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What’s in the box? – politicalbetting.com
What’s in the box? – politicalbetting.com
64% of Britons expect the taxes they pay will increase as a result of this week's budgetWill increase: 64%Will stay the same: 20%Will decrease: 1%https://t.co/ttUV5CXYPS pic.twitter.com/JZTvBf0tsf
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Best she can hope for is recognition in a couple of years time that this was a sensible long term budget.
For the best performers, anticipation is part of the fun.
Shame no markets. Shadsy used to put up a few to fund his Christmas bonus on tie colour and sips of water. The country has gone to the dogs.
Harris gave her (pretty positive and uplifting) closing message to one of the biggest crowds of the campaign ... and the headlines are all about Biden trying to walk back the garbage remark. Made on a Zoom call to a few activists.
For pensioners: a cookie and a hug
For the workers: a hammer
Well over half the anticipated tax increases fall on employers - and the well above inflation minimum wage rise will also drive up employment costs.
Businesses employing few people will do fairly well; the rest get something of a caning.
Whether that all works out depends a lot on what's done on the spending side.
The Trump campaign is a giant gas bag. Self-reinforcing and self-inflating, a vast echo chamber promoted and enhanced on Twitter and Fux and Newsmax and Lies Social. Where EVERYONE you speak to and interact with is voting Trump and thinks like you and has the same fears as you and wants the same Murica as you. EVERYONE.
We know the pollsters have had to correct in favour of Trump. Because they must be missing his voters considering that EVERYONE is voting Trump and the data isn't showing that without correction. So it looks closer now because its been corrected to look closer.
Counter to that, we know that women are more likely to vote than men. We know that whilst the core Trump vote is ANGRY, the rest are just caught up and usually don't vote. Women - and proper men who don't belittle women - are angry at Trump and the GOP, have been registering in large numbers and are motivated.
Don't drink the Trump cool-aid. That is literally what the Trump Musk campaign is wanting you to do.
It seems Rachel Reeves does have a point about Jeremy Hunt.
Different hair colour, but I see what you mean.
We will know soon enough
Well, it's a view.
(This is a reference to Richard, then Duke of Gloucester, threatening to abduct the Dowager Countess of Oxford unless she signed over her lands to him.)
So, we need some cuts in spending. We need increases in taxes. We need a plan to get spending back into balance in a sensible time frame. We need to find enough resources to make capital investments to drive growth. I am not particularly fussed whether the measures are "popular" or not. I want a coherent plan. Its been a while.
Are we all ready to assume the position? 😂
One things clear Biden has zero chance of being on stage with Harris before the election and he needs to go away and stay hidden in the WH .
One of the rabbit holes some on the right seem to have fallen down is viewing all taxes as a punishment, rather than the cost of things that make for a good society. Not good in themselves, and not to be increased gratuitously, but necessary.
95% of stuff doesn't matter...
My biggest concern is the number of things pre-Budget briefings have described as "investment", when they're nothing of the sort.
An interesting conversation from the previous threads about race/religious minorities by several commenters. From @MoonRabbit , I think: It's a curious question.
Wrt race, it points up how strange is evaluating by colour of skin, bearing in mind what we know about common genetic inheritance etc. That overwhelmingly tells us more about the crass superficiality of the commentator making the claim than about the group targeted. As I see it at present skin colour is simply a convenient label for something else (religion, culture) to which it may bear little relation.
Wrt religion (or lack of religion used the same way see eg Communist States), which is different as it is ultimately a matter of opinion (subject to attempts at self-bleaching, makeup, operation Abracadabra cf Rachel Dolezal etc), it seems difficult. It also depends on the religion (or non-religion) concerned believes, and what it preaches about society and treatment of others.
We have examples of religious (or non-religious) majorities changing, for example certain Pacific island nations since WW2 or the 19C due to missionary activity or migration. We also have non-religious or don't knows moving into an alleged majority in countries including, some Western countries. And we have large countries where a majority religion has been replaced by a number of significant groups, none with a majority - examples are South Korea, Singapore, maybe USA and perhaps Brazil. I think then the civic vision of the religion / lack of religion concerned is the important thing.
It's interesting that those claiming to represent the non-religious or don't knows, which organisations in the UK only have perhaps 2k to 10k members, are perhaps the most keen in imposing their beliefs / opinions on society.
I think the important thing is the civic vision of the religion or lack-of-religion concerned, rather than externalities.
Skin colour bears an increasingly distant relation to nationality or religion, and those arguing that way are on a vanishing foundation.
...“What Donald Trump has never understood is that ‘E pluribus unum,’ out of many one, isn’t just a phrase on a dollar bill. It is a living truth about the heart of our nation. Our democracy, it doesn’t require us to agree on anything,” she added. “And the fact that someone disagrees with us does not make them the enemy within.”
“Unlike Donald Trump, I don’t believe people who disagree with me are the enemy. He wants to put them in jail. I’ll give them a seat at the table,”..
Truss was right.
We need economic growth and we need it consistently over a sustained period. We have cut and shrunk, shrunk and cut our economy over a long period, with the biggest contraction in the last decade when we were at our most vulnerable.
Truss was wrong in that she thought the way to growth was slash taxes and spending, but she also wanted investment. Borrowing to invest - and the delivering a return on that investment - is NOT bad economics. It is capitalism. And when the state borrows to invest in capacity, skills and infrastructure it has a long-term benefit.
At the same time, we need to cut the crap. We had dug ourselves into the ground when it comes to digging into the ground. We spend hundreds of millions on reports and surveys and impact assessments *without actually building anything*. The Tories gamed house planning so that the developers always beat the council. Not that the developers built what was needed. Do the same but *for the state*. We need to build this, it's going here, please accept this mitigation (or don't), start building. For housing we must have local people involved as its their communities being expanded, but the answer cannot just be "no".
Sadly I expect nothing from the Chancellor to drive growth, to drive investment, to try and course correct the UK so that we're comparable with France or Germany or Spain or the Netherlands or any of the rest of European nations who aren't as crushed by cuts as we are. Unless she pulls a massive rabbit out of the hat, Labour have already failed.
Had a drink (well, water) with a friend last night. She employs 15 people. Her NIC increase is a 10% increase in her non payroll costs. And that needs to be paid for out of her cash balances (it’s a tech start up - the sort of thing that the country wants to encourage)
1. Efficiency actually rises, rather than the company contracting or failing to expand overall.
2. The changes don’t lead to an increase in unemployment.
Or stoop for authenticity.
A 2% increase in NI is not 1.5 new people.
At worst (say full NI on pensions with the employer contribution 10% of pension) it's the equivalent of a 3.6% pay increase for her staff so the equivalent of 0.54 of a worker...
If we are talking the 2% employer NI increase alone its 0.3 of a worker...
Got to say I really would prefer to employee NI or income to be returned to 2023 level.
There will be violence too.
It’s like the difference between the Tories and the Lib Dems in the coalition.
I'd be less certain re the House but I think the Senate we may be looking at 53-54 GOP seats,
Still getting a hearing though.
Nothing I've seen to date has persuaded me that's the case. And even if some people are hard hit by a government decision that doesn't make it either unlawful or unfair.
Many people facing tax rises are also probably about to learn that.
Of course with various vague legal duties to be imposed it will be easier to legally challenge any unliked decision.
It depends on the overall mix, and other measures.
I'd welcome comment from someone who has run the numbers on overall NIC changes (both employee / employers) since 2023 comparing the size of this likely increase, with the cut (from 12% to 10%?) in main Employee NICs which only came in in 2024.
Is there actually that much overall change at all from 2023, apart from a shift from Employee to Employer?
Some (see StillWater's example above) will be hit a lot harder than that.
Go on America, prick the boil.
And boil the prick too.
https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/insight-and-analysis/data-and-charts/nhs-workforce-nutshell#:~:text=The NHS in England currently,time equivalent (FTE) basis.
Have we all got that much sicker over time? What are all those people doing?
And older, and older.
It all hinges on turnout IMO.
We’ve had a decade of average wages rising more slowly than RPI. Wage inflation has not been the problem for the economy.
Nobody likes tax to go up, but when the alternative is cutting already crumbling public services further to the bone and continuing on the long slow journey to looking like a developing country, something’s got to give.
I’d have raised VAT to 23% and reversed the employee NI cuts, but those were off the table in the manifesto. I’d also cut CT back to 19%.
Every developed economy has the same insurmountable problem.
1) Gilts haven't moved much so far. By this time for the Truss budget, they had already surged significantly - there was plenty of warning from the markets.
2) Increasing employer NICs might be a bit regressive, depending on how much is passed on to employees through reductions to gross salaries, because employer NICs are raised at a flat rate except at the very bottom (£9,100 threshold).
Smaller salaries = less income tax paid, and for higher earners, the marginal rate for income tax is higher, so the government raises less income tax revenue, and the tax burden shifts slightly towards lower income deciles. (Otoh, employee NIC rates are regressive already, so that would mitigate this effect somewhat).
3) The productivity argument for NICs increases feels like an argument after the fact to me. It's what happened in Scotland after 2008, with lots of people on low wages losing their jobs = productivity surge. Balancing the labour market and stimulating productivity growth is tricky, and I'm no sure taxing employment is the best way to do it. In-work poverty remains a large and unusual problem for the UK, but this would just be swapping it for out-of-work poverty. I'm curious as to how many firms deliberately employ people part-time up to £9,100 - equivalent to 14 hours a week on NMW.
4) Transport is one of the few areas of public spending that is actually regressive by user, with roads and rail tending towards the top income deciles, and walking, cycling and buses the bottom. This is an area of serious risk for Labour from the left. You can expect more general outrage over fuel duty increases, though a rabbit out of the hat might be a significant reform to all motoring taxes, including VED, in the spring.
(But I misspoke - it was a 10% increase in her NIC costs not her employment costs)
Truss was a deluded moron. But her singular shining light was recognising that we cant go on as we are and wanting to get a bit radical to achieve turnaround. OK so her radical plan was bonkers, but at least she diagnosed the problem.
I think the Treasury are the problem - there is a growing acceptance that a change to their mindset must be achieved. Reeves saying she's changing the rules to borrow to invest in capex is a good start.
We need to break the idiocy - usually advocated by Tories - of " we can't afford it, who will pay for it". As if the spend is balanced on the other side of the equation by no spend. There is not a no-spend option, just do you spend to invest smartly up front for long-term benefits, or spend on emergency solutions to the crisis created by cuts?
Some kind of root and branch reform of the system, perhaps. But 3 months isn’t long to cook something like that up.
Demographics people getting older
Technology opens up more treatment options
We have low motivation through previous pay restraint
We have poor retention of senior experienced staff who retire early or go to private sector, or part time public/private mix
Chaotic organisational changes
All of those are obvious from the outside I'm sure there are more issues visible from within, but its a multi issue problem.
On your more important point, yep. It's likely taxes and borrowing will both go up AND government spending squeezed. It's not a great situation to be in.
That's not true in betting, that's not true in business and most of all its not true when government does it.
👿👿👿
When it seems to me the goal of eventually no one giving a crap, we're all British, should still be very attainable.
Mind you, if WASPIs get compensation, I'd be happy to accept it.