polite folk, and have little responsibility (which is not a problem - that's life). However lots of jobs that are difficult, arduous, back breaking, interface with monsters, keep you awake all night, shouty, complex and full of blame pay between say 22 and 28k pa.
A problem will always therefore develop from the fact that you can do OK in much of the UK as a couple on minimum wage (£44k pa) and actually have a nicer life than people earning not much more.
Is this part of the background to the outbreak of strikes from junior professionals and others?
A lot of high skilled, degree level jobs in the public sector, particularly local councils are paying only slightly above minimum wage, say £26k. You are responsible for some quite heavy stuff that can blow up quickly in your face and often there is no support, your manager just complains about you. I've seen this quite a bit, people starting and then saying 'no thanks' after about 3 months. The problem then is that you find out you are on a path to nowhere. If you don't get promoted you may be on £30k after 10 years. Why not just go and drive a van or make people coffee?
Exactly. Another issue is that the £22K minimum wage person will be paying tax and NI on 9-10K of that sum, meaning that the lowest paid FT workers are paying £3K or so in tax/NI.
There is an absurdity about saying that the lowest you can earn for a FT job ('living wage') is an amount which attracts thousands in IT and NI.
And of course absurd that the tax rate on low incomes is so high, while the marginal rate on the richest isn't much more.
The lowest earners were taken out of income tax by the Coalition
not any more £11 * 37.50 hours * 52 weeks = £21,450 a year. If you do more than 25 hours a week you will be paying tax...
The target is for it to be 2/3 of the median wage by next October. In a government that overall aspires to disappointing this is a real success story in terms of making work pay and reducing income inequality.
I wouldn't want to criticise any increase in the minimum wage but the 2/3 median wage target seems to represent more the downgrading of other work in the economy, it is being gradually bought down to minimum wage levels in a comparative sense. The marginal tax (Income tax, NI) that you pay for every pound above the minimum wage is quite significant, particularly if you are paying off a student loan.
Whilst purporting to be reducing 'income inequality' the one thing the government are noticeably not doing is adding more taxes to income from wealth. It is creating a structure whereby the gap between the workers and the capitalists increases. It is a contrast to here in Finland where the taxes on wealth are similar to the taxes on employment. Therefore more money is raised to provide things like free university education and council house building, along with many other advantages for the working age population who pay similar levels of tax to people in the UK.
Like politics, all pay is relative. An £11 minimum wage is £22k pa for a 40 hour week. Some routine jobs are not complicated, interact constantly with civilised and polite folk, and have little responsibility (which is not a problem - that's life). However lots of jobs that are difficult, arduous, back breaking, interface with monsters, keep you awake all night, shouty, complex and full of blame pay between say 22 and 28k pa.
A problem will always therefore develop from the fact that you can do OK in much of the UK as a couple on minimum wage (£44k pa) and actually have a nicer life than people earning not much more.
Is this part of the background to the outbreak of strikes from junior professionals and others?
A lot of high skilled, degree level jobs in the public sector, particularly local councils are paying only slightly above minimum wage, say £26k. You are responsible for some quite heavy stuff that can blow up quickly in your face and often there is no support, your manager just complains about you. I've seen this quite a bit, people starting and then saying 'no thanks' after about 3 months. The problem then is that you find out you are on a path to nowhere. If you don't get promoted you may be on £30k after 10 years. Why not just go and drive a van or make people coffee?
For most of the last decade the average public sector worker has sent more than the average private sector worker and had a better pension and generally more flexible working.
The highest skilled earn more in the private sector but for most others the public sector has many advantages
Not really - while the public sector may put more into your pension pay hasn't kept place with inflation for the past 13 years so wages are often 30% less than they would be elsewhere..
In reality the only way anyone can keep their pay reasonable is to change employer every few years..
There are still significant numbers of final salary pension schemes in the public sector, in the private sector they are now virtually non existent
The target is for it to be 2/3 of the median wage by next October. In a government that overall aspires to disappointing this is a real success story in terms of making work pay and reducing income inequality.
I wouldn't want to criticise any increase in the minimum wage but the 2/3 median wage target seems to represent more the downgrading of other work in the economy, it is being gradually bought down to minimum wage levels in a comparative sense. The marginal tax (Income tax, NI) that you pay for every pound above the minimum wage is quite significant, particularly if you are paying off a student loan.
Whilst purporting to be reducing 'income inequality' the one thing the government are noticeably not doing is adding more taxes to income from wealth. It is creating a structure whereby the gap between the workers and the capitalists increases. It is a contrast to here in Finland where the taxes on wealth are similar to the taxes on employment. Therefore more money is raised to provide things like free university education and council house building, along with many other advantages for the working age population who pay similar levels of tax to people in the UK.
Like politics, all pay is relative. An £11 minimum wage is £22k pa for a 40 hour week. Some routine jobs are not complicated, interact constantly with civilised and polite folk, and have little responsibility (which is not a problem - that's life). However lots of jobs that are difficult, arduous, back breaking, interface with monsters, keep you awake all night, shouty, complex and full of blame pay between say 22 and 28k pa.
A problem will always therefore develop from the fact that you can do OK in much of the UK as a couple on minimum wage (£44k pa) and actually have a nicer life than people earning not much more.
Is this part of the background to the outbreak of strikes from junior professionals and others?
A lot of high skilled, degree level jobs in the public sector, particularly local councils are paying only slightly above minimum wage, say £26k. You are responsible for some quite heavy stuff that can blow up quickly in your face and often there is no support, your manager just complains about you. I've seen this quite a bit, people starting and then saying 'no thanks' after about 3 months. The problem then is that you find out you are on a path to nowhere. If you don't get promoted you may be on £30k after 10 years. Why not just go and drive a van or make people coffee?
For most of the last decade the average public sector worker has sent more than the average private sector worker and had a better pension and generally more flexible working.
The highest skilled earn more in the private sector but for most others the public sector has many advantages
Do CCHQ provide you with a Haynes Manual of Conservative Party clichés from which to work?
The PM is rich? So what. He is leader of the Conservative Party not a Corbynite Marxist sect.
What voters want to see is their own economic circumstances improve which he and Hunt are doing by cutting inflation and growing the economy and hopefully in due course cutting tax as well.
As for getting rid of Rishi, barely more than a year ago OGH was telling Tories to get rid of Boris in favour of Rishi!
Cutting inflation is not a sufficient condition for people to "see their own economic circumstances improve". What matters to most people is the difference between their income inflation and price inflation. Inflation is still high.
We're not going destitute as fast as we were, darling. I think i'll vote conservative now.
And don't forget the cumulative effect - it will be quite some time before real wages are back where they were before Sunak got in.
Yes. We're just off the back of 20 straight months of CPI inflation being above wage inflation. We've had one month with wages going up faster than CPI. So even if every month is the mirror of the months before, we'll still be worse off than we were in October 2021 by the time the election comes around.
Especially thanks to fiscal drag.
Real take-home wages are still falling currently, even with nominal wages growing faster than inflation.
You’re in danger of post hoc data mining
Wages aren’t growing!
Oops.
Real wages aren’t growing! 😁
Fuck!
Shit! Umm! Fiscal drag, thats’s it. Fiscal drag!
Realtake-home wages aren’t growing! 😁
Excuse me but I've been banging the drum on fiscal drag and opposed it since it was announced. I'm entirely consistent.
And of course I was a loyal Tory until Sunak started putting up taxes like National Insurance and fiscal drag.
I have my principles. I believe people should be able to keep more of their own income they work for. The Tories used to believe that too.
I haven't left the Tories, Sunak's Tories have left me.
I'm sure Rishi wants lower taxes. But he wants them in the same way that St Augustine wanted chastity.
(Unless he can find ways of cutting government spending on a recurring basis, I'd rather it was funded by taxes than borrowing. The mix of taxes he's using is a disgrace, though.)
Two questions.
How can you talk tax cuts when borrowing £100billion+ a year.
Why are we borrowing £100 billion this year instead of balancing the books now the pandemic is over?
There is nothing wrong with borrowing if you are using the money to invest eg in infrastructure or education where the return is substantially greater than the interest on the borrowing.
We have plenty of borrowing headroom. The national debt is about one year's GDP. Individuals often have mortgage debt of up to three time annual salary and find it sustainable. Plenty of headroom.
But to borrow to cut taxes is severely damaging and driven by ideology.
So I agree with your first sentence but not your second.
Currently we are paying nearly £100 billion pa in debt interest. I think you are suggesting that it is sustainable to be paying much much more than that. How much is too much?
There's no precise figure, but this makes sense: There is nothing wrong with borrowing...where the return is substantially greater than the interest on the borrowing.
How you define 'substantially' is up to you, but the basic argument that we should not cut investment which is highly likely show a significant positive return, is a decent one. And not a bad test for which capital projects ought to be prioritised.
I am no economist, but here is a question. If you are borrowing about enough to pay off the interest on the debt you already have (which is UK government's position), under your formula are you borrowing too much or too little?
Who are these 100K people who can get benefit but have no obligation to look for work?
Hunt seems to have just told Radio 4 that it is not people with illness or disability.
Those on sickness benefits who are capable of some work, including working from home as Mel Stride says
That doesn't make sense at all. Being on SB by definition means one can't do work full stop. So either that is a fib or the organization has been very badly run. And that is under the existing criteria already - remember, this is an organization which demands that people with trisomy 21 have an interview every now and then to see if they are miraculously cured.
Rather, it is seemingly more of the same old same old.
But we don't really know till the autumn statement.
"One option under consideration involves closing the claims of those who have six months or more of a “nil award” – which can happen if someone is persistently sanctioned or no longer qualifies.
Under this plan, the claimant would then be barred from making a new claim for a certain period, as a means of trying to get people to stick to their “claimant commitment” that sets out how they should engage with looking for work."
There are millions on long-term sickness benefits, not all of them so disabled they cannot do any work at all
But not enough to earn a living in a real life job, else they wouldn't be on SB. Can't you see the contradiction in your assertions? You're effectively claiming massive incompetence in your party's government.
The PM is rich? So what. He is leader of the Conservative Party not a Corbynite Marxist sect.
What voters want to see is their own economic circumstances improve which he and Hunt are doing by cutting inflation and growing the economy and hopefully in due course cutting tax as well.
As for getting rid of Rishi, barely more than a year ago OGH was telling Tories to get rid of Boris in favour of Rishi!
Cutting inflation is not a sufficient condition for people to "see their own economic circumstances improve". What matters to most people is the difference between their income inflation and price inflation. Inflation is still high.
We're not going destitute as fast as we were, darling. I think i'll vote conservative now.
And don't forget the cumulative effect - it will be quite some time before real wages are back where they were before Sunak got in.
Yes. We're just off the back of 20 straight months of CPI inflation being above wage inflation. We've had one month with wages going up faster than CPI. So even if every month is the mirror of the months before, we'll still be worse off than we were in October 2021 by the time the election comes around.
Especially thanks to fiscal drag.
Real take-home wages are still falling currently, even with nominal wages growing faster than inflation.
You’re in danger of post hoc data mining
Wages aren’t growing!
Oops.
Real wages aren’t growing! 😁
Fuck!
Shit! Umm! Fiscal drag, thats’s it. Fiscal drag!
Realtake-home wages aren’t growing! 😁
Excuse me but I've been banging the drum on fiscal drag and opposed it since it was announced. I'm entirely consistent.
And of course I was a loyal Tory until Sunak started putting up taxes like National Insurance and fiscal drag.
I have my principles. I believe people should be able to keep more of their own income they work for. The Tories used to believe that too.
I haven't left the Tories, Sunak's Tories have left me.
I'm sure Rishi wants lower taxes. But he wants them in the same way that St Augustine wanted chastity.
(Unless he can find ways of cutting government spending on a recurring basis, I'd rather it was funded by taxes than borrowing. The mix of taxes he's using is a disgrace, though.)
Two questions.
How can you talk tax cuts when borrowing £100billion+ a year.
Why are we borrowing £100 billion this year instead of balancing the books now the pandemic is over?
There is nothing wrong with borrowing if you are using the money to invest eg in infrastructure or education where the return is substantially greater than the interest on the borrowing.
We have plenty of borrowing headroom. The national debt is about one year's GDP. Individuals often have mortgage debt of up to three time annual salary and find it sustainable. Plenty of headroom.
But to borrow to cut taxes is severely damaging and driven by ideology.
So I agree with your first sentence but not your second.
Pretty much the entire deficit is due to interest payments on government debt. So Britain would be in a much better place if it wasn't having to service so much debt. It doesn't make much sense to me to add even more debt, and even more future debt interest payments, particularly when the future demographic challenges means that it becomes harder to service debts in the future, with an ageing population, and a shrinking global population.
And besides all that, after the experience of the Truss Calamity, I'm amazed that anyone could think that Britain has any headroom to borrow more. The market response showed that there wasn't much appetite to lend Britain more money, nor confidence in Britain being able to service larger debts.
Worked out over the weekend that my newly-graduated daughter is paying a higher tax rate on her income (20% basic rate + 9% student loans graduate tax + 12 % national insurance = 41%) than my Dad is on his pension (40% higher rate of income tax). Absolutely insane.
I agree with your last paragraph. It's crazy and unjust.
Truss's problem was borrowing more and simultaneously cutting taxes and promising more to come. The markets agree with me on that one and don't like borrowing to cut taxes.
I also agree with you that it is better if you don't need debt but often you do eg buying a house. The average interest paid on debt by UK companies is13% of income (earnings). It's not at all unusual. I think the fact that £100 billion is a huge number freaks some people out. It needs to be seen in context.
Who are these 100K people who can get benefit but have no obligation to look for work?
Hunt seems to have just told Radio 4 that it is not people with illness or disability.
Those on sickness benefits who are capable of some work, including working from home as Mel Stride says
That doesn't make sense at all. Being on SB by definition means one can't do work full stop. So either that is a fib or the organization has been very badly run. And that is under the existing criteria already - remember, this is an organization which demands that people with trisomy 21 have an interview every now and then to see if they are miraculously cured.
Rather, it is seemingly more of the same old same old.
But we don't really know till the autumn statement.
"One option under consideration involves closing the claims of those who have six months or more of a “nil award” – which can happen if someone is persistently sanctioned or no longer qualifies.
Under this plan, the claimant would then be barred from making a new claim for a certain period, as a means of trying to get people to stick to their “claimant commitment” that sets out how they should engage with looking for work."
The current sickness benefit rules are written that way, but I don't think it's a useful way to do it. Sickness for many people will be on a sliding scale, where they might be able to work a bit, if a workplace is accommodating to them. Or they might have had days and better days, so find it hard to keep to a work schedule, but could do some work on their better days.
A non-punitive system that was more flexible, rather than the binary sick/not-sick system currently used would be a lot better. Not that it sounds like the Tories are aiming for that.
The target is for it to be 2/3 of the median wage by next October. In a government that overall aspires to disappointing this is a real success story in terms of making work pay and reducing income inequality.
I wouldn't want to criticise any increase in the minimum wage but the 2/3 median wage target seems to represent more the downgrading of other work in the economy, it is being gradually bought down to minimum wage levels in a comparative sense. The marginal tax (Income tax, NI) that you pay for every pound above the minimum wage is quite significant, particularly if you are paying off a student loan.
Whilst purporting to be reducing 'income inequality' the one thing the government are noticeably not doing is adding more taxes to income from wealth. It is creating a structure whereby the gap between the workers and the capitalists increases. It is a contrast to here in Finland where the taxes on wealth are similar to the taxes on employment. Therefore more money is raised to provide things like free university education and council house building, along with many other advantages for the working age population who pay similar levels of tax to people in the UK.
Like politics, all pay is relative. An £11 minimum wage is £22k pa for a 40 hour week. Some routine jobs are not complicated, interact constantly with civilised and polite folk, and have little responsibility (which is not a problem - that's life). However lots of jobs that are difficult, arduous, back breaking, interface with monsters, keep you awake all night, shouty, complex and full of blame pay between say 22 and 28k pa.
A problem will always therefore develop from the fact that you can do OK in much of the UK as a couple on minimum wage (£44k pa) and actually have a nicer life than people earning not much more.
Is this part of the background to the outbreak of strikes from junior professionals and others?
A lot of high skilled, degree level jobs in the public sector, particularly local councils are paying only slightly above minimum wage, say £26k. You are responsible for some quite heavy stuff that can blow up quickly in your face and often there is no support, your manager just complains about you. I've seen this quite a bit, people starting and then saying 'no thanks' after about 3 months. The problem then is that you find out you are on a path to nowhere. If you don't get promoted you may be on £30k after 10 years. Why not just go and drive a van or make people coffee?
Exactly. Another issue is that the £22K minimum wage person will be paying tax and NI on 9-10K of that sum, meaning that the lowest paid FT workers are paying £3K or so in tax/NI.
There is an absurdity about saying that the lowest you can earn for a FT job ('living wage') is an amount which attracts thousands in IT and NI.
And of course absurd that the tax rate on low incomes is so high, while the marginal rate on the richest isn't much more.
The lowest earners were taken out of income tax by the Coalition
not any more £11 * 37.50 hours * 52 weeks = £21,450 a year. If you do more than 25 hours a week you will be paying tax...
Many don't work more than 25 hours a week, especially if part time and will be earning less than £20k a year still
The target is for it to be 2/3 of the median wage by next October. In a government that overall aspires to disappointing this is a real success story in terms of making work pay and reducing income inequality.
I wouldn't want to criticise any increase in the minimum wage but the 2/3 median wage target seems to represent more the downgrading of other work in the economy, it is being gradually bought down to minimum wage levels in a comparative sense. The marginal tax (Income tax, NI) that you pay for every pound above the minimum wage is quite significant, particularly if you are paying off a student loan.
Whilst purporting to be reducing 'income inequality' the one thing the government are noticeably not doing is adding more taxes to income from wealth. It is creating a structure whereby the gap between the workers and the capitalists increases. It is a contrast to here in Finland where the taxes on wealth are similar to the taxes on employment. Therefore more money is raised to provide things like free university education and council house building, along with many other advantages for the working age population who pay similar levels of tax to people in the UK.
Like politics, all pay is relative. An £11 minimum wage is £22k pa for a 40 hour week. Some routine jobs are not complicated, interact constantly with civilised and polite folk, and have little responsibility (which is not a problem - that's life). However lots of jobs that are difficult, arduous, back breaking, interface with monsters, keep you awake all night, shouty, complex and full of blame pay between say 22 and 28k pa.
A problem will always therefore develop from the fact that you can do OK in much of the UK as a couple on minimum wage (£44k pa) and actually have a nicer life than people earning not much more.
Is this part of the background to the outbreak of strikes from junior professionals and others?
A lot of high skilled, degree level jobs in the public sector, particularly local councils are paying only slightly above minimum wage, say £26k. You are responsible for some quite heavy stuff that can blow up quickly in your face and often there is no support, your manager just complains about you. I've seen this quite a bit, people starting and then saying 'no thanks' after about 3 months. The problem then is that you find out you are on a path to nowhere. If you don't get promoted you may be on £30k after 10 years. Why not just go and drive a van or make people coffee?
For most of the last decade the average public sector worker has sent more than the average private sector worker and had a better pension and generally more flexible working.
The highest skilled earn more in the private sector but for most others the public sector has many advantages
Do CCHQ provide you with a Haynes Manual of Conservative Party clichés from which to work?
Nah, just an Inaction Man toy, complete with short trousers and plastic helicopter - pull the string in the back to find out the line of the day.
Who are these 100K people who can get benefit but have no obligation to look for work?
Hunt seems to have just told Radio 4 that it is not people with illness or disability.
Those on sickness benefits who are capable of some work, including working from home as Mel Stride says
That doesn't make sense at all. Being on SB by definition means one can't do work full stop. So either that is a fib or the organization has been very badly run. And that is under the existing criteria already - remember, this is an organization which demands that people with trisomy 21 have an interview every now and then to see if they are miraculously cured.
Rather, it is seemingly more of the same old same old.
But we don't really know till the autumn statement.
"One option under consideration involves closing the claims of those who have six months or more of a “nil award” – which can happen if someone is persistently sanctioned or no longer qualifies.
Under this plan, the claimant would then be barred from making a new claim for a certain period, as a means of trying to get people to stick to their “claimant commitment” that sets out how they should engage with looking for work."
The current sickness benefit rules are written that way, but I don't think it's a useful way to do it. Sickness for many people will be on a sliding scale, where they might be able to work a bit, if a workplace is accommodating to them. Or they might have had days and better days, so find it hard to keep to a work schedule, but could do some work on their better days.
A non-punitive system that was more flexible, rather than the binary sick/not-sick system currently used would be a lot better. Not that it sounds like the Tories are aiming for that.
Quite so, and I did wonder, so good to have that. But flexible earnings from week to week, and indeed flexible working time, does not sit well with Tory ideals of harassing people and cancelling their benefit at the drop of a cheap mobile. Too much risk of being cancelled simply because you're at work becauser you turn out to be OK that day, and can't instantly respond, or have forgone a phone interview.
The target is for it to be 2/3 of the median wage by next October. In a government that overall aspires to disappointing this is a real success story in terms of making work pay and reducing income inequality.
I wouldn't want to criticise any increase in the minimum wage but the 2/3 median wage target seems to represent more the downgrading of other work in the economy, it is being gradually bought down to minimum wage levels in a comparative sense. The marginal tax (Income tax, NI) that you pay for every pound above the minimum wage is quite significant, particularly if you are paying off a student loan.
Whilst purporting to be reducing 'income inequality' the one thing the government are noticeably not doing is adding more taxes to income from wealth. It is creating a structure whereby the gap between the workers and the capitalists increases. It is a contrast to here in Finland where the taxes on wealth are similar to the taxes on employment. Therefore more money is raised to provide things like free university education and council house building, along with many other advantages for the working age population who pay similar levels of tax to people in the UK.
Like politics, all pay is relative. An £11 minimum wage is £22k pa for a 40 hour week. Some routine jobs are not complicated, interact constantly with civilised and polite folk, and have little responsibility (which is not a problem - that's life). However lots of jobs that are difficult, arduous, back breaking, interface with monsters, keep you awake all night, shouty, complex and full of blame pay between say 22 and 28k pa.
A problem will always therefore develop from the fact that you can do OK in much of the UK as a couple on minimum wage (£44k pa) and actually have a nicer life than people earning not much more.
Is this part of the background to the outbreak of strikes from junior professionals and others?
A lot of high skilled, degree level jobs in the public sector, particularly local councils are paying only slightly above minimum wage, say £26k. You are responsible for some quite heavy stuff that can blow up quickly in your face and often there is no support, your manager just complains about you. I've seen this quite a bit, people starting and then saying 'no thanks' after about 3 months. The problem then is that you find out you are on a path to nowhere. If you don't get promoted you may be on £30k after 10 years. Why not just go and drive a van or make people coffee?
Exactly. Another issue is that the £22K minimum wage person will be paying tax and NI on 9-10K of that sum, meaning that the lowest paid FT workers are paying £3K or so in tax/NI.
There is an absurdity about saying that the lowest you can earn for a FT job ('living wage') is an amount which attracts thousands in IT and NI.
And of course absurd that the tax rate on low incomes is so high, while the marginal rate on the richest isn't much more.
The lowest earners were taken out of income tax by the Coalition
And look what happens when the LDs pulled out. Years of fiscal drag and the lowest earners shovelled back into tax.
Some people whose only income is State Pension are now being dragged into Income Tax, as has been mentioned on here several times.
After dishing out dividends which they couldn’t afford but just borrowed they’re now asking us to stump up the money to fix the leaks . The privatization of water was a historic mistake . At least with energy you can switch providers .
The PM is rich? So what. He is leader of the Conservative Party not a Corbynite Marxist sect.
What voters want to see is their own economic circumstances improve which he and Hunt are doing by cutting inflation and growing the economy and hopefully in due course cutting tax as well.
As for getting rid of Rishi, barely more than a year ago OGH was telling Tories to get rid of Boris in favour of Rishi!
Cutting inflation is not a sufficient condition for people to "see their own economic circumstances improve". What matters to most people is the difference between their income inflation and price inflation. Inflation is still high.
We're not going destitute as fast as we were, darling. I think i'll vote conservative now.
And don't forget the cumulative effect - it will be quite some time before real wages are back where they were before Sunak got in.
Yes. We're just off the back of 20 straight months of CPI inflation being above wage inflation. We've had one month with wages going up faster than CPI. So even if every month is the mirror of the months before, we'll still be worse off than we were in October 2021 by the time the election comes around.
Especially thanks to fiscal drag.
Real take-home wages are still falling currently, even with nominal wages growing faster than inflation.
You’re in danger of post hoc data mining
Wages aren’t growing!
Oops.
Real wages aren’t growing! 😁
Fuck!
Shit! Umm! Fiscal drag, thats’s it. Fiscal drag!
Realtake-home wages aren’t growing! 😁
Excuse me but I've been banging the drum on fiscal drag and opposed it since it was announced. I'm entirely consistent.
And of course I was a loyal Tory until Sunak started putting up taxes like National Insurance and fiscal drag.
I have my principles. I believe people should be able to keep more of their own income they work for. The Tories used to believe that too.
I haven't left the Tories, Sunak's Tories have left me.
I'm sure Rishi wants lower taxes. But he wants them in the same way that St Augustine wanted chastity.
(Unless he can find ways of cutting government spending on a recurring basis, I'd rather it was funded by taxes than borrowing. The mix of taxes he's using is a disgrace, though.)
Two questions.
How can you talk tax cuts when borrowing £100billion+ a year.
Why are we borrowing £100 billion this year instead of balancing the books now the pandemic is over?
There is nothing wrong with borrowing if you are using the money to invest eg in infrastructure or education where the return is substantially greater than the interest on the borrowing.
We have plenty of borrowing headroom. The national debt is about one year's GDP. Individuals often have mortgage debt of up to three time annual salary and find it sustainable. Plenty of headroom.
But to borrow to cut taxes is severely damaging and driven by ideology.
So I agree with your first sentence but not your second.
Currently we are paying nearly £100 billion pa in debt interest. I think you are suggesting that it is sustainable to be paying much much more than that. How much is too much?
The government tax take is about £1,000 billion pa. So the interest payment is about 10% of income.
If you have a mortgage, what % of your annual pay does the interest on the mortgage represent? The average UK mortgage is about £200,000. which is much more than 100% of average income. The interest payment of say £10,000 pa is 20-25% of average income of mortgage holders.
So to answer your question, I think £200 billion in debt interest is getting a bit high. Plenty of headroom at the moment.
But you have to invest the extra borrowing for a good return and not just fritter it away in tax cuts and consumer spending. Even that has some economic return in boosting the economy but capital investment should take priority for any extra borrowing.
What public services will you cut to be able to afford another £100bn in debt interest payments?
The comparison with a mortgage is absurd. People without a mortgage either have to rent or they own their home outright. It's a completely different situation to a country servicing a national debt.
The target is for it to be 2/3 of the median wage by next October. In a government that overall aspires to disappointing this is a real success story in terms of making work pay and reducing income inequality.
I wouldn't want to criticise any increase in the minimum wage but the 2/3 median wage target seems to represent more the downgrading of other work in the economy, it is being gradually bought down to minimum wage levels in a comparative sense. The marginal tax (Income tax, NI) that you pay for every pound above the minimum wage is quite significant, particularly if you are paying off a student loan.
Whilst purporting to be reducing 'income inequality' the one thing the government are noticeably not doing is adding more taxes to income from wealth. It is creating a structure whereby the gap between the workers and the capitalists increases. It is a contrast to here in Finland where the taxes on wealth are similar to the taxes on employment. Therefore more money is raised to provide things like free university education and council house building, along with many other advantages for the working age population who pay similar levels of tax to people in the UK.
Like politics, all pay is relative. An £11 minimum wage is £22k pa for a 40 hour week. Some routine jobs are not complicated, interact constantly with civilised and polite folk, and have little responsibility (which is not a problem - that's life). However lots of jobs that are difficult, arduous, back breaking, interface with monsters, keep you awake all night, shouty, complex and full of blame pay between say 22 and 28k pa.
A problem will always therefore develop from the fact that you can do OK in much of the UK as a couple on minimum wage (£44k pa) and actually have a nicer life than people earning not much more.
Is this part of the background to the outbreak of strikes from junior professionals and others?
A lot of high skilled, degree level jobs in the public sector, particularly local councils are paying only slightly above minimum wage, say £26k. You are responsible for some quite heavy stuff that can blow up quickly in your face and often there is no support, your manager just complains about you. I've seen this quite a bit, people starting and then saying 'no thanks' after about 3 months. The problem then is that you find out you are on a path to nowhere. If you don't get promoted you may be on £30k after 10 years. Why not just go and drive a van or make people coffee?
For most of the last decade the average public sector worker has sent more than the average private sector worker and had a better pension and generally more flexible working.
The highest skilled earn more in the private sector but for most others the public sector has many advantages
Do CCHQ provide you with a Haynes Manual of Conservative Party clichés from which to work?
The target is for it to be 2/3 of the median wage by next October. In a government that overall aspires to disappointing this is a real success story in terms of making work pay and reducing income inequality.
I wouldn't want to criticise any increase in the minimum wage but the 2/3 median wage target seems to represent more the downgrading of other work in the economy, it is being gradually bought down to minimum wage levels in a comparative sense. The marginal tax (Income tax, NI) that you pay for every pound above the minimum wage is quite significant, particularly if you are paying off a student loan.
Whilst purporting to be reducing 'income inequality' the one thing the government are noticeably not doing is adding more taxes to income from wealth. It is creating a structure whereby the gap between the workers and the capitalists increases. It is a contrast to here in Finland where the taxes on wealth are similar to the taxes on employment. Therefore more money is raised to provide things like free university education and council house building, along with many other advantages for the working age population who pay similar levels of tax to people in the UK.
Like politics, all pay is relative. An £11 minimum wage is £22k pa for a 40 hour week. Some routine jobs are not complicated, interact constantly with civilised and polite folk, and have little responsibility (which is not a problem - that's life). However lots of jobs that are difficult, arduous, back breaking, interface with monsters, keep you awake all night, shouty, complex and full of blame pay between say 22 and 28k pa.
A problem will always therefore develop from the fact that you can do OK in much of the UK as a couple on minimum wage (£44k pa) and actually have a nicer life than people earning not much more.
Is this part of the background to the outbreak of strikes from junior professionals and others?
A lot of high skilled, degree level jobs in the public sector, particularly local councils are paying only slightly above minimum wage, say £26k. You are responsible for some quite heavy stuff that can blow up quickly in your face and often there is no support, your manager just complains about you. I've seen this quite a bit, people starting and then saying 'no thanks' after about 3 months. The problem then is that you find out you are on a path to nowhere. If you don't get promoted you may be on £30k after 10 years. Why not just go and drive a van or make people coffee?
Exactly. Another issue is that the £22K minimum wage person will be paying tax and NI on 9-10K of that sum, meaning that the lowest paid FT workers are paying £3K or so in tax/NI.
There is an absurdity about saying that the lowest you can earn for a FT job ('living wage') is an amount which attracts thousands in IT and NI.
And of course absurd that the tax rate on low incomes is so high, while the marginal rate on the richest isn't much more.
The lowest earners were taken out of income tax by the Coalition
And look what happens when the LDs pulled out. Years of fiscal drag and the lowest earners shovelled back into tax.
Some people whose only income is State Pension are now being dragged into Income Tax, as has been mentioned on here several times.
Quite a few OAPs with full state pension and 20-40K savings will already be in it this current year, with the rise in interest rates. It's one thing to have PAYE on the pensions but another to have bank account interest taxable - which means checking and hassle and intimidating letters saying they'll be fined £X plus double charge etc etc.
It's absolute genius to suggest banning mobile phones from the classroom. A month into the start of a new academic year. What a bunch of amateurs.
Yep. I don't disagree with it tbf (my wife, who teaches secondary, will be happy with it), but introducing it now - as you say, a month into term with no clarity on what it actually means in practice - is so clearly just a cheap headline grab.
Eventually this race-grifting will come to a total juddering halt
They are playing to their base.
They want to hear that Braverman is evil personified and feel good about themselves and their shibboleths, and retweet accordingly to signal that to their peer group, so this article delivers perfectly.
After dishing out dividends which they couldn’t afford but just borrowed they’re now asking us to stump up the money to fix the leaks. The privatization of water was a historic mistake . At least with energy you can switch providers .
And there's no easy way of getting the money back, as the most egregious offenders have sold up to someone else.
Government has two options - force the regulator to be way more strict in reducing how much cash these companies extract for their investors, or nationalise.
Eventually this race-grifting will come to a total juddering halt
Obviously Leon hating a Graun article is not earth-shattering news but your comment made me read the piece, which I had previously skipped (so thanks for that).
I'm genuinely interested in what specifically you find so objectionable about the article?
It's absolute genius to suggest banning mobile phones from the classroom. A month into the start of a new academic year. What a bunch of amateurs.
Yep. I don't disagree with it tbf (my wife, who teaches secondary, will be happy with it), but introducing it now - as you say, a month into term with no clarity on what it actually means in practice - is so clearly just a cheap headline grab.
It is of course possible to implement stuff other than on just three days a year. In any case, schools would be crap at implementing stuff at the beginning of term as no-one works over the holidays.
Eventually this race-grifting will come to a total juddering halt
They are playing to their base.
They want to hear that Braverman is evil personified and feel good about themselves and their shibboleths, and retweet accordingly to signal that to their peer group, so this article delivers perfectly.
Pretty sure the Blair government said similar things about multiculturalism, and that's when we saw stuff like the Life In The UK test being brought in.
The PM is rich? So what. He is leader of the Conservative Party not a Corbynite Marxist sect.
What voters want to see is their own economic circumstances improve which he and Hunt are doing by cutting inflation and growing the economy and hopefully in due course cutting tax as well.
As for getting rid of Rishi, barely more than a year ago OGH was telling Tories to get rid of Boris in favour of Rishi!
Cutting inflation is not a sufficient condition for people to "see their own economic circumstances improve". What matters to most people is the difference between their income inflation and price inflation. Inflation is still high.
We're not going destitute as fast as we were, darling. I think i'll vote conservative now.
And don't forget the cumulative effect - it will be quite some time before real wages are back where they were before Sunak got in.
Yes. We're just off the back of 20 straight months of CPI inflation being above wage inflation. We've had one month with wages going up faster than CPI. So even if every month is the mirror of the months before, we'll still be worse off than we were in October 2021 by the time the election comes around.
Especially thanks to fiscal drag.
Real take-home wages are still falling currently, even with nominal wages growing faster than inflation.
You’re in danger of post hoc data mining
Wages aren’t growing!
Oops.
Real wages aren’t growing! 😁
Fuck!
Shit! Umm! Fiscal drag, thats’s it. Fiscal drag!
Realtake-home wages aren’t growing! 😁
Excuse me but I've been banging the drum on fiscal drag and opposed it since it was announced. I'm entirely consistent.
And of course I was a loyal Tory until Sunak started putting up taxes like National Insurance and fiscal drag.
I have my principles. I believe people should be able to keep more of their own income they work for. The Tories used to believe that too.
I haven't left the Tories, Sunak's Tories have left me.
Though you did also vote for Blair so not that loyal a Tory even before Sunak
And I'm sure you're excited to have only the purest of heart be the only ones to vote for your party next time then.
Eventually this race-grifting will come to a total juddering halt
They are playing to their base.
They want to hear that Braverman is evil personified and feel good about themselves and their shibboleths, and retweet accordingly to signal that to their peer group, so this article delivers perfectly.
Amongst all the other crap, this writer nauseatingly presumes that every other migrant in Britain automatically agrees with her. Which is total bullshit
Some of those most skeptical about mass immigration are those who have migrated and can see the downsides as well as the upsides. Like Braverman. And they are more willing to talk about it because they can’t be accused of racism
The target is for it to be 2/3 of the median wage by next October. In a government that overall aspires to disappointing this is a real success story in terms of making work pay and reducing income inequality.
I wouldn't want to criticise any increase in the minimum wage but the 2/3 median wage target seems to represent more the downgrading of other work in the economy, it is being gradually bought down to minimum wage levels in a comparative sense. The marginal tax (Income tax, NI) that you pay for every pound above the minimum wage is quite significant, particularly if you are paying off a student loan.
Whilst purporting to be reducing 'income inequality' the one thing the government are noticeably not doing is adding more taxes to income from wealth. It is creating a structure whereby the gap between the workers and the capitalists increases. It is a contrast to here in Finland where the taxes on wealth are similar to the taxes on employment. Therefore more money is raised to provide things like free university education and council house building, along with many other advantages for the working age population who pay similar levels of tax to people in the UK.
Like politics, all pay is relative. An £11 minimum wage is £22k pa for a 40 hour week. Some routine jobs are not complicated, interact constantly with civilised and polite folk, and have little responsibility (which is not a problem - that's life). However lots of jobs that are difficult, arduous, back breaking, interface with monsters, keep you awake all night, shouty, complex and full of blame pay between say 22 and 28k pa.
A problem will always therefore develop from the fact that you can do OK in much of the UK as a couple on minimum wage (£44k pa) and actually have a nicer life than people earning not much more.
Is this part of the background to the outbreak of strikes from junior professionals and others?
A lot of high skilled, degree level jobs in the public sector, particularly local councils are paying only slightly above minimum wage, say £26k. You are responsible for some quite heavy stuff that can blow up quickly in your face and often there is no support, your manager just complains about you. I've seen this quite a bit, people starting and then saying 'no thanks' after about 3 months. The problem then is that you find out you are on a path to nowhere. If you don't get promoted you may be on £30k after 10 years. Why not just go and drive a van or make people coffee?
Exactly. Another issue is that the £22K minimum wage person will be paying tax and NI on 9-10K of that sum, meaning that the lowest paid FT workers are paying £3K or so in tax/NI.
There is an absurdity about saying that the lowest you can earn for a FT job ('living wage') is an amount which attracts thousands in IT and NI.
And of course absurd that the tax rate on low incomes is so high, while the marginal rate on the richest isn't much more.
The lowest earners were taken out of income tax by the Coalition
not any more £11 * 37.50 hours * 52 weeks = £21,450 a year. If you do more than 25 hours a week you will be paying tax...
Many don't work more than 25 hours a week, especially if part time and will be earning less than £20k a year still
Who are these 100K people who can get benefit but have no obligation to look for work?
Hunt seems to have just told Radio 4 that it is not people with illness or disability.
Partners of someone who is working full time?
I'm not certain on this but believe since Universal Credit is applied for as a family and not as individuals, if one partner works full time I'm guessing there is no requirement for the other to do so since the partner has already met the obligation to work.
What would Hunt propose? That someone working full time is denied universal credit despite working full time unless their partner does too?
Doesn't matter, since very little of this is going to happen before the next election. And then, it's pretty unlikely that it won't happen at all.
(See also: MOBILE PHONES TO BE BANNED IN SCHOOLS in today's Mail. Which has already melted down to GOVERNMENT TO ISSUE GUIDANCE.)
I don't see why any school wouldn't just insist on pupils handing in their phones at the start of the day and then giving them back at the end quite honestly.
Have you thought about the logistics of this? Or the risk of theft either from the daytime store of 1,000 phones, or by pupils claiming back phones that were not theirs?
Eventually this race-grifting will come to a total juddering halt
Obviously Leon hating a Graun article is not earth-shattering news but your comment made me read the piece, which I had previously skipped (so thanks for that).
I'm genuinely interested in what specifically you find so objectionable about the article?
Even Pritti Patel thinks Braverman went OTT with her "multiculturalism has failed" crap.
In any event, both of their grifting will suffer a setback (though not "come to a halt") at the next election.
Eventually this race-grifting will come to a total juddering halt
Obviously Leon hating a Graun article is not earth-shattering news but your comment made me read the piece, which I had previously skipped (so thanks for that).
I'm genuinely interested in what specifically you find so objectionable about the article?
The idea that all immigration is like a pure moral good from which all benefit. Tell that to 100,000 raped underage white girls
The PM is rich? So what. He is leader of the Conservative Party not a Corbynite Marxist sect.
What voters want to see is their own economic circumstances improve which he and Hunt are doing by cutting inflation and growing the economy and hopefully in due course cutting tax as well.
As for getting rid of Rishi, barely more than a year ago OGH was telling Tories to get rid of Boris in favour of Rishi!
Cutting inflation is not a sufficient condition for people to "see their own economic circumstances improve". What matters to most people is the difference between their income inflation and price inflation. Inflation is still high.
We're not going destitute as fast as we were, darling. I think i'll vote conservative now.
And don't forget the cumulative effect - it will be quite some time before real wages are back where they were before Sunak got in.
Yes. We're just off the back of 20 straight months of CPI inflation being above wage inflation. We've had one month with wages going up faster than CPI. So even if every month is the mirror of the months before, we'll still be worse off than we were in October 2021 by the time the election comes around.
Especially thanks to fiscal drag.
Real take-home wages are still falling currently, even with nominal wages growing faster than inflation.
You’re in danger of post hoc data mining
Wages aren’t growing!
Oops.
Real wages aren’t growing! 😁
Fuck!
Shit! Umm! Fiscal drag, thats’s it. Fiscal drag!
Realtake-home wages aren’t growing! 😁
Excuse me but I've been banging the drum on fiscal drag and opposed it since it was announced. I'm entirely consistent.
And of course I was a loyal Tory until Sunak started putting up taxes like National Insurance and fiscal drag.
I have my principles. I believe people should be able to keep more of their own income they work for. The Tories used to believe that too.
I haven't left the Tories, Sunak's Tories have left me.
I'm sure Rishi wants lower taxes. But he wants them in the same way that St Augustine wanted chastity.
(Unless he can find ways of cutting government spending on a recurring basis, I'd rather it was funded by taxes than borrowing. The mix of taxes he's using is a disgrace, though.)
Two questions.
How can you talk tax cuts when borrowing £100billion+ a year.
Why are we borrowing £100 billion this year instead of balancing the books now the pandemic is over?
There is nothing wrong with borrowing if you are using the money to invest eg in infrastructure or education where the return is substantially greater than the interest on the borrowing.
We have plenty of borrowing headroom. The national debt is about one year's GDP. Individuals often have mortgage debt of up to three time annual salary and find it sustainable. Plenty of headroom.
But to borrow to cut taxes is severely damaging and driven by ideology.
So I agree with your first sentence but not your second.
Pretty much the entire deficit is due to interest payments on government debt. So Britain would be in a much better place if it wasn't having to service so much debt. It doesn't make much sense to me to add even more debt, and even more future debt interest payments, particularly when the future demographic challenges means that it becomes harder to service debts in the future, with an ageing population, and a shrinking global population.
And besides all that, after the experience of the Truss Calamity, I'm amazed that anyone could think that Britain has any headroom to borrow more. The market response showed that there wasn't much appetite to lend Britain more money, nor confidence in Britain being able to service larger debts.
Worked out over the weekend that my newly-graduated daughter is paying a higher tax rate on her income (20% basic rate + 9% student loans graduate tax + 12 % national insurance = 41%) than my Dad is on his pension (40% higher rate of income tax). Absolutely insane.
I agree with your last paragraph. It's crazy and unjust.
Truss's problem was borrowing more and simultaneously cutting taxes and promising more to come. The markets agree with me on that one and don't like borrowing to cut taxes.
I also agree with you that it is better if you don't need debt but often you do eg buying a house. The average interest paid on debt by UK companies is13% of income (earnings). It's not at all unusual. I think the fact that £100 billion is a huge number freaks some people out. It needs to be seen in context.
I don't think the comparison to UK companies helps your argument. Lots of them are overleveraged and that makes investing to improve productivity harder. Indeed it seems to be one of the tactics to extract money from companies to load them up with excess debt in order to pay out dividends. Borrowing for reasons other than investment is one of the problems with the UK corporate sector.
If Britain was actually spending £100bn on productive infrastructure investment each year then your argument might have some merit, but it's not. Britain is borrowing to service is debts and to fund current expenditure.
Sure, cutting investment spending would be a mad way to try to balance the budget, but that's not an argument to borrow more.
The PM is rich? So what. He is leader of the Conservative Party not a Corbynite Marxist sect.
What voters want to see is their own economic circumstances improve which he and Hunt are doing by cutting inflation and growing the economy and hopefully in due course cutting tax as well.
As for getting rid of Rishi, barely more than a year ago OGH was telling Tories to get rid of Boris in favour of Rishi!
Cutting inflation is not a sufficient condition for people to "see their own economic circumstances improve". What matters to most people is the difference between their income inflation and price inflation. Inflation is still high.
We're not going destitute as fast as we were, darling. I think i'll vote conservative now.
And don't forget the cumulative effect - it will be quite some time before real wages are back where they were before Sunak got in.
Yes. We're just off the back of 20 straight months of CPI inflation being above wage inflation. We've had one month with wages going up faster than CPI. So even if every month is the mirror of the months before, we'll still be worse off than we were in October 2021 by the time the election comes around.
Especially thanks to fiscal drag.
Real take-home wages are still falling currently, even with nominal wages growing faster than inflation.
You’re in danger of post hoc data mining
Wages aren’t growing!
Oops.
Real wages aren’t growing! 😁
Fuck!
Shit! Umm! Fiscal drag, thats’s it. Fiscal drag!
Realtake-home wages aren’t growing! 😁
Excuse me but I've been banging the drum on fiscal drag and opposed it since it was announced. I'm entirely consistent.
And of course I was a loyal Tory until Sunak started putting up taxes like National Insurance and fiscal drag.
I have my principles. I believe people should be able to keep more of their own income they work for. The Tories used to believe that too.
I haven't left the Tories, Sunak's Tories have left me.
I'm sure Rishi wants lower taxes. But he wants them in the same way that St Augustine wanted chastity.
(Unless he can find ways of cutting government spending on a recurring basis, I'd rather it was funded by taxes than borrowing. The mix of taxes he's using is a disgrace, though.)
Two questions.
How can you talk tax cuts when borrowing £100billion+ a year.
Why are we borrowing £100 billion this year instead of balancing the books now the pandemic is over?
There is nothing wrong with borrowing if you are using the money to invest eg in infrastructure or education where the return is substantially greater than the interest on the borrowing.
We have plenty of borrowing headroom. The national debt is about one year's GDP. Individuals often have mortgage debt of up to three time annual salary and find it sustainable. Plenty of headroom.
But to borrow to cut taxes is severely damaging and driven by ideology.
So I agree with your first sentence but not your second.
Currently we are paying nearly £100 billion pa in debt interest. I think you are suggesting that it is sustainable to be paying much much more than that. How much is too much?
The government tax take is about £1,000 billion pa. So the interest payment is about 10% of income.
If you have a mortgage, what % of your annual pay does the interest on the mortgage represent? The average UK mortgage is about £200,000. which is much more than 100% of average income. The interest payment of say £10,000 pa is 20-25% of average income of mortgage holders.
So to answer your question, I think £200 billion in debt interest is getting a bit high. Plenty of headroom at the moment.
But you have to invest the extra borrowing for a good return and not just fritter it away in tax cuts and consumer spending. Even that has some economic return in boosting the economy but capital investment should take priority for any extra borrowing.
What public services will you cut to be able to afford another £100bn in debt interest payments?
The comparison with a mortgage is absurd. People without a mortgage either have to rent or they own their home outright. It's a completely different situation to a country servicing a national debt.
I'm not suggesting another £100 billion in debt interest payments. That was a maximum.
But, as an illustration, let's assume it happens as the result of borrowing another £2,000 billion at 5%. That is a lot, even in HS2 terms.
If this were spent, over time, on strategic infrastructure such as road, rail, bridges, schools, housing, reservoirs, green energy etc it would give a massive boost to the economy and to employment short to medium term. This would increase the tax take big time. Longer term, the country would be in much better shape than the sad decaying current mess.
The example of a mortgage is to illustrate desirability and sustainability of debt for investment. It isn't absurd.
I was chatting to a LibDem friend (also a stand-holder at the Tory conference) about tactical voting, and we looked at the plausible situation that Labour wins some sort of overall majority while the LIbDems gain say 20 more seats from tactical voting. Labour then has 4-5 years in power amid unpromising economic conditions and could become quite unpopular. The LibDems will then want to attack the Government, as all Opposition parties do, and will try to get Tory tactical votes on the basis that "only the LibDems can beat Labour". The problem will then be that "loaned" Labour votes this time (who may poll as Labour but vote LibDem in 2024) will then recoil.
Polling the cross-currents will then become *remarkably* difficult.
Going back very many decades, the Liberals and now LibDems do better when a Conservative government is unpopular than when a Labour government is unpopular. The principal reason for this is that there are many unhappy Tories who nevertheless baulk at switching to Labour, whereas unhappy Labour voters are much more willing to switch directly to the Conservatives - as we saw in the so-called red wall seats. Yet, conversely, determined Tory voters are the more difficult to persuade to vote tactically.
We saw exactly the opposite in 2010, when the Labour government was unpopular but the majority of those moving away from Labour moved to the LDs which is why they got so many MPs.
Red Wall movement was 'away from labour' because of Corbyn and 'to Conservative' because of Boris & Brexit. In that sense 2019 was an outlier.
The LibDems lost five seats in 2010, and their vote share was only up 1%.
Sorry, you're right. I had forgotten that the LDs actually lost seats in 2010. Because those 57 MPs were crucial to the formation of the government, it felt much more like a "win" for the LDs.
After dishing out dividends which they couldn’t afford but just borrowed they’re now asking us to stump up the money to fix the leaks. The privatization of water was a historic mistake . At least with energy you can switch providers .
And there's no easy way of getting the money back, as the most egregious offenders have sold up to someone else.
Government has two options - force the regulator to be way more strict in reducing how much cash these companies extract for their investors, or nationalise.
Nope - it has one sane option
Get the regulator to do it's job as once that's been done it's very likely nationalising the companies will be way cheaper and (if the regulator is appropriately ruthless) may create the situation where the owners will be happy to hand the companies back to the Government or at least significantly reduce the value of those companies enough that nationalization would be affordable.
Who are these 100K people who can get benefit but have no obligation to look for work?
Hunt seems to have just told Radio 4 that it is not people with illness or disability.
Partners of someone who is working full time?
I'm not certain on this but believe since Universal Credit is applied for as a family and not as individuals, if one partner works full time I'm guessing there is no requirement for the other to do so since the partner has already met the obligation to work.
What would Hunt propose? That someone working full time is denied universal credit despite working full time unless their partner does too?
Doesn't matter, since very little of this is going to happen before the next election. And then, it's pretty unlikely that it won't happen at all.
(See also: MOBILE PHONES TO BE BANNED IN SCHOOLS in today's Mail. Which has already melted down to GOVERNMENT TO ISSUE GUIDANCE.)
I don't see why any school wouldn't just insist on pupils handing in their phones at the start of the day and then giving them back at the end quite honestly.
Have you thought about the logistics of this? Or the risk of theft either from the daytime store of 1,000 phones, or by pupils claiming back phones that were not theirs?
I'd give them back at random and drop a few onto concrete purposely by accident as well. Soon teach the little dears to bring them to school at all.
I was chatting to a LibDem friend (also a stand-holder at the Tory conference) about tactical voting, and we looked at the plausible situation that Labour wins some sort of overall majority while the LIbDems gain say 20 more seats from tactical voting. Labour then has 4-5 years in power amid unpromising economic conditions and could become quite unpopular. The LibDems will then want to attack the Government, as all Opposition parties do, and will try to get Tory tactical votes on the basis that "only the LibDems can beat Labour". The problem will then be that "loaned" Labour votes this time (who may poll as Labour but vote LibDem in 2024) will then recoil.
Polling the cross-currents will then become *remarkably* difficult.
Going back very many decades, the Liberals and now LibDems do better when a Conservative government is unpopular than when a Labour government is unpopular. The principal reason for this is that there are many unhappy Tories who nevertheless baulk at switching to Labour, whereas unhappy Labour voters are much more willing to switch directly to the Conservatives - as we saw in the so-called red wall seats. Yet, conversely, determined Tory voters are the more difficult to persuade to vote tactically.
We saw exactly the opposite in 2010, when the Labour government was unpopular but the majority of those moving away from Labour moved to the LDs which is why they got so many MPs.
Red Wall movement was 'away from labour' because of Corbyn and 'to Conservative' because of Boris & Brexit. In that sense 2019 was an outlier.
2010 was a case in point though: Lib Dem vote share went up a little, but they lost seats. Wasted votes in Labour constituencies. LD seat count pretty much reverse-correlates with Tory vote share.
Comments
Sorry no I’ve been scooter diving with about 50 sharks
Seriously. Absolutely sensational experience. Like riding an underwater Harley Davidson into a herd of tigers
What may save Sunak is that Starmer seems incapable of doing it as well.
Rishi's problem is partly that isn't the mandate he inherited from the 2019 majority. The other is that it's not where the British people are and Sunak can't persuade for toffee.
Whilst purporting to be reducing 'income inequality' the one thing the government are noticeably not doing is adding more taxes to income from wealth. It is creating a structure whereby the gap between the workers and the capitalists increases. It is a contrast to here in Finland where the taxes on wealth are similar to the taxes on employment. Therefore more money is raised to provide things like free university education and council house building, along with many other advantages for the working age population who pay similar levels of tax to people in the UK.
And of course I was a loyal Tory until Sunak started putting up taxes like National Insurance and fiscal drag.
I have my principles. I believe people should be able to keep more of their own income they work for. The Tories used to believe that too.
I haven't left the Tories, Sunak's Tories have left me.
Hunt seems to have just told Radio 4 that it is not people with illness or disability.
(Unless he can find ways of cutting government spending on a recurring basis, I'd rather it was funded by taxes than borrowing. The mix of taxes he's using is a disgrace, though.)
Responsibly would be to ensure taxes are low and consistent.
He wants to do the polar opposite. He wants to make taxes low on his select few he wants to prioritise, and in order to do that he's willing to jack up taxes on others.
Lets see with any tax cuts is it going to be prioritised on where taxes get obscenely high in the tax system? Such as where taxes go up to 80p in the marginal pound?
Or is he going to splurge it irresponsibly in an across the board income tax cut, which is not where the problems in the tax system lie.
Hence why he put up National Insurance instead of Income Tax.
But: I do have strong views on the sort of country I want; and I simply cannot see how we can get a country more in line with my vision *without* increasing the total tax take. There are just too many issues in the country that require more public spending.
I see calls for keeping tax levels the same, or even reducing the total tax take, as declinism for the country.
It therefore becomes a question of which party I trust most to increase taxes sensibly and spend the money wisely. And I don't trust any of them to do that, but I probably trust Sinak's Conservatives the least.
A problem will always therefore develop from the fact that you can do OK in much of the UK as a couple on minimum wage (£44k pa) and actually have a nicer life than people earning not much more.
Is this part of the background to the outbreak of strikes from junior professionals and others?
Glad to see my latest trip to the Carolinas coincided with an uptick in her performance
Increasing taxes by putting the burden solely on those working for a living (NI), or graduates (graduate tax), or by cliff edges jacking up marginal tax to 80% or higher is not the right way to do it. Nor is fiscal drag which hurts people inconsistently.
If you want to increase the total tax take, do so honestly. Even out our tax rates so everyone pays a consistent tax rate no matter how they earn their money for starters - taxing some 41% while others on the same income pay 20% is not positive. Changing it so you tax some 40% and others on the exact same income 19% [as I suspect Sunak wants to do] isn't a step in the right direction.
There are various versions of the keyboard which show up seemingly at random, but Apple doesn't consistently show a full stop? I know there is double tap space, but sometimes i get a full stop and sometimes I don't. Would be great to fix a layout.
And the other one - App folders. Do I really have to have a 3x3 grid if i put two apps in a folder? I don't always have 9 of the same kind of app. I don't want to litter every app on my home pages. Just resize the sodding thing.
I'm not certain on this but believe since Universal Credit is applied for as a family and not as individuals, if one partner works full time I'm guessing there is no requirement for the other to do so since the partner has already met the obligation to work.
What would Hunt propose? That someone working full time is denied universal credit despite working full time unless their partner does too?
Red Wall movement was 'away from labour' because of Corbyn and 'to Conservative' because of Boris & Brexit. In that sense 2019 was an outlier.
How can you talk tax cuts when borrowing £100billion+ a year.
Why are we borrowing £100 billion this year instead of balancing the books now the pandemic is over?
(See also: MOBILE PHONES TO BE BANNED IN SCHOOLS in today's Mail. Which has already melted down to GOVERNMENT TO ISSUE GUIDANCE.)
There is a bit of old-money/new money in this, but Boris understood that by translating these characteristics into a Beano character made it easier for people to accept and move past these things (ultimately, being a caricature mean that his personal fundamentals became visible in the end, and time ran out, but he got a bloody good run out of it).
Rishi, with his exam-cramming day-boy vibe, his gimpy voice and lack of charisma can’t play the same trick, so he is perceived (a bit unfairly) as out of touch Rishi Rich; Ed Miliband with added billions.
*I’m aware that he is likely an absolute car wreck of personal finance, but he still has far more access to money - whether paid in exchange for old-rope news columns or borrowed from chums - than the average person could dream of.
It says 54% want to leave the ECHR so the UK can deport more migrants .
No tables or exact question wording although I suspect it’s a push poll designed to help elicit that majority . This is the poll commissioned by the latest bunch of lunatic Tory backbenchers .
We have plenty of borrowing headroom. The national debt is about one year's GDP. Individuals often have mortgage debt of up to three time annual salary and find it sustainable. Plenty of headroom.
But to borrow to cut taxes is severely damaging and driven by ideology.
So I agree with your first sentence but not your second.
There is an absurdity about saying that the lowest you can earn for a FT job ('living wage') is an amount which attracts thousands in IT and NI.
And of course absurd that the tax rate on low incomes is so high, while the marginal rate on the richest isn't much more.
https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2023/10/371_360294.html
Between UC taper for low earners, the taper at 50k and the taper at 100k you have to be amongst the richest to avoid the risk of 80% plus marginal tax rates.
And besides all that, after the experience of the Truss Calamity, I'm amazed that anyone could think that Britain has any headroom to borrow more. The market response showed that there wasn't much appetite to lend Britain more money, nor confidence in Britain being able to service larger debts.
Worked out over the weekend that my newly-graduated daughter is paying a higher tax rate on her income (20% basic rate + 9% student loans graduate tax + 12 % national insurance = 41%) than my Dad is on his pension (40% higher rate of income tax). Absolutely insane.
Sunak being mega loaded at a time of financial crisis for most of the population won't help his chances at the election booth. Not his fault he married well, but them's the breaks.
There is nothing wrong with borrowing...where the return is substantially greater than the interest on the borrowing.
How you define 'substantially' is up to you, but the basic argument that we should not cut investment which is highly likely show a significant positive return, is a decent one.
And not a bad test for which capital projects ought to be prioritised.
Jeremy Hunt tells @KayBurley it is "not the appropriate time" to come clean on what's happening with HS2 line to Manchester
https://twitter.com/johnestevens/status/1708728305782833509
Are we setting up the big reveal in Rishi's speech ?
Rather, it is seemingly more of the same old same old.
But we don't really know till the autumn statement.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/oct/01/time-to-withhold-benefits-from-those-who-wont-look-for-work-jeremy-hunt
"One option under consideration involves closing the claims of those who have six months or more of a “nil award” – which can happen if someone is persistently sanctioned or no longer qualifies.
Under this plan, the claimant would then be barred from making a new claim for a certain period, as a means of trying to get people to stick to their “claimant commitment” that sets out how they should engage with looking for work."
[1] The fact that that was not enough to prevent some horrendously bad calls is a different conversation
The highest skilled earn more in the private sector but for most others the public sector has many advantages
Priti Patel, "No"
*Phillips bursts into a fit of uncontrollable laughter*
https://twitter.com/implausibleblog/status/1708397378263261420
If you have a mortgage, what % of your annual pay does the interest on the mortgage represent? The average UK mortgage is about £200,000. which is much more than 100% of average income. The interest payment of say £10,000 pa is 20-25% of average income of mortgage holders.
So to answer your question, I think £200 billion in debt interest is getting a bit high. Plenty of headroom at the moment.
But you have to invest the extra borrowing for a good return and not just fritter it away in tax cuts and consumer spending. Even that has some economic return in boosting the economy but capital investment should take priority for any extra borrowing.
Anyone on full time minimum wage is most definitely paying tax.
Perhaps you mean those earning less than minimum wage? Or part timers?
In reality the only way anyone can keep their pay reasonable is to change employer every few years..
The level at which you move into the light-touch group has however been increasing.
So those not required to work include those whose partners earn enough to put them into the light touch or earning enough groups, plus primary carers of a child under 3 (I think) and those caring for a disabled adult or child for more than 35 hours in the week. Plus those deemed too ill to work.
Truss's problem was borrowing more and simultaneously cutting taxes and promising more to come. The markets agree with me on that one and don't like borrowing to cut taxes.
I also agree with you that it is better if you don't need debt but often you do eg buying a house. The average interest paid on debt by UK companies is13% of income (earnings). It's not at all unusual. I think the fact that £100 billion is a huge number freaks some people out. It needs to be seen in context.
A month into the start of a new academic year.
What a bunch of amateurs.
A non-punitive system that was more flexible, rather than the binary sick/not-sick system currently used would be a lot better. Not that it sounds like the Tories are aiming for that.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/oct/02/uk-water-companies-plan-cut-leaks-sewage-discharges
Eventually this race-grifting will come to a total juddering halt
The comparison with a mortgage is absurd. People without a mortgage either have to rent or they own their home outright. It's a completely different situation to a country servicing a national debt.
They want to hear that Braverman is evil personified and feel good about themselves and their shibboleths, and retweet accordingly to signal that to their peer group, so this article delivers perfectly.
Government has two options - force the regulator to be way more strict in reducing how much cash these companies extract for their investors, or nationalise.
I'm genuinely interested in what specifically you find so objectionable about the article?
Some of those most skeptical about mass immigration are those who have migrated and can
see the downsides as well as the upsides. Like Braverman. And they are more willing to talk about it because they can’t be accused of racism
Whites are entirely cowed
In any event, both of their grifting will suffer a setback (though not "come to a halt") at the next election.
If Britain was actually spending £100bn on productive infrastructure investment each year then your argument might have some merit, but it's not. Britain is borrowing to service is debts and to fund current expenditure.
Sure, cutting investment spending would be a mad way to try to balance the budget, but that's not an argument to borrow more.
It's not entirely impossible, given Rishi's weathervane tendencies.
But, as an illustration, let's assume it happens as the result of borrowing another £2,000 billion at 5%. That is a lot, even in HS2 terms.
If this were spent, over time, on strategic infrastructure such as road, rail, bridges, schools, housing, reservoirs, green energy etc it would give a massive boost to the economy and to employment short to medium term. This would increase the tax take big time. Longer term, the country would be in much better shape than the sad decaying current mess.
The example of a mortgage is to illustrate desirability and sustainability of debt for investment. It isn't absurd.
Get the regulator to do it's job as once that's been done it's very likely nationalising the companies will be way cheaper and (if the regulator is appropriately ruthless) may create the situation where the owners will be happy to hand the companies back to the Government or at least significantly reduce the value of those companies enough that nationalization would be affordable.